Customer Reviews

Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic

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Dwelling Place is one of the most fascinating books of 19th-Century history to be published in recent years. Clarke takes a small part of Georgia--the Sea Islands and coast south of Savannah--and spins out a fascinating narrative of life among the planter class and their "people"--a convenient euphemism for slaves.
What gives the book its richness is the fact that Clarke has chosen to portray the Jones family, well-known to many through their epistolary chronicle The Children of Pride, edited by Robert Manson Myers. For those who have come to feel that the Joneses are like old acquaintances, this book gives new information that makes the picture ot life on the Georgia coast even more many-faceted.
The book also contains many insights into the truth about life during this still-controversial period. For instance, the coastal slaves had an "easier" life than those on the up-country cotton plantations. In coastal Georgia, once the slaves had finished their assigned work, they could do other things. In the interior, by contrast, the slaves worked during the entire day.
If you have any interest in the culture and life of the South, read this book! It, like Children of Pride, makes history read like a well-constructed novel.

"Early on a March morning in 1805, as the first hints of dawn touched the Sea Islands and the marshlands south of Savannah, Old Jupiter rose, went out of his cabin, and with a blast from his conch-shell horn announced a new day." With this first sentence of Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, I was captivated by the history of three generations of families- plantation owners and slaves- in Liberty County, Georgia.

The author of this Pulitzer-nominated book has thoroughly researched and beautifully written this true story, which reads like a novel. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, especially when I had an hour or two to read it without interruption. The story moves the reader through the inter-weaving history of families on several plantations in the Georgia low country, and takes place from Darien and Midway, Georgia, to Savannah, Atlanta, Marietta and Roswell, Georgia. The book occurs from 1805 through the end of the Civil War, with the end of a way of life for the plantation owners and the dawn of a new freedom for the slaves.

I particularly enjoyed the parts of the book that describe how people lived on Georgia low country plantations in the early to the mid-19th century. The book describes how plantation houses were built and farms and rice were cultivated, the role of Christianity and the conversion of plantation owners and slaves, how meals were prepared, the horrors of slave families being sold and split up in front of the courthouse in Riceboro, Georgia, how slaves lived and the secret paths they took from plantation to plantation, and the often symbiotic relationship among the plantation owners and the slaves.

At times the various characters and families can be difficult to follow, and the author's inclusion of family trees and a brief description of the principal characters in the appendices make it easier to follow. A map at the beginning of the book of Midway and the surrounding plantations is also useful. The narrative part of the book is only 465 pages; the rest of the book is appendices and endnotes. I whole-heartedly recommend this book to any person who loves history.

In Dwelling Place, Erskine Clarke expands the chronological range of a notable series of letters--published in 1972 by Yale as Children of Pride--to write a history of the extended Jones family of nineteenth-century coastal Georgia, as well as the families of their "people," their slaves.

This is a good book but not a great one. Clarke writes well enough, though his attempt to be novelistic by foreshadowing the future often seems forced. Clarke does significant service by emphasizing how important life events for southern slaveholders--marriages, deaths, and removal to distant locations--could often have disastrous effects on slave families, many of whom were torn apart by separations so final that slave spouses were treated as if they were dead to one another.

Nevertheless, Dwelling Place has significant weaknesses. First, Clarke's chronological sweep, which takes the reader from 1805 to 1869, scoops up too many characters, many of whom are tangential to the main story as told through the lives of Charles and Mary Colcock Jones. Clarke provides helpful biographical notes and elaborate genealogical charts, but it's doubtful that any but the most persistent reader can keep all the characters straight.

Second, although Clarke tries to put as much weight on slave existence as on the life of the masters, he is faced with a conundrum that exercises every historian who tries to write antebellum history from "the bottom up," that is, that the poor are frequently illiterate and therefore virtually inarticulate. Furthermore, lower class existence is repetitive and usually has small effect on the course of history. Sea island cuisine cannot hold its weight against the coming of the Civil War, which (in passing) Clarke slights.

A more serious weakness is Clarke's repeated attempts to read the minds of the slaves in ways that satisfy twenty-first century taste. For instance, Cato, a driver for Charles Colcock Jones, says in a letter (written for him by a plantation manager) that he felt "like crying with love and gratitude" for such "a kind master." Clarke can't leave this letter without suggesting that slaves understood that "successful revolution only `grows out of the barrel of a gun,' and that slaves lacked the necessary firepower and military organization to challenge white hegemony."

