Dwelling Place Read online

  Mary and Charles were trying to decide in the midst of their packing and familiar routines not only about clothes and furniture but also about which servants to carry to Columbia. They did not want to take Phoebe and Patience—although they were Mary’s “standbys”—because of their large and growing families. Jack and his wife, Marcia, on the other hand, were free from the responsibilities of a young family, and they also seemed indispensable because Jack managed so much of the household and because Marcia was a good cook. Moreover, Jack, with his good manners and cheerful spirit, had become a polished and elegant servant whose dignified ways added to the comfort of the Jones family and reinforced the family’s image of itself. He was, an acquaintance told Charles, “a gentleman of the old school.”8

  For almost forty years Jack had stood beside the dinner table, first at the Retreat and then at Montevideo and Maybank, and had served those who sat around it.

  And while serving, he had listened to the conversations of whites who talked as if he were not there. He knew what whites thought of the Gullah people and how blind whites were to what really went on in the settlements and how deaf they were to what was said around evening fires. To be sure, Jack knew Charles and Mary’s kindness and their concern for the welfare of the slave and how exceptional they were among whites. But like Buh Rooster, he knew he had to keep a sharp eye out for Buh Fowl-Hawk; and like Buh Rabbit, he knew he had to outsmart Buh Wolf and Buh Alligatur. More than any of the Joneses’ slaves, Jack had probed the character of white culture, and he had come to understand the assumptions of Charles and Mary and how they saw the world. They were, he knew, dependent on his good sense and on the work of Patience and Phoebe and all the others who labored for them. So in a strange and ironic reversal of roles, he had a sympathetic—one could almost say paternalistic—attitude toward these needy whites who couldn’t get along without him or without all those who sat by settlement fires in the evening. He was consequently more than a “good and faithful servant”—Charles and Mary regarded him as a friend and as an integral part of their household.9

  Jack and Marcia obviously could not do all the work needed for the Jones family, so Charles and Mary also decided to take with them Phoebe’s eighteen-year-old John and ten-year-old Jane. They were being trained to be domestic servants, and their grandfather Jack could not only look after them but also provide them with training that would help—it was hoped—to offset some of the bad influences of Phoebe and Cassius.10

  While Charles and Mary were making their arrangements for the move to Columbia, other members of their family were also in the midst of leaving the low country. John Jones had already moved to Marietta in northwest Georgia. Not long after Joseph’s death he had visited the upcountry, and friends had urged him to make it his home and the field of his ministerial labors. He wrote his sister Mary that he felt “greatly constrained thus to do, from two considerations.”

  First, the peculiar importance of this field which is fast becoming the most populous portion of Georgia, and its great and immediate need of the living preacher. Secondly, the climate has been very beneficial to Jane’s health. Marietta I think to be the healthiest village in N.W. Georgia, and said to be the most eligible position for a missionary, commanding many stations by Railroad, and many others in riding distance.11

  By the spring of 1848 John had bought a home in Marietta and had moved his wife, Jane, and their energetic five-year-old son, Dunwody, to the up-country. Nearby were Jane’s grandparents, James and Jane Smith, who had been such close friends to Charles’s parents at old Liberty Hall. Welham, their up-country home, John wrote, was “a quiet, delightful home; its inmates are kind, cheerful, and affectionate. The mansion is the perfection of cottage beauty, and the outer buildings admirably correspond. The whole presents the appearance of order, neatness, and comfort.” Also nearby in Roswell were many friends, including the Dunwodys, the Bullocks, the Pratts, and of course the Kings. John and Jane became frequent visitors at the Dunwodys’, for John Dunwody was like a father to Jane. “They live,” wrote John, “in a comfortable and stately mansion, built of brick.”12

  As for Atlanta, John found it a new society, rough and preoccupied with making money. And with prophet vision he described it as “the village where all the rail-roads meet, and there is such a running to and fro of rail-road cars, that one is most strongly reminded of a verse in Nahum 2:4 ‘The Chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they shall run like the lightnings.’”13

  John’s interests, however, were focused not on Atlanta but on the old Cherokee lands—especially those between Marietta and Chattanooga. Cass County, just north of Marietta, he called “the heart of the Cherokee Country, from its superior lands and its abundant mineral ores.” He marveled at the fertility of the Etowah River Valley, where low-country families would soon be building fine homes. “This country,” John wrote Mary, “is full of life and speculation. Lands are high, and settlers are moving in every day. Men are graduated and estimated very much by their means. Here is a broad field for missionary and ministerial effort. But ministers must expect for many years to work without a salary.”14

