Meaning well but doing ill

Dwelling Place is the story of a planter family in 19th-century Georgia, and of the slave community which served it. As an insight into the moral dilemmas of a slave-owning society and the local patriotism which sustained the Confederate side in the American civil war, it is one of the more remarkable recent books on the ante-bellum South. It is also refreshingly free from romantic delusions at one extreme or politically correct cant at the other.

The central figure is Charles Colcock Jones, landowner, patriarch and Presbyt- erian minister, who inherited as a young man three cotton plantations and more than 100 slaves in Liberty County, on the Atlantic coast south of Savannah. His was a life of physical comfort, elevated Protestant rectitude, and high mortality in an unhealthy climate where the mosquito was king. Unusually, Jones applied himself, as soon as he took possession of his estates, to the conversion and improvement of the black slaves.