Dwelling Place Read online

  11. JosJ, Estate John Jones, 1808, PCLC. Jones, Dead Towns of Georgia, 215.

  12. Indenture Between Sarah Anderson and JosJ, County Record F, 134, 1806, SCLC; JosJ, Notes on Births and Deaths, n.d., CJUG.

  13. For the Robarts house on lot 6, see Sheftall, Sunbury on the Medway, 186. Robert Man-son Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 27, 1658.

  14. JosJ to Sarah Jones, 6 July 1808, JTU.

  15. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842), 110–111. For everyday forms of slave resistance, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 28–47.

  16. For Robinson as Lizzy’s husband and the father of her children, see Thomas Shepard to CCJ, 16 December 1850, JTU.

  17. For slave “visiting,” “abroad wives,” and “wife house,” see RQM, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, 1892), 51; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 524–525; Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill, 1979), 52.

  18. Indenture Between Sarah Anderson and JosJ, 1806; An Inventory and Appraisement of the Goods and Chattels of JosJ of Liberty County, 15 December 1846, County Record M, 413, PCLC; MJ to CCJj, 29 May 1863, JTU; MJ to JoJ, 18 September 1865, JJUG. For the Mammy figure, see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985), 27–51; and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), 291–292.

  19. Indenture Between Sarah Anderson and JosJ, 1806, SCLC. For the “slave in the middle,” see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 334–353. For the larger context of acculturation to a Western worldview as a way to resist the power of the West, see Theodore H. Von Laue, The World Revolution of Westernization: the Twentieth Century in Global Perspective (New York, 1987).

  20. Jack, as the patriarch of his community and the one in charge of household affairs for the CCJ family, was apparently the primary storyteller who supplied the young CCJj with the folktales he later published as Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast Told in the Vernacular (1888; rpt. Columbia, S.C., 1925). For the role of folktales as conveying strategies for resistance, see James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 162–166; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana, Ill., 1984), 172–195; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford, 1977), 97–101. For the West African tradition of a clever trickster, see Will Coleman, Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story” (University Park, Pa., 2000), 20–23.

  21. Bartram, Travels, 33–35.

  22. Jones, Dead Towns, 157, 169, 171, 217; John Jones (1749–1779) Daybook, 1777–1778; Myers, Children of Pride, 1658.

  23. Myers, Children of Pride, 1621.

  24. CCJ, Journal, 2 June 1860, JTU; RQM, Montevideo-Maybank, 10–11.

  25. Audley King to CCJ, 17 October 1853, JTU. For slaves claiming surnames of earlier owners, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 445–447; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), 230–256, esp. 252; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 555–558.

  26. Will of John Bohum Girardeau, 11 November 1800, Will Record 1790–1823, PCLC. For the role of seafood, see Elizabeth J. Reitz, Tyson Sibbs, Ted A. Rathbun, “Archaeological Evidence for Subsistence on Coastal Plantations,” in The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, ed. Theresa A. Singleton (Orlando, 1985), 163–186; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 134–143.

  27. Jones, Dead Towns, 171, 212.

  28. CPB, 64, JTU.

  29. For Jack and Lizett as husband and wife and as parents of Phoebe, see Indenture Between Sarah Anderson and JosJ, County Record F, 134, 1806, SCLC; CPB, 9, 67; and Appraisement and Division of Negroes between JosJ and CCJ on behalf of his Wife, 23 February 1831, CJUG. John C. Inscoe, “Carolina Slave Names: An Index to Acculturation,” Journal of Southern History 49, no. 4 (November 1983): 535; Cheryll Ann Cody, “There Was No ‘Absalom’ on the Ball Plantations: Slave-Naming Practices in the South Carolina Low Country, 1720–1865,” American Historical Review 92, no. 1 (February 1987): 573, 579.

