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  31

  INDIANOLA

  The terrible costs of civil war had become apparent months before Charles traveled to Augusta to speak of “plantation meetings held in humble abodes.” Shortly after Fort Sumter, great armies had begun to gather in both the North and the South. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1861, volunteer regiments from all over the North had moved toward Washington, and young recruits from all over the South had moved toward Virginia in anticipation of a great battle. Among the Southerners were many Georgians, and among the Georgians were many friends and relatives of Charles and Mary.1

  Cousin Mary Robarts wrote describing a scene that was happening, with local variations, all across the South. Three companies were raised from Marietta, Roswell, and surrounding farms. The women of Marietta, taking advantage of the newly developed sewing machine, quickly made the uniforms for the recruits. Then, on the day of departure for Virginia, the troops assembled in front of the courthouse. A local minister “addressed them in a most impressive manner,” and the women presented each soldier with a New Testament. Thus spiritually fortified and blessed, the young recruits marched toward the depot singing “Dixie,” with a great crowd following them. Reaching the waiting train, they were allowed to break ranks “to say last words to weeping mothers and sisters and perhaps sweethearts.” Flowers, bouquets of them, were pressed upon these sons, brothers, and sweethearts, and frequently there was “a tear in their eye.” Then they were on the train, and with the sound of the whistle, they were off to Virginia for battles whose horrors they could not imagine. “Poor fellows,” wrote Mary Robarts, as she thought of them going off to war.2

  The Marietta troop was soon joined by companies raised in Rome, who had been sent on their way with “a solemn, affecting, and eloquent” sermon preached by John Jones. Standing among the Rome recruits to hear the sermon was Dunwody Jones, who had spent so many happy days at Maybank and Montevideo. As a lanky nineteen-year-old, Dunwody was a long way from maturity—indeed he was a young man whose parents continued to hover around their “wayward boy.” Shortly after he left for Virginia, John and Jane Jones anxiously followed him to Richmond so that they could be close to their boy if he needed them. They arrived in the Confederate capital two days before the raw recruits, North and South, clashed near a rail junction named Manassas and around a sluggish little river about twenty miles south of Washington named Bull Run.3

  The Confederate victory at Manassas—or Bull Run, as the Yankees called it—caused a great celebration throughout the South. In Savannah, Charlie thought that “surely the Lord of Hosts is with us,” and everywhere across the South many believed the victory meant that Southern independence had been won. But there was a growing recognition that the victory had been won at a great price. “Our hearts are filled with gratitude to God for our victory over our enemies,” wrote Mary from Maybank, “and at the same time we weep at the costly sacrifice.” And John wrote from Richmond of the cries of the wounded, of the dreadful stench from the battlefield, and of his own desperate search for Dunwody among the dead and the wounded and “in a wilderness of camps and tents and soldiers,” until finally “I found our boy and ran and threw my arms around his neck and kissed him as one lost and dead suddenly found again.”4

  During the coming months and bitter years, as other greater and more costly battles would be fought, hopes would rise among the Joneses and their friends when Southern armies defeated Yankee foes; but hopes would fall with Southern defeats, and despair would grow as a rising tide of blood and destruction threatened to overwhelm a southern homeland and southern home. A year and a half after Manassas, Charles wrote: “I can only repeat our daily prayer that God would take our cause into His own almighty hand, and humble us for our sins and judge between us and our enemy.”5

