Dwelling Place Read online

The Southern victory at Fort Sumter seemed to Charles a providential act. “Whoever read or heard,” he declared, “of so important and desperate a battle as that of Fort Sumter without the loss of a man on the side of the victors or on the side of the vanquished?” And he prayed that the victory was but a foretaste of others to come. But the battle itself seemed to have broken a restraining barrier within Charles. The old ethic of moderation and prudence that had for so long guided him, and the old feelings for the Union that went back to his student days in New England, all these restraints now seemed to have been breached, and through the breach flowed a long-repressed rage. He wrote Charlie:

  I never believed we should have war until after Lincoln’s inaugural address—and not altogether then, thinking that there were some preventing considerations of interest and self-preservation, and some residuum of humanity and respect for the opinions of the civilized world in the Black Republican party. But in this I have been mistaken. Christianity with its enlightening and softening influences upon the human soul—at least so far as the great subject dividing our country is concerned—finds no lodgment in the soul of that party, destitute of justice and mercy, without the fear of God, supremely selfish and arrogant, unscrupulous in its acts and measures, intensely malignant and vituperative, and persecuting the innocent even unto blood and utter destruction. That party is essentially infidel! And these are our enemies, born and reared in our own political family, for whom we are to pray, and from whom we are to defend ourselves.

  From now on the North would be “our malignant, unscrupulous, and determined enemy,” and the conduct of the United States government “a disgrace to the civilization and Christianity of the age, and an outrage on the great principles of political and civil liberty upon which our former government was laid and upon which it has stood for eighty years.” These were the shared sentiments of all the Jones family and of their white friends in Liberty County.12

  The summer following the battle of Fort Sumter, as armies were gathering in the North and the South, Charlie’s wife, Ruth, and their little daughter Julia returned to Savannah following a visit to a plantation in Burke County. Ruth was approaching the ninth month of pregnancy, and scarlet fever had been reported in Savannah. Not long after their return to the city little Julia came down with the fever. Mary—leaving Charles too weak to travel—rushed from Maybank to be with her grandchild and the ailing mother. As Julia struggled against the ravages of thedisease, her mother gave birthto another little girl. Charlie wrote hisfather:

  Ruth was this morning at nine o’clock delivered of a fine little daughter. Her previous sufferings were not protracted, but after the birth of the child she was brought to death’s door in consequence of the failure of the womb to contract, and the enormous effusion of blood. This has been stopped, but will have to remain perfectly quiet for hours to come.

  Julia, we hope, is better. The febrile action is diminished somewhat, but she continues quite restless. I do not know what we would have done in the absence of dear Mother. She is better this morning, and I sincerely trust that her exertions may not induce a return of her fever.

  Soon Charlie was himself taken by the fever, and Joe came hurrying down from August to attend to the sick family. Henry also arrived to be of what help he could, and Charlie soon began to recover his strength enough to be with his ill child. He was beside her when she died. Mary wrote Charles:

  Our little sufferer died this morning about nine o’clock. The physicians decide that there must be an early interment—this evening about seven o’clock. From the nature of the disease and poor Ruth’s situation this is necessary. She lies extremely ill—often wandering but mostly unconscious of surrounding objects, but rational when roused, and able to nurse her little babe. Joe thinks her in a very critical situation. She has as yet no symptoms of scarlet fever, but decided ones of puerperal fever. The infant, too, has ulcerated sore-throat and a little rash, which we hope may not move into scarlet fever. Charles has been very sick with sore throat and fever—threatened almost with suffocation; can now scarcely speak or swallow. Truly the hand of our God is upon us. Oh, that we may feel and act aright under the rod! We can only have prayer offered ere our dead is removed; Ruth is too ill for any service.13

  Charles, weighed down with grief, responded immediately in a letter to his eldest:

  My dear Son,

  Gilbert has just come, and I cannot express to you my sympathy and grief at the loss of dear little Julia and the extreme illness of your affectionate and devoted wife, my dear Ruth.

  Sweet child! A child of the covenant, and removed, we trust and believe, to be with God. She is not dead, but sleepeth. We must think of her as with the spirits of the redeemed in heaven. Your heart is torn; you feel what you never felt before. It is a great affliction; I wish I knew how to bear it for you. That sweet child was given you by the Lord, and He has removed her. Acknowledge His right, and humbly pray to Him for submission to His will, and that He may bless the stroke to your own eternal welfare. He alone can bind up the brokenhearted.

  Ruth fought the infection that was slowly spreading through her body. She was a strong young woman with everything to live for. But the poison did its work, and soon the mother joined the beloved daughter in death. Mary took the in-fant granddaughter—Charlie named her Mary Ruth—back to Maybank to care for her and to raise her as her own for the next few years. And from Savannah Charlie wrote his parents: “What I have suffered is known only to my desolate heart. Everything around me appears invested with the habiliments of the grave.”14 Shortly thereafter, he announced that he would not run for reelection. Alone and in deep sorrow, Charlie experienced a new tenderness coming into his life. And while he did not have a conversion experience that would bring him into the church as a full member, he did feel a new dependence on God. In the days ahead, he became less pompous and began to exhibit a kindness that showed his struggle to go beyond a sense of duty to a genuine empathy for the sorrows and sufferings of others.

