Dwelling Place Read online

  By the time Henry finally wrote asking permission to begin a “correspondence” with Laura, he had apparently ended the relationship with the young woman in the settlement. And he had had a conversion experience, which, he later wrote Mary Jones, saved him from “a terrible career of dissipation and wickedness” that “would have cast a blight upon our family and name.” During the coming years, he tried to treat the slave woman and his slave children with the respect of a kind master—as we shall see, their relationship was to be extremely complex and difficult to grasp. But once again, certain things were clear—she would become his slave, and his two children would become his slaves. No kindness could overcome the harsh and bitter reality of such a situation, and no respect could penetrate the boundaries that separated a white master from his slave children and their mother.27

  Two years after having receiving the “no” in regard to Laura, Henry married Abigail Sturges Dowse. Her older brother had been the roommate of John Jones in Athens, and her father was a wealthy planter in Richmond County near Augusta. Henry and Abigail would be married for forty-seven years, until his death in 1893. They would have a happy marriage, although six of their eleven children would die in infancy or as young children. Abigail apparently accepted with equanimity Henry’s slave children and their mother in the settlement at Lodebar, where they all lived. And when the slave mother married a man from the Mallard Place, Abigail, as we shall see, helped to prepare a remarkable wedding.28

  Three weeks after Henry and Abigail married in May 1846, Henry’s sixteen-year-old sister Emma eloped with a young Savannah physician, Stephen Harris. Emma was a headstrong young woman, self-centered and used to getting her way. When she failed to get her father’s permission to marry Harris, the young couple secretly left the Retreat at night. They made their way quietly through its gates, hurried down the sandy avenue through the shadows of its old oaks, and raced past Midway on their way to Savannah, where they were married. The news of their secret flight and marriage came to the Jones family like the sudden news of a child’s death. Only this was the news of the betrayal of parental trust and affection. Joseph was stunned, for the act seemed to him a selfish disregard for the feelings of a father who had shown his child nothing but kindness and love. Even more, the flight and the marriage had been a challenge to Joseph’s authority and to the ordered ways of the Retreat; it seemed an impulsive, immature, and dangerous abandonment of restraint and subordination in the quest for self-satisfaction. As such, Emma’s action seemed a deep treachery deserving not only condemnation but also banishment from the affections and company of her family.29

  To be sure, some tried to temper the feelings of outrage. Julia King wrote Mary Jones from Roswell, where she was visiting in the upcountry. The news, Julia said, “came to me like a clap of thunder and of all persons in the world I should have thought that Emma would have been the very last to have taken such a step.” Julia felt “most deeply for her parents always kind and indulgent.” They were in sorrow now, and Julia thought that Emma’s troubles were sure to come. But the past, said Julia, cannot be mended, and a “state of enmity is a state of misery.” Julia reminded her friend Mary of Jesus’ words to the woman caught in adultery: “Does no man condemn her, then neither do I. Go and sin no more.”30

  Mary Jones would have nothing to do with such counsel or reasoning. She saw the sorrow in her father’s eyes and the deep embarrassment and pain caused by the rashness of her young half-sister. Three months after the elopement, she wrote Betsy: “Dear father still looks badly and has no appetite. I fear that he will never recover from the affliction brought upon him by that wicked child. Ah! Few surely know the depths of sorrow and misery produced by this affair and I look upon those who apologize for her conduct as upholding disobedience, ingratitude, and deception.” And Joseph took out his will and added a codicil. To my daughter Emma, he wrote, I bequeath five dollars, “with the will and intent that she shall not inherit any more of my property real or personal, on account of clandestinely at night running way with and marrying S. N. Harris contrary to my will, wish, and advice, she being a minor and under parental control.”31

