Dwelling Place Page 49

  The wedding was held at Social Bluff in June 1856. Mary had written Laura earlier: “And I wish you, dear Laura, to say to all your friends in Savannah whom you intend inviting to the joyful occasion that we shall be most happy to entertain them at Maybank. Our hearts and home will be open to them all.” It was a generous offer from a loving aunt, but many guests meant long hours and heavy work for Patience and Phoebe and all those who helped them in the kitchen and in the house. The wedding itself was evidently a grand occasion in the familiar style of country weddings, and Patience and Phoebe no doubt were called upon to help prepare some of the low-country delicacies for the wedding feast.21

  Among those who had been busy with the preparations at Social Bluff was Betsy Maxwell. The wedding day itself, 10 June 1856, had been selected in honor of Betsy and William’s forty-fifth anniversary. But Betsy was obviously ill. Her left arm was swollen, and she had a draining wound in her armpit from surgery the previous spring. Five years earlier she had had a mole with an “inky character” removed from her arm. Everything had seemed fine for several years following the surgery, but in February 1856 she had begun to complain of great discomfort with her arm. A tumor was then found in her armpit. She went to Savannah, and there in the home of Susan and Laura, doctors used chloroform and ether to put her to sleep. The deep-seated tumor was found to be larger than first expected, and the surgery was delicate, leaving a large wound. Betsy bore the surgery “with great fortitude,” but within a few weeks another tumor had to be removed from her neck. By the time she returned to Liberty County, more tumors had appeared on different parts of her body. In spite of her suffering, she had thrown herself into the preparations for the wedding with energy and interest. She regarded Laura as a daughter—or more as a granddaughter, since as a young wife Betsy had helped to raise Susan and Charles when their mother had died and then years later Laura and Charles Edward had spent many a month with Betsy and William at Laurel View or on the island. So Betsy had found somewhere within her the will and strength to be a part of Laura’s wedding. But the effort took its toll on her, and shortly thereafter she was confined to her bed.22

  William carried her to Dorchester, one of the little summer retreats, where comfortable large homes had been built as some families had begun to tire of the annual move between plantation houses and summer cottages. Abial and Louisa Winn welcomed their old friends into their home (the Winns’ wedding in 1838 had been at Lodebar, then the home of Betsy and William). Betsy now prepared for her death. At first she had wondered “if travel or a change of air or springs of some kind” might not be of help. But when the doctor told her that nothing would cure her and that death was not far off, she “yielded to what she saw to be the will of God.” She was not alarmed but “made her arrangements for her departure with calmness and clearness and spoke of that departure as of an ordinary event.” She made decisions about the distribution of her possessions, giving special remembrances to those whom she loved. She had her hair cut off, for it was impossible for her any more “to comb and put it up,” and she gave it to Laura and Mary Sharpe and to the Winns’ daughter Lizzie.

  As her suffering increased, she refused all but the lightest dosage of opium, for she did not want to be stupefied. She said to Joe, who had come from Savannah to be with his aunt, “I wish to die in my senses.” Patience prepared some arrowroot for her, and its soft texture and rich nutrients provided a little strength. Betsy found great comfort in hearing Scripture read and hymns sung around her bed and in prayers said for her. “Her heart,” her brother Charles said “was in the Word and worship of God.” She was calm and peaceful as she faced her death and looked to “the Rock Jesus Christ.” She said, “I trust altogether in my precious Saviour and have no fears,” but at one point she began to wonder, as she remembered all her sins, whether she was too confident. Charles said to her: “My dear sister, it is common for God’s own children to be tempted of the Devil & of their own unbelieving hearts in days of affliction & death.” No one, he reminded her, can count on personal merit or righteousness, but all must depend on God’s grace. Betsy said: “Yes, that is what I constantly do and I have comfort and peace.” As her end approached she began to call family members to her bed to give them her parting admonitions and blessings. They came and knelt weeping by her bed, holding and kissing her hand as she spoke to them. “Laura and Mary Sharpe, my precious children” she said. “Joe my son, my dear child,” “Sue, my precious sister.” And so with tender affection she said her good-byes. To Mary Sharpe she said: “Your Aunty loves you dearly. God bless you my child.” To Joe she said: “Joe, my dear Baby, my son, your old Aunty is going to leave you. Let me entreat you to come to Christ. Do not put off your soul’s salvation.” She sent word to Charlie, who had stayed in Savannah: “I leave my dying farewell for him. Tell him to live not for the world…. I beg him not to put off his soul’s salvation, and not be carried away by transient pleasures and honors.” She thanked Susan and Charles and Mary for their tender care for her; she committed them to God’s keeping, and urged them not to grieve too deeply for her. She sent her love and good-byes to those in Marietta and north Georgia—to her aunt Eliza Robarts and her family, to John Jones and his family. When she called William, the old man came and sat beside her on the bed “and took her hand in both his hands and laid it on his cheek and he bowed down his head, convulsed with grief.” “William,” she said,