  In the meantime, with white troops boarding trains for Virginia and other battlefronts, the immediate concern to the master and mistress of Maybank and Montevideo was the defense of the Georgia coast. The Sea Islands and river plantations seemed easy prey to Yankee warships, which could shell the islands, and to Yankee gunboats, which could make quick raids up dark rivers. And Charles and Mary wondered not only about Yankees but also about the black men and women who lived in the settlements. These Gullahs knew how to follow secret trails through woods and deep swamps when the moon had sunk from sight. And they knew how to float a bateau on an ebb tide and move like a shadow without sound along winding creeks of the marsh to open water, deserted islands, and freedom. From long experience, Charles and Mary knew that the people of the settlements would be watching, listening, and whispering in the night. What were they saying about the war as they sat around their evening fires staring into the flames? Were they plotting how to make a break for freedom? Would they abandon their owners and even their own families and friends and go over to an unknown but seductive enemy? These were questions that troubled Charles and Mary as they prepared in the late fall of 1861 to leave Maybank for Montevideo, for they were questions about commitment, loyalty, and trust. They were at their heart questions about Charles and Mary’s pleasant life by the North Newport and the Medway marshes. Had it really been built upon shared trust and mutual obligations of responsible masters and faithful servants? Or had they somehow dreadfully deceived themselves? Had their life together—with their daily commitments and routines and their feelings of immeasurable responsibility and duty to their slaves—had all this been nothing more than an illusion, a mere façade that hid the raw power of whites that kept Charles and Mary comfortably situated in the plantation house at Montevideo and kept Cato and Porter and Patience and all the others in the slave cabins at Carlawter?6

  The move from Maybank to Montevideo in the fall of 1861 did not follow the familiar pattern of earlier moves. To be sure, after the first frost Gilbert and Charles brought their creaking oxcarts to the door of Maybank as they had in earlier years. But this year there was more, much more, to carry down the high steps and load in the carts. And this year the November move was but the first of many a long trek to Montevideo and back to Maybank. During the coming months dining room table and chairs, sofas and carpets, bureaus and desks, medicines and food, dishes, pots, and pans, the mirror stove brought from Philadelphia, and all the contents of the island home were systematically removed to Montevideo for safekeeping. As news of the war made its way to Liberty County, Charles and Mary seemed to know intuitively that their summer home, with all of its cherished memories, would no longer be theirs. Patience would be serving no more tea on the Maybank piazza. Niger would be bringing no more shrimp and crabs and oysters up from the creeks. And there would be no more visiting with friends as the light lingered over the marsh and the wind brought the sound and fragrance of a low-country night.7

  In February 1862 Charles wrote in his journal: “Rode with M. to Maybank. House much dismantled: things moved up [to] M. video.” Only Old Andrew and Mary Ann, together with a daughter Delia and grandchildren, remained at the settlement. Everyone else had been removed to Montevideo, but there was much that held Andrew and Mary Ann to their home by the marsh, where they had lived for so many years. Near their cabin under the surrounding oaks and palmettos was the recent grave of their daughter Dinah. Two years after her husband Abram Scriven had been sold off the island, she had married James, a man from Palmyra plantation across the marsh from Maybank. (James’s first wife had been sent away to work on the railroad, and it was said that there was no chance she would ever be returned to her husband.) The new couple had had only a few months of married life together before Dinah had died of typhoid fever. She had been buried in her sandy grave near the Maybank settlement, and when her parents and her sister and children were finally removed in late 1862, only yucca and wild myrtle would remain as her memorial. Everything, Charles wrote of Maybank, was “moved away and house locked up and left so.”8

  Those who went off to defend the cause of the Confederacy were not only white volunteers but also black slaves who were requisitioned to do much of the
hard labor of building defenses for Southern armies and cities. In March 1862 Charles received from the military authorities in Savannah a requisition for able-bodied men to work on the river defenses of the city. Charles selected July and Sam, sons of his old nurse Rosetta and her husband, Sam; Little Adam, who was Cato’s brother and the youngest child of Old Lizzy; Young Pulaski (named after the old driver at the Retreat) and his brother Wally, “a faithful young servant man;” and Joe and Tyrone, two strong young field hands. Charles made July the foreman of the company and sent them all to Savannah on the train.9

