Slavery in Black & White
Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic
by Erskine Clarke
Yale University Press, 2007
(624 pages, $20.00, paperback)
reviewed by Robert Elder
Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic is a study of a small group of families, both black and white, in one Georgia county, in the decades before the Civil War. At that time and in that place, the black families were enslaved to the white families, living under the peculiar institution that represents the original sin in the national narrative of America as Eden. The book recently won the Bancroft Prize, one of history’s highest honors.
Clarke tells the story of Presbyterian minister and slaveholder Charles Colcock Jones and his family. Jones was a major figure in the Evangelical “Mission to Slaves” in the South, a movement among southern Evangelicals to bring the gospel to the slave population. The book follows Jones’s lifelong efforts to apply Christian principles to the peculiar institution (and his own plantation) by preaching the mutual duties that slaves and masters owed each other. Masters, preached Jones, owed their protection, benevolence, and fatherly care to their slaves, while slaves owed their masters but one thing: obedience.
Plantations in Liberty County tended to be large, but because of the low-country climate, many slaveholders lived on their plantations only a few months out of the year. It was not uncommon for slaves to be alone on the plantation during much of the unbearably hot summer, with only a slave overseer to manage the work. The rice and cotton that grew on Liberty County plantations were quite profitable because the land was so rich, and over the period that Clarke studies, most of the planters in Liberty County were looking for more slaves, not trying to sell them.
Under these conditions, a uniquely stable slave culture emerged on the low-country plantations, a culture that Clarke reconstructs from the diaries of the slaves’ masters. We meet, through the eyes and words of Jones and his relations, generations of black families: fathers passing on roles such as carpenter or driver (foreman) to their sons, mothers passing on their place in the plantation kitchen to their daughters. One of Clarke’s accomplishments is to illuminate the variation within the slave community: variation of personality, of aspiration, of power, and of powerlessness. In other words, he reveals the slave community as a human community, and one no less complex than the white community it served.
A Moral Struggle
As a young seminarian at Princeton, Charles Jones struggled with the morality of slavery in a place far from his southern home. Through his diaries and his letters to his future wife, Clarke reconstructs the young Southerner’s conflicting feelings, his love of home and family inextricably tangled with an institution that he increasingly believed to be wrong. His love of home and family eventually won out, and Jones returned to Liberty County, married, and began his campaign to bring religion to the slaves.
Early on, Jones believed that his work was in preparation for a time when the slaves would be freed, but one of the dramatic ironies of Clarke’s story is that, as the unforeseen historical emancipation of the slaves approached, Jones became increasingly pro-slavery and increasingly skeptical of slaves’ ability to handle freedom. Jones died in 1863 without seeing his slaves achieve the freedom he had once imagined for them.
The efforts of Christian slaveholders such as Charles Jones to Christianize the peculiar institution inevitably ran up against the hard economic realities of a society in which slaves were viewed as property. As long as times were good in Liberty County, it was easy to preach that slave families should be kept together, that slaves should be well-fed and well-housed, and that white masters and black slaves were equally members of God’s family, owing love to one another. It was harder to carry out this vision when the cotton didn’t sell and masters needed money, money that was invested in slaves and that could only be realized by selling them.
Clarke shows that, because slavery was embedded in an economic system that saw slaves primarily as a form of property, and because even the most sincere Christian owners existed within this system, their efforts to act rightly towards their slaves, to treat them as human beings rather than property, always ran counter to the fundamental assumptions of a slave society. The spiritual bond between brothers and sisters in Christ ran across the line between master and slave. And that bond did not always hold.
Robert Elder is currently writing a dissertation at Emory University on honor culture and Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth-century American South. He writes the weblog, Clio and Calvin. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Catherine, and is a member of Christ Church Presbyterian.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
30.2—March/April 2017
The Education of Children Takes Generations of Fidelity by W. Ross Blackburn
24.4—July/August 2011
The Cultural Marxists’ Strategic Assault on Religion, Life & Family by Patrick F. Fagan
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
