Plantation Life Before Emancipation E-Book

Robert Q. Mallard

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 230

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Plantation Life Before Emancipation, written by a Georgian minister, recounts what life was like before the Civil War.

Leseprobe

PLANTATION LIFE BEFORE EMANCIPATION

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Robert Q. Mallard

LACONIA PUBLISHERS

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Copyright © 2016 by Robert Q. Mallard

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Word to the Reader.

PLANTATION LIFE BEFORE EMANCIPATION.

CHAPTER I. REASONS FOR WRITING AND TOPICS OF LETTERS.

CHAPTER II. THE WRITER’S CONNECTION WITH SLAVERY AND SLAVES.

CHAPTER III. THE OLD PLANTATION.

CHAPTER IV. OCCUPATIONS AND SPORTS.

CHAPTER V. THE NEGRO-HOW HE WAS HOUSED, FED, CLOTHED, PHYSICKED, AND WORKED.

CHAPTER VI. THE NEGRO-NOW HE WAS GOVERNED.

CHAPTER VII. MARRIAGE AND FAMILY RELATIONS.

CHAPTER VIII. “DADDY JACK.”-A CURIOUS CHARACTER.

CHAPTER IX. FOLK LORE OF THE NEGRO.

BUH SQUIRLE AND BUH FOX.

BUH WOLF, BUH RABBIT, AN DE TAR BABY.

CHAPTER X. OLD MIDWAY-A TYPICAL CHURCH.

CHAPTER XI. SACRAMENT SUNDAY AT OLD MIDWAY

CHAPTER XII. MISSIONARY TO THE BLACKS-A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE

CHAPTER XIII. A MISSIONARY TO THE BLACKS-HIS LABORS AMONG THEM.

CHAPTER XIV. A MISSIONARY TO THE BLACKS-HIS LABORS FOR THEM.

CHAPTER XV. A MISSIONARY TO THE BLACKS-HIS LABORS FOR THEM.

CHAPTER XVI. RELIGIOUS ANECDOTES OF THE NEGRO.

CHAPTER XVII. WHAT WAS DONE FOR THE NEGRO BY OTHER MEN AND WOMEN, MINISTERS CHURCHES, ANDCOMMUNITIES.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE SEA-BOARD OF SOUTH CAROLINA

CHAPTER XIX. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF ANOTHER MISSIONARY TO THE BLACKS.

CHAPTER XX. THE FIRST SOUTHERN GENERAL ASSEMBLY. ‘FIRST DAY.

CHAPTER XXI. THE FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND THE NEGRO; ITS MANIFESTO ON THE SUBJECT TO THE CHURCH UNIVERSAL.

CHAPTER XXII. THE FIRST GENERAL ASSEMBLY AND THE NEGRO-THE ADDRESS OF DR. JONES ON THE RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION OF NEGROES.

CHAPTER XXIII. CONDUCT OF THE NEGRO DURING THE WAR.

CHAPTER XXIV. CONCLUSION.

PLANTATION LIFE

BEFORE

EMANCIPATION.

BY

R. Q. MALLARD, D. D.,

NEW ORLEANS, LA.

TO THE MEMORY OF

Charles Colcock Jones, D. D.,

WHO, WHETHER HIS WORK AS A MISSIONARY TO THE BLACKS, OR THE WIDER INFLUENCE OF HIS EXAMPLE, AND WRITINGS IN THEIR BEHALF, BE CONSIDERED, IS JUSTLY ENTITLED TO THE NAME OF THE APOSTLE OF THE NEGRO SLAVES; AND OF HIS MANY FELLOW WORKERS IN THE GOSPEL MINISTRY UPON THE SAME FIELD, ONLY LESS CONSPICUOUS, SELF-DENYING AND USEFUL; AND OF THE HOST OF MASTERS AND MISTRESSES, WHOSE KINDNESS TO THE BODIES, AND EFFORTS FOR THE SALVATION OF THE SOULS OF THE SUBJECT RACE PROVIDENTIALLY PL ACED UNDER THEIR RULE AND CARE, WILL BE READ OUT, WITH THEIR NAMES, IN THE DAY WHEN “THE BOOKS SHALL BE OPENED,” AND “GOD SHALL BRING EVERY WORK INTO JUDGMENT, WITH EVERY SECRET THING, WHETHER IT BE GOOD OR WHETHER IT BE EVIL,”

THIS BOOK IS REVERENTLY AND LOVINGLY DEDICATED.

A WORD TO THE READER.