  30. Will of Susanna H. Jones, 10 May 1810, Will Record A, 1790–1823, PCLC.

  31. Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU. Myers, Children of Pride, 13. Cf. Joseph LeConte, The Autobiography of Joseph LeConte (New York, 1903), 6–7.

  32. JosJ, Estate John Jones, 1810–1811, PCLC.

  33. MJ Note on Early History of CCJ, JTU. This note gives a different account of the years 1810–1813 from the one in Myers, Children of Pride, 13.

  34. MJ Note on Early History of CCJ, JTU.

  35. CPB, 64.

  36. Myers, Children of Pride, 13, 1658.

  4. THE RETREAT

  1. For the relationship of Rice Hope to the Retreat, see John Jones (1749–1779) Daybook, 1778, JTU; EGR to CCJ, 21 February 1859, JTU.

  2. Plat of the Retreat Plantation, Liberty County, Georgia, CJUG; Last Will and Testament of JosJ, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC. For examples of loans by JosJ, see JosJ’s loan of $1,800 to Colonel Joseph Law, County Record H, 13, SCLC; and Inventory, Appraisement, and Division of Estate of Jos. Jones, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC. For the role of capitalism generally in the plantation South, see Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 64–72; Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York, 1989).

  3. MJ Note on Early History of CCJ, JTU (see Chapter 3, note 1). John Jones died on November 24, 1813.

  4. Inscription transcribed from Midway cemetery.

  5. Description of the avenue at the Retreat is drawn from Plat of the Retreat Plantation, Surveyed March 19, 1827, by Robert Hendry, Jr., Co. Surveyor, Grant Record Book I, 182–183, SCLC; a composite map of the Retreat by F. M. Martin, III, October 1985, in Liberty County file, GHS; Last Will and Testament of JosJ, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC; and CCJ, “Account of My Dear and Honored Father’s Death,” 1846, JTU. For the use of “threshold devises” on a plantation avenue, see John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1993), 5.

  6. For the ideological role of the plantation house, see Vlach, Back of the Big House, 1–12; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 32–42.

  7. Description of the Retreat plantation house is drawn from MJ to CCJ, 11 June 1829, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 22 November 1829, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 16 July 1830, JTU; CCJ, “Account of My Dear and Honored Father’s Death,” 1846, JTU.

  8. JosJ, Notes on Births and Deaths, n.d., CJUG; MJ to CCJj, 7 July 1858, CJUG. For pregnancy and pregnancy rates of white plantation women, see Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York, 1996), 101–105; and Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 114–116.

  9. For Sylvia and Jack as special servants of Sarah Anderson Jones before her death in 1817 and for their responsibilities at the Retreat, see CPB, 64; CCJ, “Account of My Dear and Honored Father’s Death,” 1846, JTU.

  10. JosJ, Estate John Jones in a/c Current, JosJ Administrator, 1811–1812, PCLC; Indenture between JosJ and Susannah Jones, Elizabeth Jones, John Jones, Susanna Mary Jones, and CCJ, 16 June 1808, County Record F, 211, SCLC. For Hamlet’s marriage to Elvira and the birth of Syphax, see CPB, 12. For the interaction of African and European cultures on slaves such as Syphax, see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 196–217; Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998), 186–243; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America (New York, 1987), 3–27.

  11. For landscape’s role in shaping human perspectives and emotions, see Benjamin Z. Kedar and R. J. Zwi Werblowski, Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land (New York, 1998); Frederick Turner, Spirit of Place: The Making of an American Literary Landscape (San Francisco, 1989); Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (Berkeley, 1996). For the role of landscape in plantation societies, see B. W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912 (Kingston, Jamaica, 1998), 297–300; William M. Kelso and Rachel Most, eds., Earth Patterns: Essays in Landscape Archaeology (Charlottesville, 1990); John Michael Vlach, “Plantation Landscapes of the Antebellum South,” in Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South, ed. Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr., and Kym S. Rice (Charlottesville, 1991). For CCJ’s continuing interest in hunting on an occasional basis, see CCJ to MJ, “Our Tenth Wedding Day, December 21, 1840,” JTU; and CCJ to CCJj, 3 January 1853, CJUG; and cf. Joseph LeConte, The Autobiography of Joseph LeConte (New York, 1903), 17–28. For CCJ’s lifelong love of nature, see Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU; and David Buttolph, “Funeral Sermon of CCJ,” 18 March 1863, JTU.