  In the middle of October 1846, not long after having changed his will, Joseph left his summer home in Walthourville for his weekly visit to the Retreat. He conferred, as was his custom, with Pulaski and saw after other business, and prepared to leave. Mom Sylvia walked with Joseph to the gate, where his buggy waited. Van Buren, a ten-year-old who was working around the house, ran ahead to open another gate. As Joseph began to drive the buggy away from the house, his walking cane slipped from the boot of the buggy into a rear wheel, and its clatter frightened the horse. The animal raced away and began kicking back at the buggy. Joseph tried to rein it in, but to no avail. He tried to tear open the back of the buggy to escape but could not get through. As the horse raced toward a sharp turn in the road, Joseph in desperation threw himself out of the buggy toward the grassy edge. The rear wheel caught his hip and spun him around. His head and right side hit the ground with the full force of the racing buggy. Young Van Buren ran up, found his master lying on his back speechless. Nearby the horse, having hit the fence, stood tangled in the harness, looking back at the buggy. Dr. Benjamin King, who had been visiting the sick in the settlement, came rushing to the scene of the accident. He was a local physician, a “confirmed inebriate” and no relation to the Kings of South Hampton.32 Taking Joseph’s arm, he cut it with a lancet, but only a little blood could be drawn. An improvised stretcher was made with a mattress and boards, and Joseph was carefully carried into the drawing room at the Retreat, where he was placed on a mattress on the floor. In the meantime runners were sent to the surrounding plantations and riders went for other doctors and for members of the family.

  Charles and Mary were at Maybank enjoying a seafood dinner with their children and with their Aunt Eliza Robarts and cousins Louisa and Mary Robarts when word arrived of the accident. Leaving the children with Mary Robarts, they hurried in the carriage toward the Retreat, with Jack and Gilbert driving. When they finally arrived, they found Charles Berrien, Henry Hart, and James Newton already there, together with their mother, Elizabeth, and friends from several surrounding plantations, all weeping. Joseph was still speechless and almost totally paralyzed. The doctors had now successfully bled him, and they had applied mustard plaster across his chest, on the inner part of his thighs, and on the back of his neck. The plaster was removed and blisters began to form that, it was hoped, would stimulate his system. Charles and Mary immediately took charge—Elizabeth was apparently unable to do much, and Charles Berrien and the other sons were grateful for the arrival of their older sister, who was experienced with nursing the sick.

  The next day Joseph rallied in a way that gave hope. But the rally was short, and he soon began to grow weaker. Brother John arrived, as did Roswell King. When William Maxwell, Joseph’s oldest friend, came into the room, Joseph looked at him, smiled, and said, “Maxwell.” As he grew weaker, the doctors urged that he be blistered on his head. Mary, weeping, took scissors and cut off “his gray and venerable hair.” The doctor took the razor “and shaved it smooth, and Mary in pain and weeping put on the blister.”

  Mary said to Charles, “You must speak to Father on the subject of his soul’s salvation—do not delay it a moment longer.” Charles roused him up and asked: “Father, my dear Father, is Christ precious to you?” The question “seemed to awaken his mind,” and Joseph found strength to answer: “Yes, yes.” Charles asked: “Do you put all your trust in Him for salvation?” And Joseph answered, “Yes.” Charles told him that “Christ was near to him and would be with him in his hour of affliction.” Mary, leaning over her father, said, “Him that cometh unto Christ, he will in no wise cast out.”

  This exchange was like an “electrical shock” in the parlor. “It brought everyone, black and white, around the bed.” The people from the settlement filled the yard and the piazza. Charles told them to “come in one by one and take his right hand a
nd bid him farewell forever.” John sat by his father’s side and held his wrist so that the shaking might not be too much. And so they came in one by one, men, women, and children. “Good-bye my kind master. Jesus Christ go with you.” Some kissed his hand and “most of them wept.” Then Pulaski came, “his old and faithful driver.” He and Joseph were the same age, had grown up together at Rice Hope, and “were boys together.” Now Pulaski “bowed his gray head” on Joseph’s hand and “held it there for ten or fifteen minutes in tears of unfeigned sorrow.”

  The end approached and everyone grew quiet. Charles called on John to pray, and while he prayed, Joseph’s “spirit gently took its flight. He fell asleep without a struggle or a groan.”