  John was soon called as the pastor of the Marietta Presbyterian Church, a position he accepted with the understanding that he would have time to do mission work in the rapidly growing areas of the old Cherokee country. What he found there, of course, was that other missionaries had been there before him. He wrote Mary of a visit to the little town of Rome, with its seven hills in northwest Georgia. “Upon crossing the Coosa at Rome, we entered immediately a rich farm once the property of John Ross the Head-chief of the Cherokees.” Seventeen years earlier, when Charles and Ross were meeting in Washington and traveling together to Baltimore and Philadelphia, Charles had written of Ross and other members of the Cherokee delegation: “They felt much and determined to bear with patience every evil that might come upon them, and hold fast their lands and not sell a foot, and if possible carry their cause before the Supreme Court of the U. States.” Since then Ross’s confiscated lands and fine home had passed through several hands, and now when John visited it, he found it “inhabited by the Presbyterian minister of Rome, Mr. Caldwell and his wife. Keeps a female school in the house so recently the Indian’s home.” And not far from Rome, John saw “another relic of the past, the old mission house and farm.” Here Dr. Elizur Butler, under the auspices of the missionary society begun at Andover, had “taught a school for the Cherokees.” Perhaps Butler’s experience as a missionary to the Native Americans had made Charles think about his experience and strategy as a missionary to the African Americans. Charles had sought to work within the system of slavery to make it more humane and never tried to oppose it openly. Butler not only protested vehemently the confiscation of Cherokee lands, but he also endured brutal treatment and four years in a Georgia prison for the Cherokee cause. And when he was finally freed, Butler identified so deeply with the Cherokees that he traveled the Trail of Tears to be with them in Oklahoma.15

  Not long after John had settled in his new home in Marietta, he found a home in the center of the village for his aunt Eliza Robarts, her daughters Mary and Louisa, and the four motherless children of her son Joseph. John thought Marietta would suit his aunt better than Roswell because of “the great convenience of the Railroad.” Since the death of her last husband in September 1813, she had looked to her brother Joseph and the Retreat as anchors in her life. Now at age sixty-four, with those anchors gone, she found the courage and the freedom to make a new home for herself and her family in the bustling little village on the outskirts of Atlanta. “Your house is engaged,” Charles wrote his aunt as she was preparing to leave Sunbury, “and you will presently be gone from Sunbury and we shall see you no more there.”16

  Eliza’s courage and freedom, of course, had repercussions in the settlements of Liberty County. She owned almost forty slaves, and some decision had to be made about what to do with them. Aft
er some negotiations, she reached an agreement with her nephew James Newton Jones for him to rent most of those who had been working in the fields at her Hickory Hill plantation. These he moved to the settlement at the Retreat. Among them was Old Robinson, the widowed husband of Old Lizzy. Charles agreed to rent five of his aunt’s slaves, including two children, probably to help keep families together. All of these he sent to Carlawter. But Eliza decided to take with her to Marietta six domestic servants. And among these was Sam, the butler and majordomo of the Robarts household. This decision came as a bitter and painful blow to Sam and his wife, Rosetta. They had been married in 1819, and although they had lived at different places for most of the years that followed, they had had their Saturday evenings and Sundays together. By the time of Sam’s removal to Marietta, they had five children and four grandchildren living at Carlawter and Maybank.17

  Sam and Rosetta evidently complained bitterly of the separation—although no doubt with the skill of those who knew the ways and temper of whites. Perhaps they reminded Charles and his aunt of what Charles had been preaching all these years, that husbands and wives were not to be divided. So as a compromise, it was agreed that every year Sam could return to Carlawter for not only the two weeks of Christmas holidays but also for the month of January.18

  In late September 1848 Charles and Mary set out from Maybank for Columbia with Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe. Journeying with them were Jack, Marcia, John, Jane, and Phillis. In Savannah they took the steamer William Seabrook for Charleston. A northeast wind was blowing and the sea was rough. Everyone became seasick except Jack and Jane. “The boat reared up,” said John, and “gave him the light head.” The steamer and the stormy ocean were new experiences for all those—even Jack—who had spent their lives in the settlement. “New sights and scenes for them all,” noted Charles, “and they seemed to enter into them.” In Charleston the white family stayed in the Charleston Hotel. The blacks stayed on the ship. Jack was sent ahead the next day with the first load of furniture. The second load went up the next day with the other servants whom Charles led down the streets of Charleston “in Indian file—Marcia in the center with her old cloak and Jack’s hat on her head.” The following day, the white family boarded the train with the third load of furniture. Tracks had been laid to Columbia since their last trip—no more rough carriage rides were needed. The train left Charleston at nine in the morning and was in Columbia by five that afternoon. George Howe was waiting for them with his carriage and buggy. Jack was there also, “as usual with his broad smile.” He reported “that all had arrived safely.”19

  While their house was being prepared, Charles and Mary, together with the children and the servants, all moved in with the Howes, who received them “as relatives.” Seventeen-year-old Charlie took the entrance exam and was admitted to the sophomore class of South Carolina College, and fifteen-year-old Joe was soon admitted into the first-year class. Mary Sharpe went to a school for young ladies run by a Mr. Muller. “He has the reputation,” Joe wrote his Aunt Betsy and Uncle William, “of being very cross.”20