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THE CHAPTERS TO FOLLOW WERE originally given to the public in the form of a series of letters, under the same title, contributed to the columns ofThe Southwestern Presbyterian, the official organ for over twenty years of the Synod of Mississippi, embracing the greater part of the State of the same name, and the whole of Louisiana. They were suggested by an article copied into that journal from The New York Evangelist, and written by a lady, a native of South Carolina, married and resident at the North, in defence of Southern Christian slaveholders from the aspersions of a secretary of the Northern Presbyterian Freedmen’s Board.

In this graceful and vigorous vindication of her fellow-countrymen, quotation was made from an old faded copy of a printed report, made by Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, to the Liberty County Georgia “Association for the Religious Instruction of the Colored People.” Having in the providence of God been brought into intimate relations with this eminent servant of God, and personal acquaintance with his work, I found that by marriage I had come into possession of a bound volume of pamphlets, containing not only the report cited, but the entire series, thirteen in number, as well as all his many writings upon the same subject. This discovery of accessible and ample material for a fuller vindication of the memory of our ancestors, as well as my relations to the writer, as they constituted peculiar qualifications for, so they seemed to constitute a providential call to the work.

These letters, thus prepared, met with general favor among the readers of our journal, and at the suggestion of white and black, and by the advice of prominent ministers of more than one denomination, they are now published in book form and seek a larger audience.

The purpose of the author has been to portray a civilization now obsolete, to picture the relations of mutual attachment and kindness which in the main bound together master and servant, and to give this and future generations some correct idea of the noble work done by Southern masters and mistresses of all denominations for the salvation of the slave.

If the reader shall have half the pleasure in perusing that the author has had in writing these letters; if they shall in any degree contribute to the restoration of the mutual relations of kindness and confidence characterizing the old regimé, and sorely strained, not so much by emancipation, as by the unhappy happy events immediately succeeding it; if through the blessing of him “who hath made of one blood all nations of men,” North and South, shall be induced to join hands and hearts in generous, confiding and harmonious co-operative work for the salvation and consequent elevation of this race, dwelling with us in our common heritage, then will the author’s purpose have been fully realized, and the country will have made sensible progress toward the solution of the race question, and the church gratifying advance in the settlement of a more interesting and important problem: How shall Africa in America be won for Christ?

R. Q. MALLARD.

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, December, 1891.

PLANTATION LIFE BEFORE EMANCIPATION.

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CHAPTER I. REASONS FOR WRITING AND TOPICS OF LETTERS.

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IT WAS IN MAY, 1864, that Johnson issued his celebrated battle-order at Cass Station, on the line of the Atlantic and Western railroad. Our forces were in fine trim, anxious for the fray, and confident of victory. The expressed inability of two corps commanders to hold the positions assigned them occasioned its recall, and another move in the masterly retreat, before an army almost thrice the size of the Confederate force, effected in such good order that, as one of the General’s staff remarked, “he had not left so much as a half grindstone north of the Etowah,” a retreat, however, very discouraging, since it involved the surrender of the mountain fastnesses, the fall and destruction, by vandal torch, of Atlanta, and the unobstructed march of Sherman to the sea.

Our relief committee had gone to the front, in anticipation of a great battle, when, on the evening of the 19th instant, we received orders to fall back across the river. As the night drew on, and we sought to snatch a little sleep upon boxes and barrels, there mingled with the rumbling of the wheels the monotonous but pleasant tones of a boy’s voice, that of a little drummer, perched upon the roof; and this was the ditty sung by him over and over again, with the ceaseless cadence of pounding feet:

“In eighteen sixty-one.

This war begun;

In eighteen sixty-four

This war will be o’er.”

The song was history; it had nearly proved prophecy. In the winter of 1864 the Confederacy was almost in its death throes, and in the following spring a handful of war-worn veterans tearfully folded the Stars and Bars, and our chief yielded up his knightly sword with a dignity only equalled by the magnanimity of the victor.

For twelve years in succession I have had the pleasure of reading the annual addresses of Colonel Charles C. Jones, Jr., LL. D., President of the “Confederate Survivors’ Association,” of Augusta, Ga. I do not remember one which has not feeling sketches of some dead comrades who wore the gray. It reminds us of the rapidity with which the actors in those scenes, already covered by the obliterating waters of a quarter century, are “crossing the river,” we trust, “to rest in the shade of the trees.” Since this continent shook with the tread of armed hosts, a new generation has sprung into manhood and womanhood, to whom war experiences and plantation life are only traditions. It has occurred to one who had attained his majority before the tocsin of war summoned North and South to the field, and who, from birth, was intimately associated with that which was, at least, the occasion of the tremendous conflict, that a short series of letters upon the topic at the head of this article might not only prove pleasing to those who have had similar experiences, and interesting to those readers who were born since, or who were too young to have any distinct recollection of either war or plantation life in slavery times, but would, at the same time, subserve some graver and more important purposes, to be developed as we proceed. We shall have occasion to picture a civilization peculiar, and which can never be repeated in this country. Perhaps it will be seen that slavery, with all its confessed evils, was not “the sum of villainies,” as some termed it, but had its redeeming qualities; that the common relations between master and slave were not of tyranny on the one side and of reluctant submission on the other; that our fathers, convinced that the institution was not in itself immoral, but scriptural, angered justly, and handicapped by the persistent efforts of Abolitionists to stir the slave even to insurrection, did much for the religious and mental elevation of their people.

