Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 137
Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2005. Pp. 624. $35.00.
Reviewed by Bradley Gundlach, Trinity College
Not for nothing have scholars and general readers found the Old South a fascinating
place—romantic and disturbing, archetypically American, yet a region unto itself if ever
there was one. Erskine Clarke has captured the allure, the tragedy, and the deep moral
ambiguity of the antebellum South in this monumental book. At once an individual and
group biography, recounting (in the words of the publisher’s advertisement) “four
generations of family life in Liberty County, Georgia, from the ‘big house’ and from the
slave cabins,” Clarke’s book joins works as diverse as Henry Wiencek’s An Imperfect
God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003) and Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old
South (1988) in treating the two worlds of the Old South—black and white—in tandem,
exploring how those worlds influenced each other. Unlike Wiencek, though, who deals
with Washington’s slaves mainly in order to get at Washington’s views on slavery, and
unlike Fox-Genovese, who studies the plantation household in the aggregate, Clarke uses
the richly documented life of an individual slaveholding family as a starting point to open
up the interwoven lives of masters and slaves, giving equal attention to both.
The family is that of Charles Colcock Jones, Presbyterian minister, member of the
Georgia low-country planter elite, and prominent missionary to slaves. The intersection
of these roles, and his interaction with particular slaves, slave families, and communities,
is the theme of the book—with an eye especially to Jones’s descent from the heartfelt
antislavery of his young manhood to the outright proslavery apology of his later years.
Clarke enables the reader both to identify with Jones and to be appalled by his ultimate
choices, appreciating the difficulty of making such choices within the web of economic,
moral, religious, political, and familial concerns in which this very human figure lived
and moved. It is not an easy thing to portray and assess fairly the Christian planter elite,
especially from our standpoint today (as the reception of Eugene Genovese’s recent work
demonstrates). Clarke manages to steer between excoriation and rationalization, avoiding
the too-easy charge of hypocrisy without letting Jones off the moral hook.
We enter the fullness of the life of this tragic figure thanks to the astonishingly
copious literary remains of the Jones family, published some three decades ago in Robert
Manson Myers’s Children of Pride: The True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (1972).
The reader is struck immediately with the sheer mass of detail at Clarke’s disposal, from
the carefully recorded inner feelings of Jones and his wife, preserved in letters replete
with Calvinist introspection and the desire of cultivated soul-mates to share themselves
completely, to the intricate network of kinship obligations in that tight little circle of
Liberty County planters, to the rhythms of gentle life made possible by the forced labor
of others. Clarke has a mania for detail, sometimes so overwhelming as to detract from
the story (as when he ventures into genealogies and estate transactions, especially in the
early chapters). But more often he transports the reader into a feeling of intimate