  William Maxwell and Roswell King prepared the body for its long sleep. A carpenter made the coffin—a simple and unpretentious one. Friends arrived. Paris, the driver from South Hampton, came “and the Christian man” gave the family “consolation.” Plenty James, the driver from old Liberty Hall, also came and offered his condolences. The service was held in the room where Joseph died—the family gathered to the side in the plantation office, friends crowded into the room, and the people from the settlements at the Retreat, at Laurel View, Lode-bar, and Carlawter stood on the piazzas and in the yard. The Rev. I. S. K. Axson, the minister at Midway, conducted the service. They sang a few hymns and Ax-son read from the Ninetieth Psalm: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.”

  After the service, the lid was removed and they all said their final good-byes. Charles “put the shroud around him and the winding sheet over his face and the pall covered all.” Then Jack and Pulaski, Cato and Stepney, and Sylvia’s sons Cuffee and Sandy came and took the coffin out of the parlor and across the back piazza and down the steps. There Charles and William Maxwell “took up the head, John and Charles Berrien, the body, and Henry and James the feet and with slow steps” they bore him to his “house of silence” where two wives and fourteen children awaited him. After a prayer, they lowered him into the grave, and Pulaski took up a shovel and “commenced to cover his master’s grave.”33

  Joseph’s death was the end of an era. But it was more. A year after Joseph’s death, John wrote his sister Mary: “The thought of never meeting him again in those familiar places is a source of bitter, constant anguish.”34 It was as if the gravity that had held a little world together had suddenly been cut off and the Retreat could no longer exert its attractive force on the lives of all those who had looked to it as in some way their home and dwelling place. At an important personal level Charles and Mary could hear in Joseph’s last rattling breaths this breaking with place—a sound heard as well by John, Eliza Robarts, and other members of the family. Now the seductive calls of railroad whistles and new places could be heard more clearly and forcefully. To be sure, there would be continuing attachments to Liberty County and to an extended family. During the next fifteen years Montevideo—and to a lesser extent Maybank—would take the place of the Retreat as the old home place for many in the Jones family. But with Joseph gone the old ties would never be so strong, for such was the power of his personality and the character of the old patriarchal order that he embodied.

  The whites, of course, were not the only ones who could hear in the death rattles of Joseph the sound of change. Those who came up from the settlement to see Joseph as he lay bruised and dying came not only to see “old master” spread out on the parlor floor but also to witness a critical moment in their own lives and in the life of the settlement. When they came one by one to shake his hand, their tears and their good-byes flowed no doubt from many sources and for many reasons, but surely they flowed most profusely for themselves and for their own waiting good-byes. As they shook Joseph’s dying hand, they shook a hand that had never been offered to them in its strength and vitality—Joseph, after all, had thought a handshake with a slave suggested an undue familiarity and was an invitation to insubordination. His hand had been for ruling and not for shaking. So they came one by one, and they took his hand in theirs so that now at the end they could grasp his weak hand in their strong hands. Now finally Joseph could feel their calluses and know in touching them all the labor and sorrows of their lives. Yet this taking of his hand was not so much a moment of triumph for those who lived in the settlement as it was a moment of truth telling, a moment of saying how things had been and how things were. For they took his hand with the bitter knowledge that this man, who had controlled their lives in the past, also controlled them in his looming death. His written will would largely shape their future as his iron will had shaped their past. So tears came, and good-byes were said, and Pulaski buried his old head in Joseph’s hand and perhaps remembered the past and thought about the future.

  Almost five years later, John brought to the Retreat a new portrait of Joseph. No other white was there, and the settlement had been greatly reduced in numbers. He opened the portrait in the parlor, “in that very room,” he wrote Mary, “in which our dear father breathed his last, and it was deeply solemn and sad. It seemed as if he had come back again. I called in Momma and old Pulaski.” Mom Sylvia came to view the portrait, but Pulaski was elsewhere. John left for awhile, and when he came back he found Pulaski “bending over the picture in a most solemn attentive manner, and as I entered the room he exclaimed, ‘Massa know me, but he wont talk to me. He see me, he know me, but he wont speak to me.’” The old man went out and gathered the people and brought them all in to see the likeness. “And they all evinced in a very quiet manner,” wrote John “a remarkable degree of veneration and affection for their deceased master.” Pulaski, the old driver who with Joseph had supervised the building of the Retreat, looked until he wept, and said to John: “We are so thankful that you brought old master to see us.”35 Joseph had finally become an old master who could no longer speak or give commands but only see.