  Part of the reason for the move to Columbia was for Charles and Mary to continue to supervise the education of the children—especially the boys, as they entered the dangerous years of college, and particularly South Carolina College. To go from the little schoolhouse and museum at Maybank to the college classroom in Columbia must have required some adjustments for the seventeen-year-old Charlie and even more for the fifteen-year-old Joe. But living at home and not on the campus no doubt eased the transition. Moreover, the boys brought with them a personal discipline and intellectual curiosity that had already been deeply instilled in them. “The use of translations of Latin and Greek books read in college,” Charles wrote their Uncle William, “is common with the students. They call them by the familiar name of Ponies—helping a fellow to jog through his lessons. Charlie says he never will use them, and Joe says he never will, they will aim to employ their own minds and get their lessons themselves.” 21

  Charles found Columbia “much improved.” It is, he wrote home, “a busy time, a great deal of cotton arriving and the Rail Road has as much—if not more—than it can do, both up and down.” And the military culture that so marked the state was everywhere visible. “It is as military a state as any in the Union,” wrote Charles, and “the Mexican war and the gallant conduct of their Palmetto Regiment has made them more so. Parades and reviews from time to time.”22

  As for his own work, Charles was soon busy at the seminary teaching church history and polity. “We are getting on tolerably well in the seminary,” he wrote William Maxwell shortly after he had taken up his responsibilities. “Thus far everything has been very pleasant, only I have more to do than I can do as well as it ought to be done.” He especially enjoyed being with the students, two of whom were former tutors for the children at Maybank and Montevideo—William Matthews, a Georgian, and James Rogers, a native of Pennsylvania. Once Charles and Mary were established in their own home not far from the seminary, both of the former tutors took their meals with the family, and “almost any evening,” Charles noted, “some of the students drop in and take a cup of tea with us.”23

  And there were others who came to visit and to enjoy a hospitality that had been nurtured in the low country. George and Sarah Howe continued to be their closest friends. She was, Charles noted, “as fat as she can be—never saw her in better health and full of good spirits, and her Lord is not a whit behind her.” Sarah’s daughter Augusta was married to the young Benjamin Morgan Palmer, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in the city. Palmer, who had graduated from the seminary in 1841, was already making a name for himself not only as a preacher of great power but also as an intellectual who moved with ease among a circle of intellectuals in the city. James Henley Thornwell at South Carolina College was at the circle’s center. He had achieved “hegemony over the institution” of the college and, in the words of a later historian of the university, was “perhaps the most important person connected with the institution during the twenty five years following his arrival.” Both Palmer and Thornwell would frequently teach at the seminary—and later be on the seminary faculty—and Charles regarded them as among his closest colleagues in Columbia.24

  In addition to Columbia friends, there was a steady stream of guests from out of town who came for extended stays with the Joneses. Not long after the family had settled in their new home, General John Cocke of Virginia arrived to spend some time with them on his way back from a visit to his plantation in Alabama. In 1847, when Charles and Mary had been in Virginia for a meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly, General Cocke had come in his carriage to Richmond and carried them to Bremo, his plantation home designed by his friend Thomas Jefferson. Mary had written Betsy of her impressions of the general. He had told her as they had ridden across the Virginia countryside of his friends “John Randolph, Madison, Monroe, and Jefferson.” Mary noted that while “he is himself from a first family of Virginia, I have a far higher encomium yet to pass upon this noble Christian gentleman—universally is it said of him: ‘General Cocke lives to do good.’ His heart and hand and purse is engaged in every work of benevolence.” She believed that he stood “preeminent in his efforts to instruct and improve his Negroes,” who she thought “are certainly in advance of any servants that I have ever seen for intelligence.” His Alabama plantation was, in fact, a remarkable experiment. He had carried there a group of slaves from Bremo and had arranged for the proceeds of the plantation to go toward their establishment in Liberia as free people. During the coming years the general became a close friend of the Jones family, regularly visiting with them on his trips to and from Alabama.25

  Almost from the moment of their arrival in Columbia, the family missed their Liberty County home, but visiting friends and family from the low country helped with homesickness. Laura came in the spring for an extended stay. Shortly after she arrived, Charles wrote her Uncle William Maxwell that “many have called to see her, and
she has been out to two little social parties. She has created quite a sensation among our young gentlemen. She seems quite popular and admires the town.” A little later Charles wrote his cousin Louisa Robarts about some of the social life in the city and his general impressions of Columbia:

  The town abounds in the most beautiful flowers at this season. The gardens are flourishing and much grown since you were here. So are the trees, which improve the appearance of the streets wonderfully. But the society which you knew here retains its identity in a remarkable degree. I cannot say that Columbia altogether takes my fancy as a place to call my home. Am not prepossessed in favour of Carolina notions. Besides it is a town where religion does not appear to flourish, at least not at present.26

  So, like their experience of Columbia in the 1830s, Charles and Mary again found the city a difficult place to call their home. It still had a rough edge to it, and in spite of many gracious friends such as the Craw fords and the Howes, it seemed to them to lack the refinements of the low country. They were especially concerned by what they regarded as the disorderly and lawless character of much of the city, and by “Carolina notions,” which substituted arrogance for personal discipline and the pursuit of excellence.