
          Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter
          Reviewed by Wood, Peter H.Peter H. Wood
          Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 21-24
          
          Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter by
Theodore Rosengarten. With the Journal of Thomas
B. Chaplin (1822-1890). New York: William Morrow and Company,
Inc., 1986. $22.95.  Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among 
the Georgia
Coastal Negroes by the Georgia Writer's Project. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1940; reissued with an introduction by
Charles Joyner, 1986. $26.00 (paperback $9.95).
          "All God's dangers ain't a white man." This memorable reflection on
the nature of Southern history came from a black sharecropper,
recalling the effect of the boll weevil on his cotton crop. The
listener was Theodore Rosengarten, a Brooklyn-born student of
"American Civilization," doing research in the late '60s on the
history of Southern tenant farmers. His book, All God's
Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, received the National Book
Award in 1974 and has become regarded as a classic in the realm of
oral history. Combining the best of the new social history with the
South's rich narrative tradition, the volume won an immediate place on
every shelf containing the important modern works 

about the region.
          Instead of using his first book for ante at the poker tables of
academia, Rosengarten settled near a small fishing town on the South
Carolina coast where he now lives with his wife and sons. There he has
continued to fish the waters of Southern history with the same
patience and satisfaction that he brings to shrimping and crabbing in
the tidal creeks of the Lowcountry. His most exciting historical catch
occured in 1979, when archivist David Moltke-Hansen at the South
Carolina Historical Society in Charleston showed him the lengthy
manuscript journal of Thomas B. Chaplin, a member of the antebellum
elite and the owner of Tombee Plantation on St. Helena Island near
Beaufort. After much careful work, Rosengarten completed a
three-hundred-page portrait of Chaplin, and with the assistance of
Susan W. Walker he edited and annotated the journal itself. The
historian's judicious appraisal and the fascinating primary source are
both included in Tombee, along with maps, genealogical charts, and
copious notes.
          It is hard, literally, to know where to begin in this massive book,
for the biographical treatment and the detailed journal go hand in
hand. The latter begins in 1845 when Chaplin, age twenty-two, already
controlled the lives of more than sixty enslaved Southerners, who grew
cotton for him on a 376-acre plantation facing Parris and Hilton Head
Islands. His wife Mary, also twenty-two, had already borne four
children and a fifth was on the way. The journal ends in 1858, seven
years after Mary's death and six years after Chaplin's marriage to her
half-sister, Sophy. By then, the diarist was approaching the end of
his volume-and the end of an era. But for twenty years after the Civil
War Chaplin occasionally looked back over his personal record and
added revealing afterthoughts and comments. At the beginning of 1886,
four years before his death, he inserted a three-page epilogue and
closed out his personal ledger for good. Dependent and morose, broken
both physically and economically, Chaplin was living with Sophy on the
farm of a relative, where he could "only work a garden & try to
raise poultry." He and his wife, Chaplin concluded, "are both feeling
the effects of age & can't stand much more thumping & tumbling
about, & I pray the remainder may be passed in peace and ease. So
this ends."
          Thomas Chaplin, like Nate Shaw, had a distinctive personality and a
complicated life. Both men lived close to the soil of the Deep South,
and each in his way endured a good deal of thumping and tumbling
about. Their worlds were determined by who owned the land and what
crops it could yield. They each witnessed, and were shaped by, the
region's travails over race, and they faced many of God's other
dangers as well. Both engaged in continuous and judicious observation
of their own place in society. Moreover, both had the good fortune of
ending up in the fine mesh of Rosengarten's casting net, so that their
unique character traits and archetypal qualities could be observed by
others. But here the similarities end. For Shaw, though a generation
younger, told a story that sounded strange and novel-if relevant and
disconcerting-to most modern ears. Chaplin's tale, on the other hand,
gains interest precisely because we inevitably hold it up beside
well-worn images of antebellum cotton planters.
          Naturally, he fits none of these contradictory stereotypes we have
inherited. Far from an opulent patriarch, he remained insecure about
his economic holdings and his personal status throughout his
life--though not so insecure as to become a Simon Legree. "My heart
chills at the idea, and my blood boils," he wrote in his journal in
1849 after seeing how a neighboring planter had whipped a crippled
slave and then chained him by the neck in an outhouse overnight to
choke and freeze to death. The more we get to know Chaplin, the more
he seems like a character out of a Chekhov play. And like most Russian
landlords before the abolition of serfdom, this member of the South's
rural elite has a very imperfect sense of the forces that are holding
him up and tugging him down.
          Occasionally, life imitates art so thoroughly that whole passages
from the diary read like notes from a fiction writer's journal. An
Ellison or Faulkner would beam to have created a protagonist who has
weak vision in one eye due to the burst of a rocket at a Fourth of
July celebration! Or consider Chaplin's entry for May 9, 1846. He was
sailing across Broad River with two other white men and four Negro
slaves when a sudden squall 

