Dwelling Place Read online

  26. For the cultural and religious assumptions that informed a national proslavery argument rooted in a conservative republicanism, see Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987), 347–362. Cf. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 12.

  27. For slave resistance, see Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 154–198. For the creation of a coherent culture as “the most significant act of resistance in its own right,” see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, xii. Cf. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 314–318.

  28. Savannah Republican, 3 January 1820. On runaways, see John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999); Blassingame, The Slave Community, 104–131.

  29. Savannah Republican, 18 July 1816. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 12.

  6. SAVANNAH

  1. John M. B. Harden, M.D., “Observations on the Soil, Climate and Diseases of Liberty County, Georgia,” in Southern Medical and Surgical Journal, new ser., 1, no. 10 (October 1845): 552–556. JJ, Medical and Surgical Memoirs: Containing Investigations on the Geographical Distribution, Causes, Nature, Relations, and Treatment of Various Diseases (New Orleans, 1887), 501–502.

  2. See Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio, Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe (New York, 2003); and Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore, 1992), 37–38.

  3. Cf. Harden, “Observations,” 557; and J. Hume Simons, M.D., Planter’s Guide, Family Book of Medicine: For the Instruction and Use of Planters, Families, Country People, and All Others Who May Be Out of the Reach of Physicians, or Unable to Employ Them (Charleston, S.C., 1848), 72–82. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 87–88.

  4. James Stacy, The Published Records of Midway Church (Newnan, Ga., 1894), 151; JJ, Medical and Surgical Memoirs, 502.

  5. Simons, Planter’s Guide, 72–74.

  6. JosJ, Notes on Births and Deaths, n.d., CJUG.

  7. MJ to CCJj, 7 July 1858, CJUG.

  8. Eliza Ferguson to JosJ, 5 October 1818, 3 March 1819, JTU.

  9. Susan Jones to JosJ, 24 February 1818, 4 April 1818, 26 December 1818; Eliza Ferguson to JosJ, 11 December 1819, JTU. For the social and political leadership concentrated in Circular Congregational Church, see Erskine Clarke, Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1690–1990 (Tuscaloosa, 1996), 142–159.

  10. Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU.

  11. For an example of JoJ’s affection for Sylvia as his “old Momma,” see JoJ to MJ, 19 May 1863, JTU.

  12. Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1569–1570; George White, Historical Collections of Georgia (New York, 1855), 534.

  13. Myers, Children of Pride, 1573.

  14. MJ to CCJ, 2 September 1830, JTU. For MJ referring to her stepmother as “Mrs. Jones,” see, e.g., MJ to MSJM, 31 July 1862, JTU.

  15. Savannah Republican, 14 December 1816. JosJ to MJ, 27 September 1820, JTU. MJ to MSJM, 15 August 1862; MJ to JosJ, 12 August 1822, JTU.

  16. Phinizy Spalding, “The Colonial Period” in A History of Georgia, ed. Kenneth Coleman (Athens, Ga., 1977), 19–21.

  17. Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (New York, 1964), 8–9.

  18. “Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, D.D.,” Southern Presbyterian, 4 June 1863; Myers, Children of Pride, 13.

  19. Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1995), 131.

  20. Savannah Republican, 17 August 1817. Cf. Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 80–100. Savannah Republican, 17 August 1818.

  21. Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 73–74. Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work, 101–121.

  22. Savannah Republican, 2 Feb. 1818.

  23. Wade, Slavery in the Cities, 327, 249–252; Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (New York, 1974); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 285–297.

  24. Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens, Ga., 1989), 52–53. James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America, Constituted at Savannah, Georgia, January 20, A.D. 1788, with Biographical Sketches of the Pastors (Philadelphia, 1888), 72–73.

  25. Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 104–106;

  26. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church, 79–84; Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church, 105–106. See Savannah Republican, 17 January 1818.

  27. For Jones’s relationship with Henry Cunningham and Jones’s preaching in the Second African Baptist Church, see CO, 28 September 1833.

  28. Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU.

  29. Stacy, Records of Midway Church, 123.

  30. James Stacy, History of the Midway Congregational Church, Liberty County, Georgia (Newnan, Ga., 1899), 27–38; Midway Congregational Church, Session Minutes, 1827–1840, PHSM.