  12. CCJ to MJ, 8 January 1828, and CCJ to MJ, 22 November 1829, JTU. Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU.

  13. CCJ to MJ, 8 January 1828, JTU; and CCJ, “Account of My Honored Father’s Death,” 1846, JTU.

  14. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 27–95; Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge, 1981); Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1860 (Knoxville, 1985); and Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

  15. John M. B. Harden, M.D., “Observations on the Soil, Climate, and Diseases of Liberty County, Georgia,” Southern Medical and Surgical Journal, new ser., 1, no. 10 (October 1845): 546–549; JJ, M.D., Agricultural Resources of Georgia: Address Before the Cotton Planters Convention of Georgia at Macon, December 13, 1860 (Augusta, Ga., 1861), 6–7. For inland swamp cultivation of rice, see Charles H. Fairbanks, “The Plantation Archaeology of the Southeastern Coast,” Historical Archaeology 18 (1984): 6–7; Douglas C. Wilms, “The Development of Rice Culture in Eighteenth Century Georgia,” Southeastern Geographer 12 (1972), 45–57; Carney, Black Rice, 86–89.

  16. For the development of river swamp cultivation, utilizing the influence of the tide, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 155–159; Joyce E. Chaplin, “Tidal Rice Cultivation and the Problem of Slavery in South Carolina and Georgia, 1760–1815,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 49 (1992): 29–61.

  17. MJ Note on Early History of CCJ, JTU.

  18. Ibid.; Robert Manson Myers, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 13.

  19. For the character of the Sunbury Academy and its curriculum, see advertisements in the Savannah papers, e.g.: Columbia Museum and Savannah Advertiser, 13 August 1799; and Savannah Republican, 15 January 1818. Cf. Charles C. Jones, Jr., Dead Towns of Georgia (1878; rpt. Savannah, 1997), 214–216.

  20. T. B. Smith, Essays, in T. B. Smith Papers, item no. 56, GHS.

  21. Ibid., 30–36.

  22. Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens, Ga., 1987), 170–172.

  23. Jones, Dead Towns, 219–220. For Jupiter as body servant, see CCJj, The Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast: Told in the Vernacular (1888; rpt. Columbia, S.C., 1925), 177.

  24. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 172; George White, Statistics of the State of Georgia (Savannah, 1849), 288; John Solomon Otto, Cannon’s Point Plantation, 1794–1860: Living Conditions and Status Patterns in the Old South (Orlando, 1984).

  25. Quoted in Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 182.

  26. For the story of what happened to those going to Nova Scotia, see ibid., 182–191.

  5. CARLAWTER

  1. JosJ, Estate John Jones in a/c Current, JosJ Administrator, 1811–1812, PCLC.

  2. For the purchase and gift of the Carlawter and Cooper tracts, see County Record H, 66–67, SCLC. For the purchase and gift of the Lambright tract, see County Record H, 226–227, SCLC. For summaries of these transactions, see CPB, 1–4.

  3. For the details of the tracts, see plat surveyed by Wm. Cundiff 2 October 1798, and plat surveyed by Robert Hendry 5 March 1812, in box 21, folder 8, CJUG.

  4. CPB, 4–6.

  5. For the ages of those moved to Carlawter, see CPB, 12–13. For slaves passing skills and positions to their children, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 545.

  6. For Robinson’s work as a nurse in a later outbreak of smallpox, see Thomas Shepard to CCJ, 16 December 1850. Cf. Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York, 2001).

