Dwelling Place Read online

  Mary knew that she was making decisions and giving instructions beyond what was usually expected of plantation mistresses. But when she saw something that needed to be done, she did not hesitate to act. “It has been a source of satisfaction to me,” she wrote Charles, “to be with our people to instruct them as far as I can and look after their comfort and the interests of the plantation.” She was “thoroughly convinced of the necessity of doing so” as long as Charles’s duties called him away from home. “I do not believe in ladies’ assuming responsibilities,” she later wrote her brother John, “but when the Lord is pleased to lay them upon them, I do not see why they should not trust him for grace and strength and go forward in their performance.” With all of her decisiveness and energy, John thought Mary more like their father than any of Joseph’s other children. She was, said John, the “best representative of a sire who never feared the face of clay.”37

  When Charles received a letter from Mary that winter providing details of all her work and decisions, he wrote back: “Am obliged to you for all the stirrings up to things and duty on the different places.” You are, he told her, “a great hand for business.” And as for her teaching and preaching, he wrote: “Teach and preach as much as you please in the mode you did. I give you leave. You are a minister. We are one flesh, you know.” But he was cautious about her going too far, about Mary’s crossing too many boundaries as she assumed some of the traditional responsibilities of a man. “This will do for the occasion,” he told her, “but we will not carry the matter beyond the family and household.”38

  Mary’s visit to the low country was not only a time of duty and responsibilities but also an opportunity for seeing family and friends. She and Joe went to South Hampton for Christmas with the Kings and other friends. And after Christmas there was a trip to Maybank, a kind of “maroon” Mary called it, without all of the comforts they had carried there in the past when oxcarts had been loaded for a summer on the island. But they were not without the bounty of the island—Betsy sent over from Social Bluff a “nice corned beef;” Joe went hunting and brought back a duck and some quail; Andrew brought “a fat young turkey;” and there were oysters Niger had gathered, cold and fresh from the marsh, so that, wrote Mary, “with a dish of fried oysters, rice, potatoes, and turnips, with a dessert of oranges and sugared oranges, we had a very nice maroon.” 39 But such pleasant time was soon brought to an abrupt end.

  A few days after their arrival at Maybank, Mary and Joe drove up in the carriage and saw smoke and found “fires burning low on the ground.” Gilbert ran up and cried: “Aunt Patience’s house is burned down!” With hearts pounding they looked and found that not only Patience’s house but also the plantation kitchen, the poultry yard, the stable, and the fences beyond it “all lay a heap of smoldering ruins.” Fortunately, the wind had carried the flames away from the plantation house itself, and it was not harmed.

  Patience told Mary what had happened. A spark had caught the roof of the kitchen—an old building with pine shingles. The women working around the house had done what they could to put it out, but the flames spread. Andrew and those working in the fields came running to help. William Maxwell was summoned, and he came rushing with his crew from Social Bluff. A spark fell on the stable, filled with fodder, and it “was like falling in a tinderbox. In one moment the flames rose in the skies and licked around.” The roof of the corn house caught. Andrew said that “the Lord helped him and gave him strength. He flew up like a squirrel (to use his own expression) and tore off the shingles.” The others kept putting wet blankets on the buildings and fences, and in this way, the fire was finally stopped. William said, “No man in the world could have acted with more promptness or forethought than Andrew.” He not only rushed to the roof and with his tough hands tore off the burning shingles, but he also gave instructions to the others to help stop the spreading flames.40

  The Maybank fire brought back forcefully to Mary—and later to Charles, when he read Mary’s account—all the memories and the trauma of the night in Columbia when they had awakened to smoke and flames. True to their theology and piety, they wondered what they should learn from this second fire. They both believed the fire “was from the Lord,” who was trying to teach them something. Charles thought that God was seeking “no doubt to teach us over and in a milder form the lesson that all our earthly possessions are held by us at His pleasure; that they are ours to hold for necessary and charitable uses in His fear, but not to keep as an unchanging inheritance.” The fire made Charles search his own heart and to wonder whether his long quest for home was a “secret idolatry of heart which still clings to earth for home and happiness.” “The Lord,” he wrote Mary, “may be revealing our hearts to us, and teaching us that our home is in His hand; that He can take it all away in a moment of time; and therefore we must live upon Him, to Him, and for Him; and He and He alone be our portion and our inheritance.”41