  31. Stacy, Records of Midway Church, 161.

  32. Carol A. Pemberton, “Lowell Mason,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York, 1999), 14: 656–657. Lowell Mason to CCJ, 28 May 1857, JTU.

  33. Lowell Mason to CCJ, 14 February 1859, JTU.

  34. Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU.

  7. SCATTERED PLACES

  1. See MJ to JosJ, 9 December 1823, JTU; MJ to JosJ, 10 January 1824, JTU.

  2. MJ to JosJ, 9 December 1823, JTU. Tabby was a cement incorporating oyster shells that was used along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, by extension, a building made with that cement.

  3. See Will of J. Audley Maxwell, recorded 11 January 1841, Will Record B, 1824–1850, PCLC; Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler’s Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (Athens, Ga., 1987), 532.

  4. Cf. MJ to JosJ, 10 January 1824, JTU. Laura Maxwell to MJ, 16 May 1851, JTU. CCJ to EM, 24 November 1824, JTU.

  5. Cf. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 47–48.

  6. Journal of MJ, 1863, JTU. CCJ to EM, 17 August 1827; RQM, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, 1892), 11. Glenn T. Miller, Piety and Intellect: The Aims and Purposes of Ante-Bellum Theological Education (Atlanta, 1990), 68–69. CCJ to MJ, 7 September 1853, JTU.

  7. See the extensive treatment of the Roswell Kings, Sr. and Jr., in Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, esp. 223–226.

  8. For the shift from patriarchalism to paternalism, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 273–274, 284–296. For the long history of patriarchy, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford, 1986).

  9. Roswell King, Jr., “Letter to the Editor,” Southern Agriculturalist 1 (December 1828): 523, 528. For Roswell King, Jr., as an overseer, see Charles H. Fairbanks, “The Plantation Archaeology of the Southeastern Coast” Historical Archaeology 18 (1984): 1–14; Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 234–239; William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996).

  10. CCJ to EM, 4 October 1825, JTU. See also Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 219, 515–516.

  11. Indenture between Roswell King and Julia Rebecca Maxwell, County Record I, 156–157, SCLC. List of Negroes of Mrs. Julia R. King, July 1854, by Joseph E. Maxwell, Trustee, Midway Museum, Liberty County, Ga. Bell, Major Butler’s Legacy, 280–281.

  12. Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), 1573. Cf. Charles Berrien Jones to CCJ, 17 July 1854, JTU; Charles Berrien Jones to MJ, 24 July 1856, JTU.

  13. CCJ to EM, 9 Octo
ber 1832, JTU.

  14. Joseph Maybank Jones to JosJ and JosJ’s note on the letter, 26 November 1827, CJUG; Joseph Maybank Jones to MJ, 7 December 1827, JTU; CCJ to R. M. Charlton and William Law, 4 November 1848, CJUG.

  15. CCJ to CCJj, 4 October 1856, CJUG.

  16. Cf. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 36–44, esp. 37.

  17. For the childbearing patterns for slaves in the low country, see Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 87–92. By the 1830s the average age for females at first birth was about twenty-one. See Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 152. For Phoebe’s age at the time of Clarissa’s birth, see CPB, 67, JTU. Rosetta was twenty at the birth of her first child, Lucy, who was twenty-one at the birth of her first child. Sina, Lizzy’s oldest daughter, born in 1814, was twenty-four when she had her first child in 1838.

  18. For the Jezebel figure, see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985), 27–51; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), 291–292.

  19. CCJ to EM, 4 October 1825. JTU

  20. Ibid.

  21. CCJ to EM, 16 November 1828, JTU.

  22. CCJ to EM, 4 October 1825, JTU.

  23. CCJ to EM, 14 April 1826, JTU.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Ibid.

  26. CPB, 63–78.

  27. For WM’s altercation with the rider, see WM, Sworn Statement, 18 November 1817, Record Book G, SCLC. For JosJ’s loan to WM, see WM mortgage to JosJ, 8 January 1825, County Record I, SCLC.

