In the late winter of 1796, a Georgia planter
sent instructions to his wife about a slave he had leased to a neighbor
some years earlier. "Make Old Jupiter go to Mr. Dowses and bring old
Silvey home and set her to work," John Jones wrote. Silvey was
Jupiter's wife. After years of doing everything in his power to get her
returned, Jupiter rejoiced when his master finally relented. After the
couple was reunited, Jones wrote again. "Tell [Jupiter] that as he has
now got his wife back I shall expect he will do his best for me" (3).
The twisted paternalism of American slavery is on full
view in these two lines. Two couples, one enslaved to the other, knew
one another intimately in life and in death. The mistress bathed the
fevered back of the sick slave, the slave delivered and suckled the
woman's child. Master and slave, men and women, sang hymns together,
prayed together, and wept together over their dead. Yet they did not
know each other at all. Slave and master were bound together in a
relationship so complex and ambivalent, Eugene Genovese famously wrote,
"that neither could express the simplest human feelings without
relation to the other."(1)
Indeed, John Jones needed his slave's gratitude when he restored the
precious thing he had so carelessly broken. And Jupiter felt the bitter
edge of his joy, which laid bare his powerlessness to protect his
family. Slave and master lived separate lives in a single place, unable
to breach the terrible chasm opened when one human being claims
complete power over another. John's son Charles would later observe
that masters "live and die in the midst of Negroes and know
comparatively little of their real character" (26).
In his Bancroft prize-winning book, Erskine Clarke shows
over and over how the same event—a visit, a death, a birth, a purchase
of property, a church service, a trip to town—meant one thing for the
slave and another for the master. Leasing a slave was both a careless
decision to bring in some extra cash and a wrenching end to marital
intimacy. Clarke shows as no historian has done before that the history
of American slavery should be written as a single narrative of "two
histories of one place and one time" (ix).
By far the more difficult of the two histories to write
is that of the slaves. Clarke used an extraordinary collection of
papers left behind by the family of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones,
scattered in archives from New Orleans
to North Carolina.
The family, one of the wealthiest families in one of the wealthiest
slave societies in the world, meticulously recorded the births, deaths,
sales, and movements of their slaves and many details of the material
circumstances of their lives. In this, we are indebted to the
paternalism that prompted such record-keeping. The voices of the slaves
themselves are nearly always silent in these records, so Clarke draws
on an anthropological model pioneered by the historian Rhys Isaac to
reconstruct their experiences.(2) Accordingly,
the book is filled with people moving across the landscape of coastal Georgia,
which itself becomes a character in the story. There are carefully
imagined meetings, conversations, and surreptitious gatherings by
slaves on any one of seventeen plantations in the region. Most of these
events are known to us only through accounts left by their masters, but
Clarke richly reimagines them from the perspective of the slaves. One
can only marvel at the exhaustive research and years of thought
required to support such readings.
It is a cliché to say that a brief review cannot
do justice to a book. Clarke's beautifully-detailed history is as
densely peopled and intricately plotted as a Russian novel, stuffed
with magnificent detail. In these pages, we learn and relearn the epic
of American slavery. Clarke writes unapologetically of a particular
people in a particular place. We see the view across the marshes from
the broad piazza of the big house at Montevideo and the view from the
fires that burned in front of the cabins in the settlement at
Carlawter. We watch as a Presbyterian session bowed to the absolute
power of the master by declaring that Major, a church member, could
marry again after his wife was sold away, as she was as good as dead to
him. We see the only white man singing and praying with several hundred
mourners at the slave preacher Sharper's funeral, and watch as the ox
cart bears the coffin down a dusty moon-lit road to the burial ground
in the settlement. We see how the story of slavery moved towards
bondage for the master and towards freedom for the slave, and how both
master and slave were diminished.
The kind of slavery practiced on the Jones family
plantations was not the only kind of American slavery. As Ira Berlin
has emphasized, slavery changed dramatically in North
America from generation to generation and region to region.(3) The free people of Liberty County, Georgia
thrived off the labor of their slaves for more than a century and a
half before Federal troops invaded during the Civil War. The stability
and prosperity brought by the labor-intensive rice cultivation meant
that slaves in the region were able, more than many American slaves, to
live in relatively stable families, to negotiate the task system of
work with their masters, and to create a rich Gullah culture out of
remembered African traditions. Yet these relatively stable slave
settlements were under constant threat in the early nineteenth century,
along with the rest of the seaboard South, from a new kind of slavery
practiced in the lower Mississippi
valley. The massive migration of more than a million slaves to till the
rich soils of the interior, named by Berlin the "Second Middle Passage,"
put constant pressure on plantations in the older seaboard states. Long
before the thundering of Federal guns threatened to end plantation
slavery as it was practiced in the Low Country, it was being threatened
from inside the South.
Charles Jones was a sincere Christian man, and by any
meaningful measure, a benevolent master. He had agonized over slavery
in his youth, particularly during his years of study at Andover and Princeton,
at one time declaring it unqualifiedly against the laws of God. He
eventually silenced his own fears by devoting his life to "the
religious instruction of the slaves." If slavery must continue, Jones
reasoned, then it must be reformed and brought under the supervision of
Christian people. Accordingly, Jones devoted most of his working life
to evangelizing slaves on his own and neighboring plantations. His
optimism about the possibilities of moral reform to wrench society into
the shape he thought best matched the fervor of any northern moral
reformer of his day. North and South, all Americans seemed convinced of
their power over history. And yet, even the relatively benign and
deeply Christian paternalism of Jones and his wife Mary could never
completely dull the sharp assertion of power by owners over what was
owned. "They are traitors who may pilot an enemy into your bedchamber!"