Maybe, maybe not. I have never been a slave, but I was a draftee infantryman during the Vietnam era and one definitely unsuited to military life. A historian who tried to guess how I felt about being pulled away from school to prepare to kill people would probably go far astray. Frustration and fear were mingled with patriotism and pride in my new (but definitely limited) military prowess. My calculated desire to shirk as much work and responsibility as possible was combined with a determination to accomplish my mission to the best of my ability. We do not have to adopt the Gone-with-the-Wind mentality about plantation slavery to believe that slaves were sometimes sincerely devoted to their masters and to the religious faith that they shared. They were not always hypocritical when they spoke words later romanticized by purveyors of the Lost Cause.

Although I recommend Dwelling Place, the more sophisticated reader (especially one who has a taste for big books) should read Children of Pride instead. In that massive volume the reader can approach the remarkably articulate Jones family on its own terms and calculate its conflicted feelings about slavery without twenty-first century intervention.

It was to my surprise that I discovered the existence of the remarkable Reverend Mister Charles Colcock Jones, 1804-1863, of whom, even through my years of historical studies, I had never heard. It was first via this book, Dwelling Place, and later through another, The Children of Pride, that I became aware of Jones, his extended family, and their place in both the religious life of antebellum America, and of their significant contribution in the form of letters and first-hand accounts, to some further measure of understanding low country life in the decades before the 1860's war destroyed that culture.

Let me say that the author of Dwelling Place, Erskine Clarke, is a gifted researcher, writer, and interpreter of the American past. He has crafted a book certain, if there is fairness among scholars, to stand through time as the definitive reference on its subject matter. I also say while I understand religion was the Reverend Jones' vocation, that I found Dwelling Place to be far more compelling as an investigation into the lives of planters and their slaves than I did its primary theme of chronicling the career of an influential Christian cleric. As such, I was engrossed in the first hundred pages, but soon found myself slightly less captivated by the constant reflections on Jones' considerable evangelism: in large part among the non-Caucasian populace.

As a sort of expose on the realities of life as a black and as a white in coastal Georgia in the early and mid nineteenth-century, I know of no finer work. As a study on the life of Jones, on religion in his time and place, again, this book is preeminent. It's simply true that speaking for myself, had it strayed a little less far from its initial subject matter, southern plantations and their inhabitants, I would have enjoyed it even more.

This is the most impacting, and disturbing, book I've read in the past year. I found myself identifying strongly with Charles Colcock Jones, an extremely heartfelt evangelical Christian who thought of himself as utterly consecrated in service to God, and who was held in high regard by the evangelical community of the South. Through Clarke's detailed and highly documented narrative, I was able to understand how his understanding of slavery was gradually warped through several factors: 1) compromise with the viewpoints of his peers, 2) cultural difficulties with the slaves, 3) losing sight of the ends by concentrating on the means, and 4) by being a beneficiary of the status quo.

It's easy to think of slaveowners as sadistic monsters with no shred of humanity. It's more difficult for people of our time to imagine themselves as slaveowners. Dwelling Place accomplished that for me. Charles Colcock Jones was not the typical slaveowner, but he was one that evangelicals might identify with. More than that, he had a spirituality and a heart of service that many evangelicals might ASPIRE to.

Contrary to another reviewer, I did appreciate Clarke's attempts to infer the viewpoint of the slaves, though because of their illiteracy there is infinitely less documentation of their thoughts in the historical record. Perhaps some of his inferences are off-target, but to not make an attempt at representing the slaves' point of view would be to leave out an equally important part of the story, and to artificially silence voices as important to the story as the whites. Many of the African-American characters were developed as multi-dimensional compelling actors in the drama.

I also appreciated the number of characters described, both white and black, because they comprise the very intricate and dynamic context which produced Jones's mindset, so analagous to the context which Americans find themselves in our time.

I'll go ahead and put my cards on the table--I was extremely disappointed with this book. It has great content, you learn a lot about what life was like for both planters and slaves in coastal Georgia, and it covers many topics from social to political to religious history. However, all that aside, I found Clark's writing style to be extremely hard to read and it made the book a bore at times. I kept reading, figuring I was just waiting for the good parts since I read so many glowing reviews of this book. As a piece of history, this book is great because of how well documented it is and how thorough Clark was in his research. As something to just sit down and read, it was like visiting the dentist. Granted, many history books are like that, but the fact this book was so widely praised for its readability still floors me a bit. The sheer number of people, places, and things to keep up with is nearly impossible, although to Clark's credit, the glossary with short biographies helps. All in all, this is an important book to read if you are interested in slavery, Georgia history, or 19th century history in general. However, I did not find this to be quite the entertaining read that I saw in reviews and that's why I give it 4 stars. For sheer research, it surely deserves 5.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Gave me an insight into what my ancestors went thru. Also gave me a couple of clues to follow as my Ashmore family was mentioned several times in this book.