  28. CCJ to WM, 4 March 1826, JTU.

  29. CCJ to EM, 17 August 1827, JTU.

  30. CCJ to MJ, 11 September 1827, JTU; MJ to CCJ, 27 October 1827, JTU.

  31. CCJ to MJ, 11 September 1827, JTU; MJ to CCJ, 27 October 1827, JTU.

  32. MJ to CCJ, 30 May 1828, JTU.

  33. CCJ to MJ, 8 January 1828, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 19 September 1828, JTU.

  34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essays: First Series (Boston, 1841).

  35. On CCJ’s concerns about Audley Maxwell, see CCJ to MJ, 22 July 1829, JTU.

  36. CCJ to MJ, 22 November 1829, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 8 May 1830, JTU; MJ to CCJ, 19 May 1830, JTU; MJ to CCJj, 4 April 1863, CJUG.

  37. CCJ to JosJ, 19 May 1829, JTU.

  38. MJ to JosJ, 27 May 1829, JTU.

  39. JosJ to MJ, 30 May 1829, JTU.

  40. CCJ to EM, 20 June 1829, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 10 June 1829, JTU.

  41. CCJ to MJ, 30 May 1829, JTU.

  8. PRINCETON

  1. CCJ to MJ, 10 June 1829, JTU.

  2. For Catharine Beecher as a social reformer and feminist, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973), esp. 59–77; Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere (Chapel Hill, 1988), esp. 1–8.

  3. CCJ to MJ, 20 June 1829, JTU. Quoted in Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis, Limits of Sisterhood, 133.

  4. CC to MJ, 20 June 1829, JTU. Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements verifying the Truth of the Work (1853; rpt. Port Washington, N.Y., 1968), see esp. 199–200, 246–247.

  5. CCJ to JosJ, 20 July 1829, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 22 July 1829, JTU.

  6. MJ to CCJ, 27 October 1827, JTU.

  7. See CCJ to MJ, 2 October 1829, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 24 June 1830, JTU.

  8. MJ to CCJ, 16 October 1829, JTU.

  9. MJ to CCJ, 3 December 1829, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 1 January 1830, JTU.

  10. MJ to CCJ, 6 November 1829, JTU.

  11. CCJ to MJ, 24 October 1829, JTU.

  12. MJ to CCJ, 24 November 1829, JTU. For the larger context of MJ’s position on slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966); and David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven, 2001), 123–136.

  13. Quoted in James O. Farmer, The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values (Macon, Ga., 1986), 52.

  14. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972), 403–414.

  15. CCJ to MJ, 8 December 1829, JTU.

  16. CCJ to MJ, 3 February 1830, JTU.

  17. Ibid.

  18. CCJ to MJ, 9 July 1829, JTU.

  19. CCJ to MJ, 18 May 1830, JTU.

  20. Ibid.

  21. CCJ to MJ, 5 June 1830, JTU.

  22. Ibid.

  23. CCJ to MJ, 24 June 1830, JTU; CCJ to MJ 23 July 1830, JTU.

  24. CCJ to MJ, 24 June 1830, JTU.

  25. Ibid. For the African colonization movement, see P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (Princeton, 1961).

  26. CCJ to MJ, 16 July 1830, JTU.

  27. CCJ to MJ, 23 July 1830, JTU.

  28. Ibid. For a biography of John Ross and the story of the Cherokee removal, see Gary E. Moulton, John Ross, Cherokee Chief (Athens, Ga., 1978), esp. 34–53.

  29. MJ to CCJ, 5 July 1830, JTU.

  30. MJ to CCJ, 4 August 1830, JTU. For Thomas Spalding, see E. Merton Coulter, Thomas Spalding of Sapelo (Baton Rouge, 1940).

  31. CCJ to MJ, 25 August 1830, JTU.

  32. Ibid. For a biography of Lundy, see Merton Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana, Ill., 1966); Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains (Westport, Conn., 1972).

