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.
Author(s): Erskine Clarke
Edition: 1St Edition
Publisher: Yale University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 624
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
one Liberty Hall......Page 18
two Riceboro......Page 27
three Sunbury......Page 36
five Carlawter......Page 61
six Savannah......Page 72
seven Scattered Places......Page 84
eight Princeton......Page 99
nine Solitude......Page 114
ten Montevideo and Maybank......Page 128
eleven The Stations......Page 142
twelve The Mallard Place......Page 157
thirteen The Arbors......Page 169
fourteen Columbia......Page 184
fifteen Carlawter II......Page 197
sixteen South Hampton......Page 207
seventeen Midway......Page 219
eighteen Maybank......Page 233
nineteen Arcadia......Page 250
twenty The Retreat II......Page 264
twenty-one Columbia II......Page 9
twenty-two Philadelphia......Page 295
twenty-three Carlawter III......Page 317
twenty-four Arcadia II......Page 334
twenty-five Maybank II......Page 347
twenty-six Slave Market......Page 362
twenty-seven Patience’s Kitchen......Page 379
twenty-eight Montevideo......Page 391
twenty-nine The Retreat III......Page 403
thirty Southern Zion......Page 414
thirty-one Indianola......Page 425
thirty-two The Refuge......Page 439
thirty-three The Promised Land......Page 460
List of Principal Characters......Page 484
Genealogical Charts......Page 512
List of Plantations......Page 522
Notes......Page 526
Index of Names......Page 594
General Index......Page 607