  I have tried to be a good wife to you. I have tried to do my duty to you; to keep you from extravagance, to keep things together, to be economical and to make both ends meet. I have prayed for your conversion and God has answered my prayers. I am going to leave you. You will be all alone. Do not stay too much at home by yourself—go around and see the children. God be with and bless you my dear Husband. We cannot be long separated.

  She then drew him to her, kissed him, and said “farewell, goodbye my dear Husband.”

  Then she called her personal servant Louisa. They had been together as mistress and servant for years. Each had cared for the other when sick, and Betsy had stayed by Louisa’s bed days and nights when she almost died of childbirth. Louisa knew Betsy as only a personal servant could know the habits and moods of a mistress. And Betsy knew much about Louisa—about her affair years earlier with Miley’s husband Isaac, how she had later repented of it, and how she had been so good to Miley when Isaac had beaten her and had so brutally damaged Miley’s eye. Now on her deathbed, Betsy said her good-byes to Louisa, gave her parting advice, and sent messages with her to all “the servants at the plantation.”

  Betsy’s pain now became excruciating and her nausea constant. She prayed to die: “My work is done. Come Lord Jesus, come quickly! Come quickly, Lord Jesus receive my spirit.” They gave her ether and chloroform, and she found it a comfort as her end grew near, but her “life ebbed away in the slowest manner imaginable.” Finally, early on the morning of 24 July she left “Jordan’s stormy bank” and crossed over the river. Charles and Mary were with her, as were Joe and Susan and Laura and her new husband, David Buttolph. William was seated at Betsy’s side, holding her hand. Mary reached over and closed her eyes and placed “the napkin about her face.” David Buttolph had said a prayer and then, after everyone else had left the room, Mary and Susan began to perform “the last sad offices” of preparing Betsy for her “long rest.” Joe rode to Montevideo and had Porter and Sandy Maybank build the cypress coffin and the outer case.

  The funeral was held two days later at Midway. A large crowd of whites gathered from around the county to honor a greatly beloved member of their little community. And in the balcony, wrote Charles, were “all our servants from the different plantations, a large number of them.” David Buttolph, looking up into the balcony from the Midway pulpit, could see among them Louisa and Miley, Cato, Phoebe and Cassius, and Patience and Porter. They had come to say their own good-byes to a white mistress and to make their own private judgments about her life.23

  The pallbearers—Charlie, Joe, Henry Hart,
and Maybank Jones—carried the coffin out of the meetinghouse to the Midway cemetery. Beneath the massive oaks and the long gray wisps of Spanish moss, Betsy was buried among her family and friends. A plain white marble stone was later erected at the spot. It said to all who stopped to notice it that Betsy’s way of dying, like her way of living, was a testimony to a Calvinistic and evangelical faith that had taken root and flourished in the Georgia low country.24 And her stone shining in the shadows of the oaks and moss of the Midway cemetery served as another painful reminder to Charles and Mary that the home they sought was elusive. Time, like a low-country river, brought change and loss, and even love could not resist its flow or protect a home from time’s erosive power.