  Charles sent word to Cato that Peggy was to come to Maybank to help with the care of Mary Ruth. Earlier in the summer Peggy had given birth to a little girl, and Charlie and Mary decided that Peggy would be the best servant to nurse their new granddaughter. When Peggy arrived at Maybank, Charles and Mary discovered to their horror that her little girl was a mulatto. They questioned the nineteen-year-old Peggy carefully. The father, she confessed, was none other than William States Lee. He had, she said, seduced her shortly after he arrived at Maybank in late summer of 1860 and for weeks thereafter had continued his relations with her. She did not accuse him of forcing her, but she insisted that he was the father.15

  Charles was incensed and wrote a blistering letter to Lee in Columbus, where he had begun his school for young women. “You had my confidence,” he declared, “as unreservedly as any stranger possibly could have, and enjoyed the kind hospitality of my family from the day you entered to the day you left it.” Yet in spite of this hospitality, you “debauched a young Negro girl” and “continued your base connections with this Negro woman week after week until you took your final leave!” Not only had Peggy been abused, but Charles felt abused as well. You are, Charles wrote in outrage, “the only man who has ever dared to offer to me personally and to my family and to my neighbors so vile and so infamous an insult. You are the only man who has ever dared to debauch my family servants—it being the only instance that has occurred—and to defile my dwelling with your adulterous and obscene pollutions.”

  Charles then spelled out in his letter the proof of Lee’s “criminality,” which, he said, was “so clear a character as to remove all doubt.” There was first of all, “the free, unconstrained confession of the Negro woman herself in full detail; there is the correspondence between the time of your connection with her and the birth of the child—a mulatto, now some time born; and there is a resemblance to you beyond mistake.” The case, Charles declared, “is amply sufficient to warrant the submission of the case to the session of the Colum
bus church for action.”16

  Lee, upon receiving the letter, immediately showed it to two elders of the Columbus church—one a judge and clerk of the session, the other a wealthy merchant. Lee vigorously denied the charges. Since the Columbus pastor was away, the two elders sought to handle the matter with discretion. Before presenting the case to the entire session and thereby jeopardizing Lee’s reputation and the work of his school, they insisted that while “it is our duty to look closely to all offenders, yet it is no less our duty to protect and defend innocent members of the church.” They consequently raised several issues with the evidence presented by Charles. Most telling was their questioning of the reliability of the mother. “It is the opinion of some of our ablest legal men,” they solemnly declared, “who have had much experience in the investigation of cases of bastardy that the propensity in woman is to conceal the true father.” The charges made by the woman, legal experts have found, “usually arise from a sprit of revenge for what the woman considers a breach of promise, false pretenses, etc.” Some of our lawyers and judges, the elders wrote with self-assurance, have been so strongly impressed with “these facts that some effort has been made in the general assembly of the state to have the law so altered as to make the mother incompetent for a witness unless the complaint be made at the time or very soon after the illicit intercourse.”17

  Charles answered their letter point by point, arguing with all the zeal of his righteous indignation and with all the forcefulness and clarity of one deeply familiar with church law. In particular, he insisted that “servants are not always liars, and are particularly slow to father their children upon white men without the best of reasons, and because of the humble and exposed condition are more open to the seductions of their superiors (not in character but in station in society).” Furthermore, Charles said that he had discovered that Lee “had been charged by a Negro girl in the village where he taught school in our country with having had criminal connection with her and with being the father of the child with which she was then pregnant; that he had denied the charge before the trustees of the academy and demanded that the Negro should be punished, which punishment was inflicted previously to the birth of the child; and the trustees acquitted him, there being no evidence but that of the Negro girl against him.” Later, however, the child was born a mulatto, and the young mother “persists in the charge to this day.” Some in the village, Charles admitted, still believe him innocent, but others believe him guilty. “Now,” he said, “here are two Negro women living twenty miles apart, without any knowledge of or correspondence with each other, preferring the same charge against the same man holding to it.” Charles was clear about his own position: “My own belief,” he wrote, “is settled, which I pronounce with sorrow: that with all the circumstances and evidences before me, he is a guilty man.” And he added: “Nor am I alone in that belief.”18

  A few weeks later another letter arrived from the clerk of the session containing a sworn statement from Lee: “I do hereby solemnly deny the truth of such charges and do pronounce them to be utterly false and unfounded.” The clerk, at the pastor’s request, asked for Charles to “reply as early as convenient,” and asked that Charles, from “your extensive experience and observation in church judicature … please suggest what course should be adopted here by session.” Will you, they asked Charles, “become prosecutor, or can the case be so made out that the session of this church can take action upon it?”19

  Charles was clearly disgusted with the casuistry of their responses and with their avoidance of duty. “I have laid pretty fully all the evidence relating to it before you,” he wrote in a brief letter to the clerk of the session, “and upon which, with the first six chapters of our book of discipline in your hands, you are well able of yourselves, independent of all assistance, to decide what course should be pursued without the intervention of any prosecutor at all.”20

  The matter, so threatening to the reputation of Lee and his school for young women, was never taken before the session. But Peggy did not change her story. She named the little girl Eva, after the child’s maternal grandmother, and Lee, after the young white man who had spent several months under the hospitable roof of Charles and Mary Jones.21

  As for Charles, Lee’s behavior represented a profound betrayal not only because it broke rules of hospitality and moral rectitude but also because it betrayed a long-cherished image of a quiet and peaceful home. This betrayal evoked bitter rage in Charles, for it threatened to undercut the very foundations of May-bank and Montevideo as sacred places held in the memory and imagination of his heart. How was he to think of his low-country home now that he knew all too well that his dwelling had been defiled by “adulterous and obscene pollutions”?

