A Book Review

Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006).

The book review is a new genre for our blog, but why not? Among the myriad books I’m asked to read as a graduate student, I occasional encounter a work I might well have read and enjoyed just for the fun of it. Actually, this happens often enough that I worry I may be a greater nerd than previously imagined—and I had thought always to have gauged my own nerddom with a full and healthy candor. In any case, Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic is a fantastic read on many levels—even and especially for people permitted to read for personal enjoyment rather than professional expectation.

Dwelling Place chronicles three generations of Joneses, a slaveholding planter family of Antebellum Georgia. Pride of place in the narrative is given to the odyssey of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones (1804-1863), his wife Mary, and their ultimately elusive effort to establish a realm of harmonious order on their Liberty County plantation. But Clarke's cast of characters sweeps well beyond the immediate family of the Joneses to include their relatives in several directions and, more notably, their slaves, who sometimes speak in their own voices. The story represents narrative history near its finest. The narrative is capacious, smooth, and highly literate. Clarke aimed to produce a work of literature as well as of history, and the work is highly imaginative as both literature and history.

It is also tragic. Charles C. Jones felt called to the ministry as a young man and for a time left Georgia to study at Northern seminaries. While “abroad,” he mingled in antislavery and abolitionist circles and came to the firm conclusion that slavery was wrong and that God wanted him to oppose it. But how? Should he abandon the home of his youth—and ask his fiancée cousin, Mary, to do the same—to join the abolitionist crusade in the North? Or should he return home and oppose slavery from within? Jones opted for the latter, probably against his own best instincts, but certainly in accordance with his future wife’s desires. In any case, the pull of home proved stronger than the call of conscience.

Jones’s choice was a fateful one. He dedicated many years to serving as a missionary to the slave settlements, reasoning that, although immediate abolition of slavery was impracticable, he could answer his vocation and serve God’s purposes by preparing the slaves for the duties and responsibilities of freedom, whenever that should come. This meant evangelization and Christianization of the slaves. It took all Jones’s powers of persuasions to convince his fellow planters to go along with the scheme, but Jones insisted that such preaching was in the masters’ interest—that he could, among other things, serve the master class by teaching slaves the Pauline creed of dutiful submission, even as he urged upon the masters themselves a more humane and just treatment of their human chattel.

Jones himself remained a slave owner. Apparently he could never retain the planters’ trust if he ceased to be one of them. He would go on to win a far-flung reputation as a just and equitable owner. But an owner he remained, and this fact transformed him. In process of time, Jones surrendered the ideals of his youth. One compromise of conscience led to another; equivocation necessitated equivocation. Moved at first to destroy slavery, Jones sought, temporizing, to reform it and came, at length, to defend it. So did his sons, who gave fiery secessionist speeches after Lincoln’s election and later rose to distinction in the Confederate Army. In the later 1850s Jones sold a family of his longtime slaves who had proven intractable, and on another occasion had a female slave who gave birth to a mulatto child flogged until she revealed the name of the child’s father.

The tale of Jones’s metamorphosis is poignant. When the war came, the world Jones sought to fashion and defend unraveled around him. He lost his health and finally his life (he died in the year of the Emancipation Proclamation). Mary survived him only to see the plantation ravaged by Sherman’s legionaries of terror. And she was roundly disabused of fanciful illusions as slaves she thought fiercely loyal to the family fled to freedom at the first approach of the armies of emancipation. As the conflagration consumed the world as she knew it, Mary fumed her displeasure in racialist language that echoed that of slavery’s staunchest defenders. The language was not far from Charles’s dying thoughts.

What had happened to Charles Jones the quasi-abolitionist? Jones’s odyssey displays many of the features of self-justification highlighted in the publications of the Arbinger Institute (The Anatomy of Peace, Leadership and Self-Deception, Bonds That Make Us Free). The Arbinger Institute, a non-denominational group (its founders and chiefs are Mormons) devoted to conflict resolution, posits that when a person resists the call of conscience—an inner prodding to perform some “right” act—a lack of peace (guilt) ensues which must be combated with some form of self-justification. To be consistent and convincing, the justification often requires other wrong acts, which must themselves be justified, and so the cycle goes. An initial right choice brings peace—and increased capacity for further right choices—and there the story ends. What might history have done with Charles Colcock Jones had he brought Mary to the North with him to make their life there? Would we remember him as a more temperate William Lloyd Garrison? Who knows. We do know that an otherwise good and well-intentioned man ended his life as an apostle of disunion and an advocate of human bondage.

Dwelling Place is thus an absorbing study of human moral psychology. The tale is richly textured, in part because the Jones family were a clan of prodigious correspondents who left behind a monumental and nuanced epistolary record. Clarke did his homework here and elsewhere, and brought it all together in a penetrating act of literary imagination. The style is not dazzling, but the tale coheres in powerful ways.

Erskine Clarke teaches American Religious History at Columbia Theological Seminary outside Atlanta. He was 65 when Dwelling Place was published in 2006, and from the happy obscurity of a small seminary he won all the awards they give, including the prestigious Bancroft Prize for the year’s best work in American historiography. He certainly deserved it.

To say that Dwelling Place is a fascinating moral study is not to accuse Clarke of historiographical moralizing. He never insists on the moral reading I have outlined, but the conclusions are compelling, however subtly implied. This is a work of tremendous pathos. It is a sad and in some ways a haunting book. Though Clarke of course never uses these terms, Dwelling Place is finally a book about freedom and agency and the light of Christ. It is also a sweeping confirmation of the exacting dictum (from Adam Bede) of George Eliot, that sternest of moralists: “Consequences are unpitying.”