Charles C. Jones Sr.
*Charles C. Jones Sr. was born on this date in 1831. He was a white-American Presbyterian clergyman, educator, and planter. He was both a slave owner and a missionary to slaves.
Charles Colcock Jones Sr. was born at Liberty Hall, his father's plantation in Liberty County. He made a profession of faith when he was 17 for the Presbyterian ministry at Phillips Academy, Andover Theological Seminary, and Princeton Theological Seminary. 1846, Jones received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Jefferson College. While in the North, Jones agonized over the morality of owning slaves, but he returned to Liberty County to become a planter, a missionary to the slaves, and a reluctant defender of the institution of slavery.
In 1830, Jones married his first cousin, Mary Jones; they had four children, three of whom survived to maturity. He was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Savannah, Georgia (1831–32), Professor of church history and polity at Columbia Theological Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina (1835–38), returned to missionary work in 1839, and was again Professor at Columbia Theological Seminary (1847–50). He then moved to Philadelphia and was corresponding secretary of the Board of Domestic Missions of the Presbyterian Church until 1853, when his health failed, and he returned to Liberty County.
He spent the remainder of his life supervising his three plantations, Arcadia, Montevideo, and Maybank, while continuing his evangelization of slaves. Besides many tracts and papers, Jones published several books, including The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842), an appeal to slave owners and ministers to provide religious instruction to slaves. Jones's Catechism of Scripture Doctrine and Practice (1837) was translated into Armenian and Chinese, and he also wrote History of the Church of God (1867). His brother-in-law wrote that Jones "did more than any other man in arousing the whole church of this country to a new interest in the spiritual welfare of the Africans in our midst." *Charles C. Jones Sr. died on March 16, 1863.
Legacy
In 1972, literary critic Robert Manson Myers published a collection of Jones family letters in The Children of Pride. A work of more than 1,800 pages, the book won a National Book Award (1973). In 2005, historian Erskine Clarke published Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic; based on an even larger collection of Jones family correspondence, it won a Bancroft Prize (2006).
