Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic

Description

Published some thirty years ago, Robert Manson Myers’s Children of Pride: The True Story of Georgia and the Civil War won the National Book Award in history and went on to become a classic reference on America’s slaveholding South. That book presented the letters of the prominent Presbyterian minister and plantation patriarch Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863), whose family owned more than one hundred slaves. While extensive, these letters can provide only one part of the story of the Jones family plantations in coastal Georgia. In this remarkable new book, the religious historian Erskine Clarke completes the story, offering a narrative history of four generations of the plantations’ inhabitants, white and black. Encompassing the years 1805 to 1869, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic describes the simultaneous but vastly different experiences of slave and slave owner. This “upstairsdownstairs” history reveals in detail how the benevolent impulses of Jones and his family became ideological supports for deep oppression, and how the slave Lizzy Jones and members of her family struggled against that oppression. Through letters, plantation and church records, court documents, slave narratives, archaeological findings, and the memory of the African-American community, Clarke brings to light the long-suppressed history of the slaves of the Jones plantations—a history inseparably bound to that of their white owners. Contents Preface 1 Liberty Hall 2 Riceboro 3 Sunbury 4 The Retreat 5 Carlawter 6 Savannah 7 Scattered Places 8 Princeton 9 Solitude 10 Montevideo and Maybank 11 The Stations 12 The Mallard Place 13 The Arbors 14 Columbia 15 Carlawter II 16 South Hampton 17 Midway 18 Maybank 19 Arcadia 20 The Retreat II 21 Columbia II 22 Philadelphia 23 Carlawter III 24 Arcadia II 25 Maybank II 26 Slave Market 27 Patience’s Kitchen 28 Montevideo 29 The Retreat III 30 Southern Zion 31 Indianola 32 The Refuge 33 The Promised Land Principal Characters Genealogical Charts Plantations Notes Index of Names General Index