  Two weeks after the fire, Mary—having made arrangements for the rebuilding and repairs at Maybank and having replaced what Patience and Porter had lost in the fire—left with Joe for the North and her home in a Philadelphia boarding-house.42

  The winter of 1852 was a busy and demanding time for Charles. The Presbyterian Church (Old School) was growing at a rapid rate—faster than the general population—and the number of domestic missionaries had now exceeded five hundred.43 Charles’s days, and many evenings, were spent trying to keep on top of his correspondence, and his hand, arm, and shoulder began to trouble him greatly. In addition, there was the constant pressure to raise money to meet the demands of an expanding mission. This meant that he had to travel regularly on the weekends and speak to church groups and preach in various congregations, which meant that he also had to find time to study and write his long sermons and addresses. But all of his labors were taking a toll on Charles’s health and making him wonder how much longer he could continue in his work.44

  During these winter months of 1852, Charlie and Charles Edward were moving toward graduation—Charlie from Princeton and Charles Edward from the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania. In late March, Charles Edward’s mother, Susan, wrote him from South Hampton, where she was visiting: “I suppose I may congratulate you now on bringing off some of the honours.”

  Charles Edward had indeed done well in his studies and had already made plans to begin his medical practice in Savannah. Susan had rented a fine home in the city—it was built off the ground in low-country style, and the enclosed ground-level rooms were designated to serve as Charles Edward’s new office. The young physician was ready not only to enter his profession but also to assume his responsibilities for his mother and his sister Laura.45

  Mary, however, was worried about her nephew. He had worked such long hours, burning the candle at both ends as he came toward the end of his medical studies. A few days before his graduation Mary wrote Laura that Charles Edward had been “suffering from a severe cold and cough, and looks very thin.” She added: “If possible he ought to recruit his health before he enters upon the active duties of his profession.” The next week he graduated—with honors—and shortly afterward he set off toward home. He got no farther than Morristown, New Jersey, however, before he was struck with a violent case of dysentery. He had a telegraph sent to his Uncle Charles: “I am very sick with inflammation of the bowels here at Morristown N. Jersey. Come to me and bring me twenty-five dollars and bring Dr. Hodge with you.”46

  Charles and Mary rushed to his side, arriving late in the night. The next morning they wrote Charlie and Joe at Princeton: “We found your dear cousin very ill—glad, glad to see us, as we to get to him. The attack has been exceedingly violent, and his situation is very critical, although we hope for the best.” They lavished on him all the love and attention they could and called in another physician. But he did not improve. He is “critically ill,” they wrote Charlie and Joe the next day, “and we know not how his case will terminate! We must pray and hope for the best. He sends love to you
.” The next day he seemed a little better, but Charles warned his sons: “A deathbed, my dear sons, is no place for you to prepare to meet your God!”47 Charles Edward died early the following morning.

  Charles wrote Susan:

  Oh, my sister! My sister! How shall I speak? “The cup which my Father giveth me to drink, shall I not drink it?” Oh, this cup—so unexpected, so bitter, so deep! God writeth you sonless! Help her, O my God! Your help, my sister, must come from Him who made heaven and earth—the almighty and compassionate Saviour.

  We are in sore dismay and distress beyond expression! Alas, how sudden, how violent past all remedies his disease! Nothing left unattempted, undone. We were with him day and night. He lacked for no attention. All skill was executed in his case. Dear child, his hour had come, and God has taken him. You were spared the agony of the eye and the ear. The kindness of the people is extraordinary. We will do all things the best we can. My dear wife and I are cast down and overborne. He was beloved as a child to us. He died this morning at ten minutes after five o’clock. God only can comfort you and our dear Laura! Pray for us as we do for you. Love, love to everyone.