  Never before had Charles sent anyone from the settlements to do such work or to labor in another planter’s rice or cotton fields. To be sure, Phoebe had worked for Julia King as a seamstress when Charles and Mary had been away in Columbia, and the plantation carpenters had helped to build barns and houses on other plantations, but it had all been under the close supervision of well-known white neighbors. Charles felt too much his own responsibility for those whom he owned and he worried too much about the treatment they might receive from unscrupulous overseers to rent out any of “his people” for field labor or work on the railroads. But now under the pressure of war, he sent these men to do the wretched work of building earthen defenses on the muddy banks of the Savannah. The results were disastrous.10

  Within weeks they were all back, and all but Pulaski were dangerously ill. River cholera had struck, with its cramps, vomiting, and violent diarrhea. Wally died first. Then Joe. And finally Tyrone. But to make matters worse, they apparently brought back with them a deadly form of measles. Before the epidemic was over, the measles had killed nine in Carlawter, including Patience and Porter’s daughter Beck. She had been brought to the washhouse that had been made into a little hospital behind Montevideo. There the plantation doctor tried to stop the ravages of the disease, and Patience served as her nurse. Perhaps as Beck struggled against her fever and the pneumonia that followed the measles, she remembered the tender letters from Ben Lowe, who had promised to love her “until life leaves.” Their marriage had been short—three Christmases were all the time they had had together—and now Ben would never have a chance to know his infant son, who died beside his mother.11

  Old Quarterman, born in slavery in Liberty County (Margaret Davis Cate Collection, courtesy Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Ga.)

  Joe, who was stationed with the Liberty County Independent Troop at Sun-bury, had set up his surgery in one of the old homes in the little village. With limited military responsibilities, he was using all his skills as a physician that spring of 1862 to tend the sick at Carlawter and at other places around the county. In late April he was at Arcadia seeing after the sick in its settlement when word came that two Yankee gunboats were off Colonel’s Island. They appeared to be threatening Woodville and Social Bluff. Joe raced to Montevideo to spread the alarm. While his mother packed some rations for him, Joe took out his grandfather’s double-barreled shotgun—the old silver-mounted one that his grandfather John Jones had carried with him on his fateful ride in 1805. With this relic of long-forgotten hunts, Joe rode off to the island to fight the Yankees. To his disappointment, he had no chance to send buckshot their way. But the Yankee gunboats did not appear to be intimidated by Joe and his silver-mounted shotgun or by the other rebels who rushed to defend the island. Rather, they steamed steadily up the river and were stopped only by an ebbing tide. They did no harm to the estates along the river, but a crew loading cotton at a wharf scuttled their little ship, and on the threatened plantations there was a great rushing to and fro to escape a possible shelling. Nowhere was the rushing more vigorous or orderly than at Montevideo. Charles and Mary, seeking to protect their most precious possessions, sent a steady stream of mules with loaded wagons and oxen with wobbling carts to Arcadia, whose location some distance from the river seemed more secure. The Yankee gunboats, however, soon turned around, went downstream, exchanged a few shots with the rebels on Half Moon Bluff, and then steamed off to more serious business.12

  When the excitement had died down, Charles wrote Charlie a long letter giving all the details. Charlie, after completing his term as mayor, had enlisted in the Chatham Artillery and was serving as its first lieutenant. He was busy learning all that he could about artillery, a complicated science far removed from the study of Latin or law. But Charlie was bright and inquisitive, and he was fast becoming an accomplished artillery officer—in a few months he would be promoted to lieutenant colonel of artillery and assigned to duty as chief of artillery for the military district of Georgia, with headquarters in Savannah. When Charlie received his father’s letter and learned of the gunboats on the North Newport and of his brother’s rush to defend the homeland with the old shotgun, he was amused. And he wished that a section of his artillery battery had been at Half Moon to treat “the Lincolnites to a dose of shell and canister.” Charles, on his part, now greatly relieved with the disappearance of the gunboats, wrote Charlie: “I think when peace comes we must have the Chatham Artillery—officers, at least, at Montevideo on a picnic.”13

