Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic.

Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. By Erskine Clarke. (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, c. 2005. Pp. xvi, 601. $35.00, ISBN 0-300-10867-2.)

This is a marvelous book. In my judgment very few books match the hype of title or subtitle, but Erskine Clarke has indeed written an epic about dwelling place. Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic is a multiple biography of white planters and slave owners--the extended Jones family of Liberty County, Georgia, and the slaves who spent their lives toiling for the Joneses. Although Clarke considers three generations of the Jones family from the founders of the family plantations, brothers John (1772-1805) and Joseph (1779-1846), to those who lived through and beyond the Civil War, he focuses on Charles Colcock Jones (1804-1863) and Mary Jones (1808-1869), a son and daughter of the brothers who became husband and wife. As Clarke details the story of these slave owners, he also charts the lives of generations of slaves who belonged to the Joneses. Interactions between owners and owned and the different perspectives from which they viewed their common dwelling place always occupies center stage in Clarke's impressive achievement.

Clarke can tell such a richly textured story because of the massive manuscript archive of the Joneses, located chiefly at Tulane University. Many readers of this review will have met this remarkable family in Robert Manson Myers's edition of letters from the Jones archive, The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven, 1972), published a generation ago. Clarke has mined the voluminous manuscripts, which contain detailed information on an incredible variety of topics including cultivation practices, slave discipline, diet, theology, and the deepening sectional conflict.

Dwelling Place is an inspired title, which Clarke employs in two ways. First, it refers to place--the land and homes in Liberty County where the Joneses and their slaves lived, worked, and died. Then, it becomes a metaphor for all the forces and ties that connected free and enslaved to each other and to the land that nurtured and supported them.

So many subjects receive thoughtful treatment in these pages that I will give but a sampling before moving on to Clarke's major themes. Diseases that affected free and slave as well as the efforts of white and black healers to alleviate the maladies get careful attention. Depiction of the religious beliefs and practices of masters and slaves is excellent. Clarke underscores the trauma of slave sales for the bondpeople; he also cogently reports the reality of sexual contact between owner and owned and notes the divergent attitudes among whites toward those occurrences. He is absolutely superb on documenting and emphasizing the dependence of masters and slaves on each other. In sum this book is a remarkable primer on the history of slavery.

Always, however, Clarke's world of slavery focuses sharply on the Jones family, white and black. Trained for the clergy at Andover and Princeton seminaries as well as the inheritor of plantations and slaves, Charles Jones strove to integrate his clerical calling with his ownership of slaves. While studying in the North he wrestled with the morality of slavery but finally concluded that his duty lay in taking the gospel to slaves and their masters. His mission from God, as he viewed it, had two goals: to insure that masters permitted the gospel to be preached to slaves and to insist that masters recognize their Christian duty as stewards of their human property. The two, according to Jones, infused a Christian interpretation of slavery into master and slave alike, making for a more humane system.

Returning from his studies in 1830, Charles began his work in Liberty County. Home called powerfully to him. There he remained except for sojourns as a faculty member at Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina, and as executive of the Presbyterian Board of Domestic Missions in Philadelphia. But the church apart from his dwelling place could not provide him fulfillment. There he was both slave-owning planter and minister of the gospel to slaves. Yet his efforts in the latter capacity extended far beyond his native county. In writings and activities in various Presbyterian venues he advocated carrying the gospel to slaves, constantly pointing to the benefits for master and slave.

As a slave owner Charles saw himself as the benevolent patriarch presiding over the acres and human beings entrusted to him by God. But, as Clarke shows, Jones perceived his world only through his own eyes. For example, he took great pride in keeping slave families together, yet he did not hesitate to assign family members to different plantations, to take individuals away with him on his sojourns, or--when faced with slaves he considered too difficult-to sell them.

Clarke leaves no doubt about Mary's centrality in the dwelling place or her devotion to Charles. Like her first cousin/husband, she inherited acres and slaves. Also like him, she was committed to their religion and perceived their slaves as their responsibility from God. In her dwelling place she was matriarch to Charles as patriarch, managing households and domestic servants.

A distinct strength of this book is Clarke's thoughtful, nuanced treatment of slaves. He rides no ideological hobbyhorse. Rather, he respects the evidence, which demonstrates the range of human emotions that existed between masters and slaves. In trying to describe the slaves' perception of their dwelling place, he had to rely chiefly on masters' documents, but the detail therein enabled him to present a number of slaves as individuals--the driver Pulaski, the carpenter Sandy Maybank, the domestic servant Patience, the preacher Sharper, the cook and domestic servant Sylvia, the field hand and basket maker Cassius, and others. While making clear that the system was inherently brutal and that slaves preferred freedom to enslavement, a truth unmistakably revealed during the war, Clarke also shows the loyalty and friendship that often existed between master and slave. He additionally demonstrates how the quite different emotion of rage when exhibited by some slaves spurred strong reactions from masters in the form of corporal punishment and even slave sales.

War brought dislocation and fundamental change to Liberty County. Masters watched with disbelief and great sadness as their world came apart. At the same time slaves reached out for freedom, fully aware that a new day had arrived. Struggling to cope with the momentous change wrenching his dwelling place, Charles did not live to see the cataclysm; he died there in 1863. Mary survived, but she had to leave her beloved plantations to live with a son in New Orleans, where her life ended in 1869. Without question Clarke's book contributes immensely to our understanding of slavery, especially the master-slave relationship. He merits all the accolades that I hope come his way. I do wish, however, he had omitted the "must haves." The richness of his material and his own reading of it rendered them unnecessary.

WILLIAM J. COOPER

Louisiana State University