  Your ever affectionate and afflicted, distressed brother. Mary writes this letter with me.

  Susan was crushed. Laura became “but the shadow of what she was” and Betsy and William were left “bowed with sorrow.”48

  The family’s sorrows that spring, however, were not over. A month after Charles Edward’s death came news from Marietta that John’s little girl Mary Elizabeth, “the darling of her parents” and Charles and Mary’s “pet niece,” had died. She had run across her bedroom, tripped over a toy box, and hit her head. At first she seemed fine, but later in the day she began to complain of a headache, and then she began to vomit, and the next day she had died in her mother’s arms. John was grief stricken, but he wrote Charles and Mary, “My sorrows are light compared with those of that chief mourner, the stricken and almost inconsolable mother…. I now understand the meaning of that verse, ‘Rachael weeping for her children and would not be comforted because they are not.’” “O!” he cried, “this cutting off one’s heart and putting it in the grave.”49

  The death of Mary Elizabeth added a tenderness and vulnerability to John and his ministry that made many love him. Later in writing Mary about Charles Edward’s death, he said that when he lost his “precious baby, my little idol, an unknown fountain of sorrow for myself and other bereaved parents broke forth from my heart.” The loss, he said, taught “a lesson which may be imagined, but never known, until we are called to take our own flesh and lay it in the dust.” And later when his brother Henry Hart lost a child, John wrote Mary that the loss of a child brings a “sorrow that lives as an exhaustless fountain in the heart. Tears never cease to flow for those little ones and the parent’s heart becomes a kind of endless whispering gallery in which their little words and remarks reverberate unceasingly.” And then giving an indication of his own continuing grief, he noted that “at times impetuous with emotion and anguish long suppressed, the swelling heart heaves, moaning like the ocean that cannot be at rest.”50

  Charles and Mary were back in Liberty County in late November 1852. Charles had another synod meeting to attend, and he had been invited to speak at the celebration of the Midway congregation’s one hundredth anniversary. But a primary reason for the visit was for Charles to see his cousin, Dr. Charles West, and to have a complete physical examination. West’s news was not good. While the doctor encouraged Charles to get other medical advice, he was confident about his diagnosis. “I regard your symptoms,” he wrote Charles,

  as the first indications that the nervous structure of the spine is becoming permanently congested, the progress of that state leads to paralysis of the arms & hands. This congestion once be gun in one limited spot, seldom remains within these limits, but is apt to extend to other portions of the spine producing paralysis also, and once it begins its march of extending to portions now healthy we do not know when it will stop. In fact, it seldom ceases short of the nervous centre, the Brain.

  West believed that the disease “had been produced without doubt by great mental effort, without sufficient muscular exercise.” He also believed “It has been aggravated without doubt by removal to a colder climate.” He recommended that if, after exercise, the debility continued, a surgical procedure be followed to allow for drainage from the “lower portion of the cervical vertebrae” at the back of Charles’s neck. The major thrust of what he recommended, however, was that Charles leave his work in Philadelphia and return to Liberty County. There he could rest and exercise, and his nervous system could benefit from the warmth of the climate.51

  Charles immediately wrote the directors of the Board of Mission and enclosed a copy of Dr. West’s letter. He then asked if it would be “consistent with the interests of the Board” to allow him to remain in a “warmer climate during the severer months of this winter and endeavor to recover his health?” The response, which came quickly, was deeply sympathetic but also ambiguous. It appeared that the directors were leaving to Charles the decision about remaining in the South. Two weeks later, in the middle of January, he and Mary left Liberty County for Philadelphia. “Dr. Jones is threatened with paralysis,” Eliza Mallard wrote her son Robert, a student at the seminary in Columbia. “Notwithstanding,” she said, “he has left for the North.”52