  The arrival of the Yankees off the coast of Liberty County had been noted not only in the plantation houses, of course, but also in the slave settlements. And there the reaction was more ambiguous and mixed. The Yankees, after all, were also white, and generations of Gullah wisdom had taught that all whites were dangerous, that none could be trusted, and caution and care were imperative when dealing with whites. Moreover, masters and mistresses had done everything they could to impress upon their slaves that Yankees were their enemies too, that Yankees promised one thing and delivered something quite different. So many in the settlements were afraid of the Yankees and their marauding. Most were inclined, for the time being at least, to follow the old Gullah tale—to act “Jes like the tarpins or turtles: jes stick our heads out to see how the land lay.” But some were bolder, and when they looked around them and saw white masters and mistresses fleeing the Yankees, they saw a chance for a longed-for freedom.14

  Those who made their plans for escape knew that the old, well-established slave community of Liberty County—so long in the building—was already being violently broken apart. Ironically, the movement of slaves to southwest Georgia and points west had loosened one of the most powerful forces that might have kept some slaves from running away. A sense of belonging to a tightly knit community composed of husbands and wives, aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents, and friends from youth had been dramatically weakened during the preceding decade. When ties of family and friendship were broken by the removals, the ties with a home place—so long under attack—were weakened even more and the magnetic pull of freedom was strengthened. So it was not simply the nearness of Federal forces, nor the longing for freedom, nor an accumulation of rage that encouraged some to make a break for freedom. All of these factors were no doubt important in whispered plans and no doubt played their role as sources that led to flight. But surely there was also a deep sense that many of the ties that had bound a Gullah community together had already been broken and that something new was on the horizon.

  The lines of secret communication between the settlements now began to hum. What was the best way to make a break for freedom? What should one take from storehouses and barns for the flight? What hidden trails were safest to follow through the woods and swamps? What boats were easily taken or could be found concealed in swamp or marsh? What island offered the best hopes of freedom?

  A few weeks after the gunboats stirred the waters up and down the North Newport, Charles wrote his Aunt Eliza Robarts in Marietta: “Some Negroes (not many) have run away and gone to the enemy, or on the deserted sea islands. How extensive the matter may become remains to be seen. The temptation of change, the promise of freedom and of pay for labor, is more than most can stand; and no reliance can be placed certainly upon any.”15

  But already others were planning their escape. Five days after writing his aunt, Charles wrote Charlie with alarming news: “Fifty-one have already gone from thi
s county. Your Uncle John has lost five. Three are said to have left from your Aunt Susan’s and Cousin Laura’s; one was captured, two not; and one of these was Joefinny!” The flight of Joefinny was particularly distressing because he was a trusted personal servant who had worked for years at Social Bluff, serving tea on its piazza and seeing after the orderly management of the household servants. He had been a frequent visitor to Maybank and Montevideo and was married to Flora, Patience’s apprentice. Charles had even performed their wedding in the chapel at Montevideo and had made arrangements for him to have a kind of honeymoon with Flora by remaining at Montevideo for several months after the wedding. Clearly a privileged slave, he had been watching for his chance to run.16

  When Charles and Mary had closed down Maybank, Sister Susan, with Laura and David Buttolph and their children, had evacuated Social Bluff and had temporarily moved to a rented house in Dorchester. There Joefinny plotted his escape. He drew into his plans two of his brothers who were working at Lambert plus a young nephew who had been named after Cato. They tried to get their brother-in-law, Young Andrew—the son of Old Andrew and Mary Ann—to join in their scheme, which was a mistake. He appeared horrified by such an idea and reported on them, but he was careful not to do so until they had made their break for freedom. The two youngest were caught and immediately taken to Savannah and shipped to the up-country of Georgia to be rented for fifteen dollars a month doing hard labor. But Joefinny and his brother Isaac made good their escape to Colonel’s Island, where they had an intimate knowledge of the woods and ridges, the isolated hammocks and surrounding marshes. From his hiding place, Joefinny apparently stayed in touch with Flora. “I would keep an eye on Flora,” warned Laura. “She might go too.”17