The topics, subject to modification, and contraction or expansion, as necessity may require or mood suggest, that will be treated of, are: to state them as they now lie in the writer’s mind, such as these-the writer’s connection with slavery and slaves; the old plantation described; plantation occupations and sports; houses, food, physic, work, government, and family relations; Sacrament Sunday on plantation; “Daddy Jack,” a curious character; a missionary to the blacks; anecdotes, mainly religious, of the negro; what the South did for his salvation and elevation; our First General Assembly and the negro; the slaves during the civil war, etc. Our letters will be brief, but, it is trusted, sufficiently full to accomplish the writer’s purpose. May they, under God, result in renewing the kindly feelings which bound together the two races in the olden time, somewhat alienated, not simply by the results of the war, but by events since, which need not be named now, as they are past, let us hope forever. Possibly in the restoration of such feelings may lie at least an approximate solution of the race problem, now so deeply agitating the public mind.

CHAPTER II. THE WRITER’S CONNECTION WITH SLAVERY AND SLAVES.

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IT WAS MY LOT FROM infancy to mid-life to have been intimately associated with that race whose premature enfranchisement wrought such temporary mischief in state, and whose present and future political and ecclesiastical status fills the hearts of statesmen and Christians alike with concern. I was the son of a well-to-do slaveholder, and myself, although never a planter, an owner at my marriage, by the generous gift of my father, of some of his trustiest and best servants, and also as trustee in my wife’s right, and having our own servants always with us until emancipation.

The memories of that connection are of almost unmixed pleasure. In the interests of truth and candor, which I intend shall characterize these letters, I should here remark that at I saw slavery under its most favorable aspects. My home was in Liberty county, Ga., where that curse of Ireland,landlordabsenteeism, did not exist, the planters, almost without exception, visiting their plantations during the summer at least twice a week, and spending the six months, including the winter, among them; in this county, too, at the period when my recollections of slavery began, our people had enjoyed for some time the apostolical labors of Rev. C. C. Jones, D. D., nomen clarum et venerabile. It is believed, however, that my experience will be found typical of the general experience; for while the congestion of the negro population in the rice and sugar districts, and measurably in some parts of the cotton belt, was accompanied by evils elsewhere unknown, it is believed that the great majority of this race were distributed into smaller bodies, in more direct contact with their masters.

As a babe, I drew a part at least of my nourishment from the generous breasts of a colored foster mother, and she and her infant son always held a peculiar place in my regards. A black nurse taught me, it is probable, my first steps and first words, and was as proud of both performances as the happy mother herself. With little dusky playmates, much of my holiday on the old plantation in the winter season was passed. Some parents were in this matter more particular than mine. On one plantation, I remember, the rule was that the white and black children were both punished if found playing together. My association with them was, I admit, somewhat to the detriment of my grammar, a fault which my schoolmaster speedily remedied, but never to the damage of my morals; for be it recorded, to their everlasting honor, while their words were sometimes coarse, they were rarely vulgar, and never profane. My experience may have been exceptional, but I do not remember, even among the adults, a single profane swearer!

With my little playmates I, as other children who are constantly rehearsing the drama of life, some times played at preaching; our pews, the leaf of a door set against the palings; three shingles, conveniently arranged, my pulpit; and a small book which I could not read, my Bible and hymn book; if the preaching was short and incoherent, the singing was neither. In my case this peculiar turn was not strange, for I bore the name of one of our pastors (the extent of the area occupied by the congregation during summer made the services of two necessary), and my father’s plantation residence being next but one the nearest to the church, and he a prominent officer of it, was the preacher’s home. In those days the old Midway church was known far and wide; and many is the Northern preacher visiting the South (not to say Southern) who found a warm welcome beneath the roof of our paternal mansion. Among them a frequent guest was the venerable octogenarian, Rev. Dr. McWhir, a polished Irish gentleman, finished scholar and learned divine, who had taught a school of which Washington was a trustee, and was the minister to whom the President apologized for returning thanks in his presence, replying to Mrs. Washington’s remark, “My dear, you forget that there is a clergyman at the table;” “My dear, I wished him to know that I am not a graceless man.” Here, too, winter after winter, was entertained Rev. Dr. Ebenezer Porter, of Andover Seminary, then admired all over the country, as much for the soundness as the solid attainments of its learned faculty. I remember to have heard my father say that Dr. P. was accustomed to observe that he always felt like taking off his hat in the presence of the grand old moss-covered live oaks, for which that region was and is noted.