  26

  SLAVE MARKET

  The sorrows that invaded low-country homes with such violence were not, of course, confined to those who lived in plantation houses but were also a part of life in the settlements. Indeed, disease and death were a part of the wider and more pervasive sorrows of those who sought to make a home under the burdens of slavery’s oppression.

  A short time after Charles and Mary had returned from Philadelphia in the fall of 1853, they had sent for Phoebe to come to Maybank. She had been hired out in late summer to Mrs. Susan Way, who was home from China with her missionary husband for a short stay in Liberty County. Mary, however, wanted her old personal servant close to her, so Phoebe had been brought to the island to work her magic as a seamstress and to help Patience in the kitchen. Cassius and their children stayed at Carlawter, but Phoebe’s son John was brought with her to Maybank and apparently put to work around the house and lot. The previous summer John had left his wife, a young woman at Carlawter, and the overseer Benjamin Allen had not been able to get him to return to her. John thus brought with him a growing reputation as a rogue.1

  Christmas 1853 fell on the Sabbath, so in order to avoid disturbing “the hallowed day,” the Christmas celebration was postponed to Monday, 26 December. Early in the morning, Charles and Mary gave gifts to all those in the settlement and received in return gifts of eggs and “many thanks.” Later in the day, Charles and Mary, with Mary Sharpe, went to Andrew’s cabin for a Christmas worship service with the people of the settlement. During the service, John left the room in some distress. After the service, Charles and Mary went to John’s cabin and found him “suffering from great oppression—difficulty of breathing and hemorrhage from the lungs.” Because his situation was alarming and no doctor was near, they sent for William Maxwell. After various remedies were administered, John had some relief, but he was obviously dangerously sick. As soon as he was able “to receive it,” Charles spoke to him about the state of his soul and urged him “to repent of his sins and cast his lost and guilty soul at the feet of Jesus Christ, the poor sinner’s only friend.” He had been, Mary noted, “a prayerless, wicked, profane, Sabbath breaker and immoral boy and he seemed insensible to his sins and their consequences.” About sunset Andrew came running over and reported that John’s breath was growing very short. Charles and Mary again rushed “to him and there he was in agony of body, gasping for breath, spitting up blood profusely, apparently nigh unto death and with all the terrors of sin and eternal destruction filling him with horror unutterable.” John said that “he had lost his time. He knew the way but he did not care for it, that he had been a fool, that even since he had been so sick he would not pray ‘for fear that people would laugh at him and run their rigs upon him and say because he was sick and afraid to die that he wanted to turn to God.’” He confessed that “he never would think upon these things because he believed that he would get well, but if spared he hoped to let the world see that he was a praying soul. And then in the most earnest manner, he would entreat the blessed saviour to have mercy on his poor soul.” He thanked Charles “for all his kindness and faithfulness in warning and teaching him and trying to bring him to Christ.” Mary repeated “that precious passage: ‘For God so loved the world etc.’” John said “it was true and he could look only to Christ.” “Poor fellow,” wrote Mary quoting Psalm 116: “The sorrows of death compassed him and the pains of Hell got hold upon him.” And she felt herself the horror of his situation: “Oh! The Anguish of coming to our dying hours with no preparation for judgment and eternity! No Saviour, no Mediator, no Advocate!” No one, she thought, could tell what the result would be, but she hoped that if he were spared “we shall see the evidences of a genuine work of grace on his heart.” But she warned her unconverted son Charlie that “a death bed is no place for repentance—remorse and anguish for sin are not faith and love to Christ.”2