  20

  THE RETREAT II

  A little more than a year before Joseph’s death, Charles received an invitation to a meeting in Charleston, the old center of fierce opposition to the religious instruction of slaves. As he read the invitation, it no doubt brought back memories of his visit ten years earlier. In 1835 the city had been in an uproar over abolitionist materials sent through the mails, and Whitemarsh Seabrook had launched a bitter personal attack against Charles and Thomas Clay. Henry Laurens Pinckney and Judge Charles Jones Colcock had told Charles that the opposition to the religious instruction of slaves was the work of an “Infidel Party.” This party, they had agreed, was rooted in a remnant of Deism among some of the planters and was associated with the old curmudgeon Thomas Cooper at South Carolina College.

  With such memories, Charles read the remarkable invitation he had received. A group of leading citizens of the city was inviting “a considerable number of gentlemen” to a meeting in Charleston on the religious instruction of slaves. The invitation had gone only to “South Carolinian gentlemen”—that little club of planters, merchants, and professionals that dominated the Palmetto State. The only exception had been “two gentlemen of Georgia”—Charles Jones and Thomas Clay, the very two whom Seabrook had denounced! They were now being invited to take part in the deliberations and to “furnish their views” because of “their known interest in the subject, and their long-continued personal exertions in this department of benevolence.” The invitation suggested that during the preceding ten years some important changes had taken place among Charleston’s leaders as they thought about the South’s “peculiar institution” and the place and role of religious instruction of slaves in southern society. After consulting with Thomas Clay, Charles decided to make the trip and participate in the meeting.1

  He left Liberty County for Charleston in early May 1845. Traveling with him was Dr. William McWhir, Charles’s old teacher in Sunbury. McWhir had decided that while he had not received an invitation, he would arrive at the meeting and trust that no one would object to an eighty-six-year-old Presbyterian minister hobbling in from Georgia. They stopped in Bry
an County at Richmond-on-Ogeechee and were joined by Thomas Clay. The three went on to Savannah and took a ship for Charleston.2

  Once again as he sailed into Charleston harbor, Charles could see the fine homes and church steeples that stood as proud symbols of the city’s fabled wealth and influence. But the city that his ship approached in 1845 was no longer the largest or the richest in the South. During they ears that Charles had been preaching at the stations and visiting in the settlements of Liberty County, Charleston had shown little growth. A former resident of the city, now living in New Orleans, soon wrote of the change: “When the Crescent City consisted of a few huts on the low lands of the Mississippi, her sister of the Palmetto State was reveling in the riches of foreign commerce, and in all affluence and property. But now the vision is changed. The noble city on the banks of the Cooper and Ashley looks back to the past with lingering regret,” while the Louisiana port moves ahead.3

  Charles knew, however, that if Charleston had lost its commercial preeminence, it still claimed to be the Capital of the South because of its cultural and political leadership. Moreover, it continued to play a critical role in the slave trade, for the slave markets in the city were doing a thriving business in the sale of low-country slaves for an expanding southern frontier.4 Charles could remember that when he had been a student of McWhir’s in Sunbury, slavery had still been largely confined to the Atlantic seaboard. But now as he sailed into Charleston harbor in 1845, the South’s “peculiar institution” was already being established in distant Texas, and slaves in great numbers were being carried to the rich new lands of an expanding South. Charles knew only too well that this steady expansion of slavery, with its appetite for more and more black laborers, was already beginning to destabilize the settlements of the low country and was a growing threat to the stability of the nation itself.5