At college, to which I went with the lively sympathy and good wishes of our people, I recall the faithful service of Uncle Peter, and at the seminary of Uncle Jack, not to speak of their wives. In the up-country, the titles of respect which Southern children were taught never to omit, were “Uncle” and “Aunty;” in the low country it was “Daddy” and “Maumma.”

Coming events seem to have cast their shadows before them; for the child-preacher, when he came forth from the school of the prophets, began to preach to negroes in earnest, in their own special building (and a more appreciative and sympathizing audience he never has had); and in the old ancestral church, in which master and servant worshipped together, the colored people packing the wide, deep gallery, baptized from the same marble font, and taking the elements of bread and wine at the same time, from the silver baskets and gold-lined silver goblets, the gift of deceased slave-holders to the church. My first sole pastoral charge embraced a colored as well as a white membership, and among the former were some of my most consistent and valued members and attentive listeners. A regular Sabbath-school for them, children and adults, was taught by my young people, using Dr. C. C. Jones’ Catechism, a manual prepared especially for them. And they also drilled them in hymns and tunes. Catechumens were carefully instructed by the young pastor in his own parlor, using the same manual as his basis. Besides preaching to them, where comfortable accommodations were provided in the common church, a weekly lecture, for which he made the same preparation which he did for the lecture to the whites, was delivered to full and most appreciative congregations, in a neat church building built for them by the trustees (all slave owners) of a benevolent fund, left to the county by a deceased slaveholder.

The unavoidable personal tinge given to this letter claims, as its justification, the necessity of establishing the competency and credibility of the witness.

CHAPTER III. THE OLD PLANTATION.

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IT WAS SITUATED IN RICH lands, abounding in malaria, against which only the negro was proof. I remember an instance of a planter who had spent only one night on his plantation in this region, harvesting his corn, rendered desperately sick by it; and another, who lived in our village, dying from a high grade of bilious fever thus contracted. Consequently, the summer months were spent by the white families in what was known as “summer retreats,” or villages located out in the pine forests; the return to the plantation was not considered safe until a killing frost had fallen.

How we children watched with our keen eyes and ears for the first signs which nature gave of winter’s approach! What joy it was to see the yellowing leaves of the old china trees, which grew near the academies and old Union church, the poverty of the soil hastening the process; to feel the evenings growing cooler and cooler; to catch the first notes of “the six weeks’ bird,” which we implicitly believed always sang just that length of time before frost; to hear the woodman’s axe, as he cut and split the great pine logs for the ordinarily unused fire-places of the summer home; and oh! the happiness to wake some bright morning and find the grass in the lawn all covered with mimic snow, and as we chased each other around the yard to mark the vapor pouring from our parted lips; we children called it “smoke!”

Word is sent down to the plantation-and not soon enough for our impatience-there come to move such furniture as we carried from one home to the other the double-horse wagon, and the two slow-moving ox-carts. Before we can get ready to start, Stingo, the old yard dog, a beast of exceeding ill-temper, aggravated by age, and, I am sorry to say, by the plaguing of his young master, to which his churlish disposition naturally exposed him, divining the cause of the unusual stir, set out by himself, and all alone made the journey of fifteen miles of good road, ready on our arrival to take charge of the family in their winter home.

Then the carriage and buggy are made ready, father, and mother, and children and nurse packed in, and we are, to our infinite delight, actually off at last for our winter holiday and the unspeakable joys of plantation life. On the way we halt at a clear spring, bubbling up by the roadside, and lunch, always, among other tempting edibles, upon shortened Johnny-cake! I wish it were in my power to give the housekeepers of our day the recipe; I only remember it was baked on a long clean board leaned before a wood fire, and was ambrosia to our healthy young appetites.