capsized their vessel and left them
clinging to the overturned boat. "One poor fellow named Monday could
not swim & though we got him on the boat twice the third time he went
down, never to rise again poor fellow...." The rest eventually managed
to right the boat and row to shore. Chaplin lost all his best hunting
and riding equipment and a set of gold studs, but he saved his
water-soaked pocket watch.
          "A broken watch is a small thing next to a life that's lost,"
Rosengarten observes, "but Chaplin did not see it that way....Faced
with great losses he clung to small things. Always aware of his class,
the things he recalled when he had been stripped of everything were
emblems of pleasure and ease." This applied not only to an overturned
boat but to an overturned land title, not only to a brief spring gust
but to the five-year storm of war that arrived at St. Helena with the
Union gunboats. "Thus, we find him," Rosengarten concludes, "missing
his old oak chair when what had passed out of his hands were his house
and land; and fretting over the loss of silver forks and spoons when
what had perished was the social order."
          In offering a portrait of the master of Tombee plantation,
Rosengarten also provides a picture of the social order of the Sea
Islands, or part of it. His narrative and notes trace networks of
kinship and debt back and forth across the Lowcountry from Beautort to
Charleston to Savannah with a care that should delight any Daughter of
the Confederacy. (References to various Chaplins take up more than a
page and a half in the index.) At the same time, the author displays a
consciousness toward the non-elites that most dedicated plantation
watchers still lack. But as Rosengarten himself points out in a
chapter on "The Chaplin Family," blacks outnumbered whites eight to
one on St. Helena Island during the antebellum period and by about
that much at Tombee.
          While it might not be fair to ask Rosengarten to take up the task
himself, it is worth remarking that a portrait of the local slave
community could now be undertaken with the same attention to
detail. One wonders whether the far-too-cautious Lyndhurst Foundation,
which supported Rosengarten with Coca-cola bottling money from
Chattanooga, would be willing to fund an equally well-crafted study of
members of the island's black majority? Hopefully, the current efforts
of the venerable Penn Community Center to bring St. Helena's black
history to life will soon bear fruit, though we must wait to see
whether the acclaim for Tombee will be used by funders to further such
designs.
          While they are making up their minds, they can examine another
challenging book that has appeared this summer: Drums and
Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal
Negroes. It represents a collaborative effort by the Savannah
Unit of the Georgia Writer's Project, set up by the Works Projects
Administration, and it first appeared in 1940. At a time when
forgetful and careless bashing of the New Deal is sanctioned from on
high, it is a credit to the editors at the University of Georgia Press
that they have reissued this volume as part of their handsome and
selective "Brown Thrasher" series. It includes an informative
introduction by Charles Joyner whose recent book about the Waccamaw
Neck region of South Carolina, Down by the Riverside,
affords the best available study of a black community in the
Lowcountry.
          Drums provides an intriguing companion volume to
Tombee. It concerns Georgia rather than South Carolina;
it focuses on blacks rather than whites; and it uses oral history and
an ethnographic approach rather than archival research and
biographical techniques to make its points. But it describes a world
close to Thomas Chaplin's own in a hundred ways, and the impressive
photographs by Muriel and Malcomb Bell, Jr., help bring the
inhabitants of that world to life. Black and white residents of Tombee
would have had no trouble recognizing the "Wooden grave markers at
Sunbury: or the "Praise House at Sapelo" pictured here. They would
have felt thoroughly at home around Lewis McIver's fishing nets, Katie
Brown's mortar and pestle, Cuffy Wilson's tote basket, or Julius
Bailey's ox cart-more at home no doubt that some of these people's
far-flung grandchildren might feel today.
          The pictures from the original edition have been moved prominently
to the front and introduced with a note from the photographers. Though
somewhat darker and smaller than they were in the original, these
shots (clicked from under a black cloth, with a bulky Kodak camera on
a tripod) retain their freshness as strong portraits from a period
known for its impressive visual studies of everyday people. "We had
seen the Julia Peterkin / Doris Ulmann collaboration, Roll,
Jordan, Roll," the Bells recall. "The soft focus of the Ulmann
portraits was not to our liking, [but] Ulmann's remarkable 

