A Paternalist's Progress: Insurgency, Orthodoxy and Reversal in the Old South

A Paternalist's Progress:

Insurgency, Orthodoxy, and Reversal in the Old South

In his epic account of the plantation life of Presbyterian minister Charles Colcock Jones, his extended family, the slaves who lived on the plantations of the Jones family, and their friends and neighbors in Liberty County, Georgia, Erskine Clarke succeeds in meeting that most difficult of challenges facing any historian of the Old South: that of writing fairly, perceptively, imaginatively, and insightfully about both slaves and slaveholders and their multi-faceted lives "together" and apart. Clarke, a professor of church history at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, is himself a most thoroughly reconstructed white southerner, one who has internalized the profound insight of James McBride Dabbs, a fellow southern Presbyterian one-generation Clarke's senior, who suggested that southern African Americans offered southern whites a powerful witness to the Christian meaning of redemptive suffering, even if that lesson was not all that well-learned by all those who saw and heard the witness. Erskine Clarke's earlier books, Wrestlin' Jacob and Our Southern Zion, established him as one of the most respected historians of the antebellum South, especially regarding matters related to the expansion and influence of Protestant Christianity in the region. But Clarke's triumph in Dwelling Place transcends southern religious history, important as that field is, and establishes Clarke as a leading historian of slavery in the Old South, as an expert in both the social and cultural history of whites and slaves, and as a perceptive commentator on the master-slave relationship in all its immense complexity.

Clarke's epic is just that, a sweeping narrative, stretching across three generations of southern families, white and black, slave and free, who struggled with their own problems and opportunities and, most of all, with their relationships with each other. Clarke's narrative proves especially skilled at capturing the emotional textures of white and black life in the Old South, whether in the master-slave relationship, in the life of the slave community that remained opaque to most whites, in the life and work of the Big House, or in the daily life and work of people in the church and at leisure. Those emotional textures are at once coarse and sensitive, revealing and obscuring. Clarke explains the lives of slaveholders as stories of abundance and anxiety. Their great abundance came largely from the exploitation of slave labor and bonanzas in the international staple market. Their anxiety grew from their knowledge of their dependence on the skills and labor of the very slaves whose capacity they doubted, whose revenge they feared, and whose loyalty they cultivated with very mixed success. The slaveholders feared the annoyance of slave resistance, the aggravation of slave runaways, and the grave dangers of insurrection, especially in black majority areas like the Georgia Lowcountry that the Jones family called home.

Clarke explains slave life in the Old South as a story of exploitation, vulnerability, and deprivation. Slaves could readily see, Clarke points out, that much of the planters' wealth and comfort came from their knowledge and work, and yet they knew that the system of slavery allowed them to claim nothing from their labor and skill. Ironically, from a very different relationship to power, slaves also led lives of opportunity and anxiety. The opportunities seemed small at times, but they were there. The opportunity to build a family, to become part of a faith community, to gain a modicum of autonomy if they handled their masters adroitly emerged as part of the give-and-take between masters and slaves. The anxieties, of course, were pervasive. They came from living on the thin edge of vulnerability to the masters' every mood and whim. Punishments could be handed out at the master's...