  7. CPB, 12–13.

  8. For Sam’s role in the Robarts household, see, e.g., Eliza Robarts to MJ, 16 January 1858, JTU. For “life in the big house” for house servants generally, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 328–365.

  9. Cf. William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996), 84–121.

  10. For Willoughby, Tony, and their children, see Indenture between JosJ and Susannah Jones, Elizabeth Jones, John Jones, Susanna Mary Jones, and CCJ, 16 June 1808, County Record F, 134 and 211, SCLC; CPB, 12–13; and MPB 50a. For Fanny and her children, see CPB, 7.

  11. Cf. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 519–530; and Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 84–121.

  12. For plantations as “so many little villages,” see CCJ, Seventh Annual Report of the Association for Religious Instruction of the Negroes in Liberty County, Ga. Together with the Address to the Association by the President, The Rev. Josiah Spry Law. The Constitution of the Association. And the Population of the County for 1840. (Savannah, 1842), 10.

  13. For Liberty Hall’s location in relation to Carlawter, see County Record H, 66–67, SCLC; County Record K, 129, SCLC.

  14. See Thomas Shepard to CCJ, 6 August 1851. For the relationship of African Americans to the natural world, see Ras Michael Brown, “‘Walk in the Feenda’: West-Central Africans and the Forest in the South Carolina–Georgia Lowcountry,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge, 2002), 289–318.

  15. Cato later was able to taste the river water to see whether it was fresh enough to flood the rice fields. See HHJ to CCJ, 1 July 1857, JTU.

  16. For slaves’ fishing in the rivers of the low country and use of boats and canoes, see Elizabeth J. Reitz, Tyson Sibbs, Ted A. Rathbun, “Archaeological Evidence for Subsistence on Coastal Plantations,” in The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life, ed. Theresa A. Singleton (Orlando, 1985), 163–186; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 134–143; RQM, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, 1892), 25–26.

  17. For the role of trails and an “alternative territorial system,” see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 52–57; and Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica, 99–100. For whites knowing about such trails and the uses to which they could be put, see CCJ to CCJj, 10 July 1862, CJUG. For an example of slaves at Carlawter killing and butchering a cow in a secret place, see Elija Chapman to CCJ, 17 November 1855, JTU

  18. In South Carolina, Lambert had been a member of the Bethel Pon Pon Presbyterian Church that was visited by Whitefield. Bethel Pon Pon Presbyterian Church, Session Minutes, 1740–1770, PHSM.

  19. Will of John Lambert, Papers of the Estate of John Lambert, GHS.

  20. Inventory and Appraisement of the Goods and Chattels of John Lambert Deceased, Estate of John Lambert; and Estate of John Lambert, II, Papers of the Estate of John Lambert, GHS. List of Negroes, Estate of Lambert, 1837, JJUG. Estate of John Lambert, II and IV,
Papers of the Estate of John Lambert, GHS.

  21. Estate of John Lambert, II, 4 January 1806. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1945), 6.

  22. For Jack, see Estate of John Lambert, II, 11 April 1810, 14 February 1812, 16 December 1813, GHS. For Sharper and his wife, see Last Will and Testament of JosJ, Will Record, 1824–1850, PCLC; Journal of CCJ, 25 April 1858, JTU; and CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 8.

  23. Estate of John Lambert, II, 18 December 1805, 11 January 1815, 28 June 1805, 9 June 1805, GHS. For slave doctors and nurses and the use of folk medicines, see Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens, Ga., 1984), 152–154; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford, 1977), 63–66.

  24. Works Projects Administration, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens, Ga., 1940), 112–132; Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana, Ill., 1992), 68–72; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 615–625; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), 80–86, 275–288; Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York, 1994), 140–158; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1972), 1–40.

  25. Weak remnants of a European tradition of magic may have lingered among some white planters of Liberty County at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but I have found no indication in the letters and papers of whites of a belief in the occult. See Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (New York, 1996); Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York, 1998).