  John’s health continued to decline during the coming weeks. By the first of February 1854, Charles thought, “Poor John is to all appearance approaching that awful event which awaits us all.” Charles had been visiting him regularly, “conversing and praying with him.” His mind, he reported, “is calm and seems staid on the Lord Jesus Christ—the only support in such trying hours.” Charles believed that there had been a great change in John and added, “We sincerely hope it may be the work of God in His infinite mercy to him.” John asked to see his sisters Clarissa and Jane, and Charles sent for them at Carlawter and Acadia. After the visit, Jane was allowed to remain at Maybank to be with her brother. John sent “a thousand howdyes, and goodbye too!” to Charlie, who at that time was still away at Harvard. And he said that he never expected to see Charlie in this world anymore. “Nothing,” he said, “is left for me but to look to the Lord Jesus Christ and to put my whole trust in him.”3

  Two weeks later, John was sitting in a chair with his mother, Phoebe, and his uncle Porter at his side. John’s “arms were resting along on the back of the chair and his face sideways on his arms, and neither arms, hands, head nor person moved.” Porter called him, but he did not respond. “He touched him, but he moved not. He put his hand to his nostril. There was no breath. He was dead!” He was, wrote Charles, “conscious, calm, collected, reposing his hopes on the Lord Jesus Christ to the last. We cannot decide. God alone knows. But we have strong hope for him. Ten thousand times this, than other wise.”4

  A coffin was built, and they carried John’s body in a creaking oxcart to the chapel at Montevideo. The service was at noon, and the people came from Arcadia as well as Carlawter and Maybank to the little chapel. Charles found the service a “solemn and affecting hour.” Phoebe and John’s sisters “and many others and indeed all were affected. The opening of the coffin and the last look was the touching close.” The men bore John to his grave in the cemetery at Carlawter, and the people followed in procession. There they committed him to the ground and to the grace of God.5

  Jane had been close to her brother—they had spent time in Columbia together and shared a rebellious spirit. She was in many ways her mother’s child, having absorbed Phoebe’s rage against slavery and its oppression. But the teenager lacked her mother’s self-control and her grandfather’s wisdom about the ways of whites and about strategies for avoiding their wrath and violence. So Jane had become in the eyes of Charles and Mary another troublemaker, like her brother John before his sickness. It consequently seemed to Charles and Mary that Phoebe and Cassius and their children were becoming not simply irritants but a festering sore in the settlements, increasingly difficult to control and disruptive of the peace, order, and harmony of the plantations. Less than two years after John’s death, Mary wrote Charlie: “We have not yet determined what we shall do in reference to that family. We wish to act aright. They have always been unprincipled. Jane gives constant trouble. Much as I should miss the mother, I will not separate them if I can help it. It is a painful and harassing business.”6

  Mary’s note to Charlie was an ominous indicator of things to come. Phoebe was obviously a skilled servant who had a special relationship with Mary not only because of her talents as a seamstress and personal servant but also because of the memories and associations that clustered around her. Charles, however, had continued to distrust her, and Jane’s behavior had reinforced his
images of Phoebe and Cassius’s family. As Jane continued to be obstinate and surly, Charles and Mary had begun discussing what to do about her. If they separated her from her family, they would be betraying all that Charles had said about masters’ keeping slave families together. They obviously found the whole matter “painful and harassing,” as it intruded into the peace and tranquillity they sought in their low-country home.

  Jane may have learned that Charles and Mary were discussing her behavior and were perplexed about how to act “in reference to that family,” or she may simply have had more than she could stand of Carlawter. At any rate, in August 1856 she made a break for freedom.7 She probably slipped aboard a river schooner docked in Riceboro, maybe helped by one of the black seamen, and hid on board until the vessel arrived in Savannah. There she was able to blend into the obscurity of an urban black community. Now her previous experience in Columbia came to her aid, for it meant that she was not simply a plantation slave on the run but a young woman with some experience of urban life and with some understanding of strategies for survival. She adopted the name Sarah and began to represent “herself as belonging to a gentleman in the up country who allowed her to find work and pay wages”—a common practice in Savannah.8