For the Love of Place: Paternalism and Patronage in the Georgia Lowcountry, 1865-1898

Abstract

IN EARLY APRIL 1891 JOSEPH JONES, A RENOWNED PHYSICIAN AND THE youngest son of Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, made a pilgrimage from his residence in New Orleans to his childhood home in Liberty County, Georgia. (1) His return was motivated in part by nostalgia. Joseph had not seen the old homestead since leaving in 1863 to serve in the Civil War. (2) His nineteen-year-old son, who accompanied him on the trip, brought a camera to capture Joseph's homecoming in a series of photographs. The snapshots, seven in all, show the places that members of the Jones family held dear--Midway Church, their plantation home at Monte Video, and patriarch Charles Colcock Jones's tomb. (3) Upon receiving copies of the photographs, Joseph's older brother, Charles Colcock Jones Jr., vowed, I will take good care of them and they will serve to recall memories of localities consecrated by recollections most precious. (4) The brothers shared a nostalgic affection for the places and a way of life that, from their point of view, had been marred by war. The young photographer, however, captured something more than the locales and sentiments of his father's generation. All but two of the pictures included images of African Americans. The appearance of local black residents in a white family's snapshots reminds us that these were their places too. Stepney West, Niger Fraser, and many others caught on film that day lived and worked on the Jones family's plantations both before and after emancipation. (5) Their inclusion in the family's photos, taken twenty-six years after the war's end, whisper of the longstanding connections among the Joneses, their former slaves, and the place both groups called home. (6) Joseph's return to Liberty County also served a practical aim. For years he had refused his brother Charles's repeated requests to sell two of the family's Lowcountry plantations--Maybank and Monte Video--because Joseph believed that one day he might return there to live. (7) At age fifty-eight and in failing health, he must have felt that it was time to make a decision. His journey home, however, proved to be a harsh awakening. The old landmarks and his relationships with the men and women of his youth had changed, something that his older brother understood all too well. Joseph left Liberty and never returned. Unlike Joseph, Charles had visited Liberty County every year since their mother's death in 1869. Usually he made the journey, first from Brooklyn, New York, and later from Augusta, Georgia, during the first week of January. He went there to protect and preserve their Monte Video home, to settle accounts with tenants on Monte Video and Maybank plantations, and to sell the lots carved from the family's third plantation, Arcadia. (8) In between these visits, Charles relied on his family's former slaves to watch over the homesite, collect rents from tenants, broker land sales, and maintain his father's burial plot. (9) In return for their efforts, the freedpeople expected and received the typical benefits of patronage, such as extra allotments of food and supplies, occasional gifts of cash and clothing, and the modest amount of prestige and protection that came from their association with a wealthy white family. (10) The Jones family was unique because of patriarch Charles Colcock Jones Sr.'s reputation as a benevolent slaveholder and his mission to provide slaves an oral, religious education. But in other ways, the Joneses were very much like their Liberty County neighbors after the war. They lost the source of their wealth, experimented with different labor-management practices, struggled to re-establish their plantations and reap a modest profit, argued with unscrupulous white overseers, and attempted to find suitable buyers for their Lowcountry properties. And they, like many of their wealthy neighbors, left the area after several years of suffering poor returns from their plantations. (11) Members of this family are unusual, however, in that their propensity for writing and preserving letters and other records has left scholars with nearly thirty years of extant postwar correspondence between members of the Jones family and black Liberty County residents, many of whom had been slaves of the Joneses. …