Jones exclaimed of his slaves in late 1863 as Yankee gunboats sailed up
a nearby river, prompting the boldest of them to take flight (415). And
as her life lay in ruins after the war, the widow Mary demonstrated how
easily pious pity for the slave hardened into racial hatred for
freedmen and women. "With their emancipation must come their
extermination," she bluntly declared. "They perish when brought into
conflict with the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian race."
(444)
Clarke is not the first to use the rich papers left
behind by the Jones family. Nor is it the first time a study based on
them has won national acclaim. In 1972, the literary scholar Robert
Manson Myers published an 1,800-page colossus, The
Children of Pride, which featured a selection of Jones family
letters written between 1854 and 1868.(4) The book was
hailed by many critics and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 over some
loud objections. One Georgia historian scorned the book's warm
reception by the "literate few in the fading Daughters of the
Confederacy" and decried its "Gone With the Wind" southern apologetics,
complete with "shadowy whites, invisible negroes, slavemasters of
unbelieveable Christian rectitude, and flowers of chivalry."(5)
Clarke's achievement in Dwelling Place is to
tell two histories where Myers told only one. The striking difference
is apparent on every page of the book, but it is most starkly on
display in the appendices. Children of Pride included
almost 300 pages of a densely-printed "Who's Who" of nearly all of the
people mentioned in the Jones letters. Not a single slave appears in
the hundreds listed there (although they do earn an index of their own
by first name only.) By contrast, Clarke
includes eight family trees of slaves owned by the Jones family. His
painstaking work demonstrates visually what is made clear on every page
of his book: that the slaves had their own family histories, that their
low country settlements were composed "not simply of a mass of slaves,
but of distinct men and women, people with names, with diverse
personalities and personal histories" (189).
Clarke's contribution in this book extends beyond
writing slaves like Jupiter, Sharper, Silvey, and Major and their
masters into a single narrative. His book also reflects on the meaning
of American Christian slavery and how best to write its history. Is the
best history one informed by moral outrage? How much do we have a right
to expect of the dead? Shall we use them only to measure our own
progress? Historians of American slavery have long wrestled with such
questions. Many who have claimed no interest in defending Christianity
have been able to explain people like Charles Jones only by denying
that they were Christians at all.
Clarke offers a different answer. He has expressed
exasperation with those who deny that "Southern evangelicalism could be
a part of an intellectual tradition worth exploring," and like Donald
G. Mathews, he takes for granted that "the slaveholding ethic was as
natural an extension of Evangelicalism as was abolitionism." (6) In this,
he offers a sharp rebuke to any who might claim that the Church is a
culture. Charles Jones was very possibly the best Christian master that
the system of American chattel slavery might have created, and yet it
is nearly impossible to claim him as one of our own. Clarke refuses to
make excuses for Jones's sincere and ultimately misguided piety, or to
claim that he was merely a rank hypocrite. He takes the costlier path
of trying to understand him, wisely acknowledging that we have much to
learn from staring down Christian slavery for what it was. Clarke is
hardly an apologist for the South. But as a seminary professor with
deep roots in the Low Country and in Jones's beloved Presbyterian
tradition, it is not possible for Clarke to stand outside of Jones's
world and point a finger at this preacher's folly. Instead, he chose
the more difficult task of standing with him. And it is only in
standing with him that Clarke can tell us what he sees—a blind,
visionary, noble, arrogant, thoughtless, wise, brave, cowardly,
heartless, loving, and mortal Christian man.
Charles Colcock Jones died in the turbulent spring of
1863, lying on his bed at Montevideo
fully dressed in black with a "pure white cravat." Only his wife and
daughter-in-law were with him at his death, but many of theslaves whom
he thought he knew watched as the coffin, built by the carpenter
Porter, was covered over with earth. Firm in the conviction of his sin
and of his Savior, Jones died still closed to the full wisdom offered
by his theology. Yet it was not that he saw the truth and chose to
resist it. Instead, he grasped only a part of the truth even while he
was convinced he had it all. "You can know a thing to death and for all
purposes be completely ignorant of it," a character in a recent novel
opined.(7) Erskine Clarke's history warns us how little
we can see, even when we would swear that our eyes are wide open.
|
Beth
Barton Schweiger |
University of Arkansas |
|
1. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, (New York: Random
House, 1974; Vintage Books, 1976), 3.
2. The Transformation of Virginia: Community, Religion,
Authority, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1982).
3. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves,
(Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard
University
Press, 2003).
4. Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia
and the Civil War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Myers also published a book on Jones's
experience at Princeton and wrote a
play based on the papers. Myers, A Georgian at Princeton
(New York: Harcourt, 1976) and Quintet: A Five Play Cycle
Drawn from The Children of Pride (Urbana-Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1991).
5.
Charles Crowe, "Historians and 'Benign Neglect': Conservative Trends in
Southern History and Black Studies," Reviews in American
History 2 (June, 1974): 163-173.
6.
Review of Heyrman, "Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt," Theology Today 55 (July, 1998): 283-5; Religion
in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xv