ability to
capture an attitude and to reflect her subject's character we hoped to
emulate." For this edition the Bells have added some interesting new
images from their files, such as the picture of a "Goatskin-covered
log drum made by James Collier" that provided the cover design for the
original book and the sensitive photograph of Cuffy Wilson and his
granddaughter. Many of the previous images have been cropped less
tightly, and what is lost in the intimacy of a close-up face is gained
in the inclusion of background setting. Why some of these images have
been reversed in the current edition seems deserving of
explanation.
          "Our picture-taking expeditions were always led by Mary Granger,"
the Bells relate, and it would be useful, perhaps inspiring, to know
more about this "confident and cheerful" woman. (Joyner tells us only
that she "was a cosmopolitan and well-traveled novelist" with a
formidible intellect.") Granger was the district supervisor of the
Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writer's Project, and as its
"unquestioned leader," the photographers remember, "she told us of her
proposed study of African cultural survivals she believed to be extant
along the Georgia coast." In the late '30s this hypothesis remained
unfashionable on most fronts. As Joyner explains, dominant Southern
historians like U. B. Phillips were ignorant and disparaging about
African cultures, while northern sociologists like Robert E. Park had
accepted a "catastrophist interpretation of the black cultural
experience"--one that still receives nodding acceptance from many
mainstream scholars. The essence of this view had been stated in 1939
by the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier: "Probably never before
in history," Frazier wrote, "has a people been so completely stripped
of its social heritage as the Negroes who were brought to America."
          But Granger had different ideas, and she put together a group of
advisors who could endorse, or at least tolerate, such research. The
work paid off, and though it was dismissed by critics at the time,
Drums and Shadows has come to be regarded as a
pioneering work, however dated or patronizing some passages may
seem. Even the controversial use of phonetic spelling in transcribing
interviews now appears useful on balance, as understanding of the
roots and logic of the Gullah dialect continues to grow. Meanwhile,
Granger's basic premise about African survivals has proven so true
that a new generation of scholars run the risk of dismissing it as
boring and old-hat at just the time when increased western knowledge
of historical African religions and cultures is opening up new layers
of potential research.
          Today we find ourselves thinking as much about Africa's current
events as about its past, and one can hardly read these two excellent
books without reflecting on political and cultural conditions in South
Africa. We glimpse that world through the narrow keyhole provided by
the American media, censored at one end by an embattled white minority
that would understand perfectly the gag rules of Thomas Chaplin's
South and at the other end by our own inertia, myopia, and
ignorance. With righteous officials still telling us which historical
comparisons we cannot make, the urge builds to contrast and compare on
our own, as shown by Steven Lawson's excellent essay here in
Southern Changes in May. If both these books make good
reading when examined alone, and better reading when considered
together, they may prove best of all when regarded in a wide
comparative context that links them to our present concerns.
          
            Peter H. Wood lives in Hillsborough, N.C., and teaches
Early American History at Duke University. He is the author of
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670
Through the Stono Rebellion.
          
        