  Charles plunged back into his work for the board, and he felt from every side pressures and responsibilities weighing upon him as his physical condition continued to weaken. He was not ready, however, to bring his work to its end. When the General Assembly met in June, he received permission for a six-month leave of absence to see whether he could recover his health.53 He decided to spend the summer in Sharon, Connecticut, in a beautiful part of New England where the summers were cool, the villages quiet, and the pace of life could be slowed down. The plan was that Charles and Mary Sharpe would go to Sharon; that Joe would join them later in the summer and escort his sister on some outings; and that Mary would remain in Philadelphia with Charlie, who had spent the previous year working in a Philadelphia law office and was preparing to leave in the fall for law school at Harvard.54

  Charles was very pleased with what he found in Sharon. “It is an old fashioned, plain New England village,” he wrote Mary, “and the inhabitants of the plain, honest, moral, business style.” He enjoyed the New England countryside and took long walks every day. “I like the place,” he wrote Mary, “so retired and so beautiful.” But in spite of the quiet, the rest from his labors, and the long walks, Charles’s health did not improve. And he missed Mary terribly. “I cannot bear to be separated from you,” he wrote her. He wanted her to join him in Sharon, but when Joe arrived to take Mary Sharpe to Yale for its graduation exercises, Charles decided to go for a quick visit to Philadelphia because, he told Mary, “I love and can’t stay from you.” He confessed he felt that “love never grows old nor decays.” And he thought that their love for each other was “as fresh now as when we first loved and won each other’s hearts.”55

  But Charles also had another purpose for making a quick trip to Philadelphia. He wanted to see Dr. Hodge and get “some prescription for my neck, which continues much at the old rate…. My impression is deepening that it will take a long time to restore me—if ever. I desire,” he told Mary, “to leave it all with God.” Mary, however, had already made up her own mind in regard to Charles’s condition. “I think my dear,” she wrote from Philadelphia, “you must be now convinced that years of rest are absolutely necessary to your restoration with God’s blessing, and I look forward with great satisfaction to our return to our own home on that account above all others.”56

  While Charles’s health thus became a primary motive for a return to their Liberty County home, there were other reasons as well. That summer of 1853 a series of embarrassing letters appeared in the New-York Daily Times. Frederick Law Olmsted, the traveler, writer, and future landscape architect, had left Savannah the preceding win
ter for a visit to the plantations on the Georgia coast. Reporting in the Times on what he had found, he told of having visited briefly Eliza Clay’s Richmond-on-Ogeechee and of having been charmed by its beauty. He had spent three days at Whitehall, the neighboring plantation of Richard Arnold, where he “found Slavery under its most favorable circumstances.” Olmsted had been eager to discover at Whitehall and throughout his travels whether the treatment of slaves was humane and whether the institution of slavery was—as many southerners claimed—an instrument for civilizing and evangelizing slaves. What he had found, he wrote in the Times, was that “the mind and higher faculties of the Negro are less disciplined and improved in slavery than in the original barbarism of the race.” And he concluded that “Slavery, in its effects on slaves, is at war with progress, with enlightenment, with Christianity.”57

  In order to justify his conclusions and to dismiss any charges that he had “observed superficially and judged with prejudice,” Olmsted quoted extensively from Charles’s final report to the Liberty County Association. In particular, Olmsted pointed to Charles’s remarks about slaves’ being the property, the “money,” of their owners. Because they were “money” for their owners, it was, Charles had said, exceedingly difficult for slave owners to render their slaves “that which is just and equal as immortal and accountable beings, and as heirs of the grace of life, equally with ourselves.” Olmsted seized on this and other statements from the report and used them to verify his conclusion that “Slavery, in itself, rendering impossible a strong appeal to the character and happiness of its subject, recognizing him solely in such a manner as produces self-humiliation, can tend only to degradation of conduct and character.”58 Such use of the report must have been not only embarrassing for Charles but also infuriating. Olmsted’s letters, however, were nothing compared to the use made of Charles’s work by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the sister of Charles’s old friend Catharine Beecher.