Resuming our journey along the broad, splendid roads, worked every fall by details of plantation laborers, under white supervision, we pass the old church where we shall worship anon, and of which more hereafter; drive along the wide Sunbury highway a half mile or more, and then turn at a right angle into our avenue, lined with live oaks, leading up to the plantation mansion. It is an unpretending structure, a large and roomy cottage of one and a-half storey, unpainted, a chimney of brick at one end, of clay at the other, a piazza running around two sides, and its gable end facing the avenue. It has only four glazed windows, two lighting the parlor, and the other two our parents’ room just opposite, the panes small, and so imperfect that many is the time that our youthful imagination occupied itself, while waiting for the house-girl to kindle the fire in mother’s chamber, in shaping its bubbles and defects into the images of different creatures. The parlor, the common living room, is papered with a pattern I have never seen elsewhere-a curious group of figures, which I see distinctly before me as I write. There is on the wide fireplace, with its fender and andirons, polished until you can see your face in them, a generous supply of oak and rich pine, but the big door leading out upon the piazza is persistently left open, I presume for ventilation, but bringing the sensations of freezing and burning into startling conjunction!

The arrangement of the houses is somewhat peculiar, but convenient, and apparently made upon the principle of placing everything as far as possible under the master’s eye. Looking out from the front door, you see on your right the smoke and meat house, made of yellow clay, in which the bacon (for our planter raises or purchases his hogs from his own people) is cured and stored; on the left-hand corner, and in sight, is the kitchen, where French cooks are completely distanced in the production of wholesome, dainty and appetizing food; for if there is any one thing for which the African female intellect has natural genius, it is for cooking. Just over the palings of the front yard, you see the cotton houses, and directly in front the horse gin, with its wide branching arms carrying round and round all day the noisy rattling chain which turns the hickory rollers inside, with their lips separating the little black seeds from the fleecy lint, piling up in a growing bank of snow behind the screen. On the left, just beyond the stile (we called it the “blocks"), your eye takes in the stables and carriage-houses, and still farther away, and stretching to the left and in front, the single and double rows of cottages, the “quarters,” the homes of the laborers, with their vegetable gardens, chicken coops, pig pens, rice ricks, and little store-houses. The only thing in the rear, and invisible from the front door, are the rice barns and winnowing house (for rice and Sea Island cotton constitute about in equal parts the market crop), and the vegetable garden, stocked with broad-headed cabbages in winter, and with its beds of fragrant chrysanthemums and the sweetest roses I have ever smelt! On every hand, the corn fields, with their brown stalks, and cotton fields with their leafless black bushes, stretching away to the encircling forests, and beyond them on the left the road leading by two tall sweetgums to the rice fields, great lakes now, and frequented by water fowl, and fringed with the dense moss-draped cypress swamps.

Such is a picture of the plantation home in which a large part of the sunny days of my childhood and youth were spent, and in immediate contact with the African race; and here for the present I close.

CHAPTER IV. OCCUPATIONS AND SPORTS.

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IT IS NOT MY INTENTION to describe in this letter the ordinary work of a plantation, but only the occupations and amusements of the younger members of the planter’s household.

Many of these were shared by the boys and girls of the family in their earlier years. These were, first, the almost daily visits to the cotton houses, where it was a pleasure to help the little slaves in beating up with switches the snowy cotton, as it lay upon the elevated scaffolding, airing in the winter’s sunshine; or to take hold of the crank of the whipper, which, with its long revolving shaft, with numerous radiating spokes, separated the dust and trash from the cotton; and then to stand by the ginner and watch him, or be permitted for a few minutes ourselves to feed the grooved hickory rollers, as they draw in the fleecy cotton and divide the lint from the seed; or to supervise the packer, as suspended in his distended bag from the upper floor, with many a grunt, he, with his heavy pestle, forces the lint into the bale. Then what joy it was, in the keen winter’s air, to perch upon the long beam outside, and travel miles and miles in a circle, ever-repeating itself, permitted as a special favor, for which a plate from the dinner table was exacted and willingly promised, and paid ourselves to drive the team.

At another time the barn-yard would be the special attraction, with its long parallel stacks of sheaves of golden rice. The dirt floor is beaten hard and swept clean, and the sheaves arranged upon it side by side; and now the stalwart laborers, with their hickory flails, beat off the heads of grain from the yellow straw; the obliging servants make for us children, or, if sufficiently skillful, we make ourselves, lighter flails, and, with our slighter blows, emulate in fun the heavier strokes of the men. And now the grain and broken straw are taken in baskets up the steps of the lofty winnowing house, which stands, stilt-like, upon its four upright posts; and as the grain and beaten straw are forced through a grated hole in the floor, the wind (faithfully whistled for) comes and carries off the chaff, and the round mound of rice steadily grows beneath. The rhythmical beat of the numerous flails is accompanied by a recitative and improvised song of endless proportions, led by one musical voice, all joining in the chorus, and can be heard a mile away, “The joy of the harvest,” of which a Hebrew prophet speaks.