  While the letters were going back and forth between Charles and the elders in Columbus, preparations were going forward for the first meeting of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. In May 1861, only a few weeks after the battle of Fort Sumter, the General Assembly of the still united Presbyterian Church had met in Philadelphia. A few southern commissioners had attended, but a resolution had been passed that called on the church to “Promote and perpetuate, so far as in us lies, the integrity of these United States, and to strengthen, uphold, and encourage, the Federal government in the exercise of all its functions under our noble constitution: and to this constitution in all its provisions, requirements, and principles, we profess our unabated loyalty.” In Charleston, Thomas Smyth, an old moderate and Unionist, declared that the General Assembly had “willingly, willfully and wickedly” severed the last link that held the North and South together. Charles agreed that the resolution was nothing less than treason against the church, against the Gospel, and against Christ, and he joined in a call for the organization of a Southern Presbyterian Church.22

  Arrangements were soon made for a meeting of a Southern Presbyterian General Assembly to be held in Augusta in December 1861, and Charles was determined to attend. His health, however, was now in a serious decline. When he preached, he had to do so sitting down, and when he made any physical exertion, he was soon out of breath. His “creeping palsy” was doing its slow but steady work of disabling him; his heart was weakening and his strength was fast ebbing. Nevertheless, Charles made his plan to go to the assembly.

  Meanwhile, Joe had joined the old Liberty Independent Troop—the one his grandfather Joseph had commanded during the War of 1812—and was stationed at Sunbury as the troop’s surgeon. At his father’s request, he obtained a furlough in order to accompany Charles to Augusta and to have a quick visit with Carrie and little Stanhope. They caught the train into Savannah, and from there they took the train to Augusta. Whenever he moved about, Charles had to lean on Joe’s arm for support.23

  In Augusta, Charles found many of his old friends gathering for the assembly. Howe and Thornwell werethere from Columbia with their colleague Joseph Wilson. I. S. K. Axson, the former pastor at Midway, had ridden up from Savannah. (In a few years Axson’s granddaughter would be married to Wilson’s son Woodrow.) Benjamin Morgan Palmer came from New Orleans, and John Leigh-ton Wilson—whose reports and letters from Africa had been so important to Charles—came from New York to join in the Southern cause. These and other friends and colleagues gathered at Augusta’s First Presbyterian Church. Palmer was elected moderator and preached the opening sermon. But Thornwell was the real leader of the assembly, and it was he who articulated a brilliant generation’s considered thought on secession and its fundamental cause—human slavery. Secession and the creation of the Confederacy provided, they believed, a critical moment for the creation of a new social order. The North represented a social system where capital and labor were divided—a system so oppressive to the laboring classes that a revolution was likely to occur. Thornwell was convinced that the only way to prevent such a bloody revolt by the masses of oppressed workers was to convert “the labourer into capital; that, is by giving the employer a right of property in the la
bour employed; in other words, by Slavery.” Against the social order that they saw rising in the North, Thornwell and his colleagues envisioned the Confederacy as an alternative class-stratified society that would stand against the increasing anarchy of the modern world. The new Confederacy was to be a commonwealth that was both capitalistic and hierarchical. Such a commonwealth would be not a society of democratic capitalism committed to an equality of opportunity, but a commonwealth whose capitalism would be controlled by a commitment to what they called “regulated liberty”—and those whose liberty would be most carefully regulated were black slaves.24

  If Thornwell articulated the assembly’s theological and ideological position on secession and slavery, Charles was theone who captured the assembly’s imagination and evoked deep images of the South as home, where old times were not forgotten and where duty and social place were inescapably linked. Charles was asked to speak to the assembly on the religious instruction of the slaves. So once again—and for the last time—he rose to address the subject that had been the great passion of his life. Though weak, he spoke for an hour on the responsibilities of the white South for the religious instruction of slaves. And he remembered with longing his labors among those who lived at Carlawter and at Lambert and at the old Mallard Place and at all the other settlements of his low-country home:

  Yes, my brethren, there is a blessing in the work. How often, returning home after preaching on the Sabbath-day, through crowds of worshippers—some-times singing as they went down to their homes again; or returning from plantation meetings held in humble abodes, late in the star-light night, or in the soft moonlight, silvering over the forests on the roadside, wet with heavy dews, with scarcely a sound to break the silence, alone but not lonely—how often has there flowed up in the soul a deep, peaceful joy, that God enabled me to preach the Gospel to the poor…. 25