  33. CCJ to MJ, 25 August 1830, JTU.

  34. CCJ to MJ, 6 September 1830, JTU.

  35. CCJ to MJ, 18 September 1830, JTU.

  36. CCJ to MJ, 8 September 1829, JTU.

  9.SOLITUDE

  1. MJ to CCJ, 8 January 1830, JTU. For Sandy’s age and work as a carpenter, see John Jones Daybook, 1802, JTU. For a description of the long-standing practice of slave carpenters’ having Saturdays for themselves, see CCJ to Thomas Shepard, 13 February 1852, JTU. For slave carpenters as apprentices and their work generally, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 214–215, 347–353. For Sandy as a church member, see Session Minutes, Midway Congregational Church, 26 August 1842, PHSM; CPB, 64, JTU. For slave weddings, see CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842), 132–133; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), 228–230; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972), 475–482. On expectations in regard to marriage for members of Midway Congregational Church, see Session Minutes, Midway Congregational Church, passim, PHSM. PBC, 67, JTU.

  2. This is a composite picture drawn from a number of sources. See CCJ to MJ, “Our Tenth Wedding Day, December 21, 1840,” JTU; EM to CCJ and MJ, 19 March 1838, JTU; CCJ to CCJj, 24 December 1860, CJUG; and, for arrangements used in nineteenth-century plantation weddings, an interview with Elizabeth Warren, Middleton Place Plantation, Charleston, S.C., 25 January 2002.

  3. CCJ to CCJj, 24 December 1860, CJUG.

  4. CPB, 66, JTU; CCJ to EM, 17 April 1850, JTU.

  5. CCJ to MJ, 2 January 1831, JTU; CCJ to MJ, 4 January 1831, JTU.

  6. CCJ to MJ, 25 December 1829, JTU.

  7. CCJ to MJ, “Our Tenth Wedding Day, December 21, 1840,” JTU.

  8. For an example of earlier opposition in general to any instruction of slaves, but esp. religious instruction, see “Schools for the Instruction of Slaves, etc.,” Savannah Republican, 14 August 1817. For direct opposition to Jones’s proposals for religious instruction of slaves, see CCJ, Tenth Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1845), 18.

  9. Indenture Between Sarah Anderson and Joseph Jones, County Record F, 134, 1806, SCLC; Appraisement and Division of
Negroes for Mrs. Mary Jones the Wife of the Rev. C. C. Jones, 23 February 1831, CJUG. For prenuptial agreements and separate estates for wives with property, see Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York, 1996), 63–94.

  10. Appraisement and Division of Negroes for Mrs. Mary Jones the Wife of the Rev. C. C. Jones, 23 February 1831, CJUG.

  11. These included the slaves of Charles Jones, his sister Susan Jones, his aunt Eliza Ro-barts, and his wife, Mary Jones. For Hamlet as the driver and Ashmore as the overseer, see CPB, 20–22, JTU.

  12. CCJ to MJ, 18 May 1830, JTU.

  13. For the Liberty County Temperance Society, see “Liberty County Temperance Society,” Charleston Observer, 17 May 1834. For Library Society and Education Society, see “Midway and Newport Library Society,” JTU and Charleston Observer, 16 October 1839. Part of the following description and analysis of Jones’s proposal was originally published in Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South (Atlanta, 1979), 21–29.

  14. CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 14. CCJ, “Annual Report of the Missionary to the Negroes, in Liberty County (Ga.),” Charleston Observer, 15 March 1834.

  15. CCJ, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes, A Sermon, Delivered before Associations of Planters in Liberty and McIntosh Counties, Georgia, 4th ed. (Princeton, 1832), 6–7. CCJ’s view of the “condition” of African Americans was widespread in both the North and South. See, e.g., David Brion Davis, “The Culmination of Racial Polarities and Prejudice,” in In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven, 2001), 323–342.

  16. Cf. CCJ, Eleventh Annual Report of the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes, in Liberty County, Georgia (Savannah, 1846), 14, 17–18; CCJ, “Religious Instruction of the Negroes: Third Annual Report of the Missionary to the Negroes in Liberty County, Ga.,” Charleston Observer, 17 September 1836; CCJ, Tenth Annual Report, 39. The most extensive treatment of the proslavery argument is Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987).