Charles Colcock Jones Sr. (December 20, 1804 – March 16, 1863) was a prominent American Presbyterian clergyman, educator, planter, and missionary in Liberty County, Georgia. He is best known for his extensive efforts to provide religious instruction to enslaved African Americans while owning and operating rice and Sea Island cotton plantations. He was sometimes called the “Apostle to the Slaves.”
Jones was born at Liberty Hall, his father’s plantation in Liberty County, Georgia, to John Jones Jr. (a merchant and planter) and Susannah Hyrne Girardeau Jones. His paternal grandfather, Major John Jones Sr., had been killed during the 1779 Siege of Savannah. Orphaned young—his father died around 1805 and his mother in 1810—Jones grew up within the coastal Georgia planting elite.
At age 17, he made a profession of faith and decided to enter the Presbyterian ministry. He prepared at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (1825–1827), Andover Theological Seminary (1827–1829), and Princeton Theological Seminary (1829–1830), studying under leading theologians such as Archibald Alexander and Samuel Miller. In 1846, he received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. While studying in the North, Jones wrestled with the morality of slaveholding. He ultimately returned to Georgia, becoming both a planter and a dedicated missionary to the enslaved population, as well as a defender of slavery framed in paternalistic and religious terms.
Marriage, Family, and Plantations
In 1830, Jones married his first cousin, Mary Jones. The couple had four children, three of whom survived to adulthood: Charles Colcock Jones Jr. (1831–1893), a lawyer, mayor of Savannah, Confederate officer, historian, and archaeologist; Joseph Jones (1833–1896), a physician and medical professor; and a daughter.
The family owned and managed three Liberty County plantations:
- Montevideo (also spelled Monte Video; roughly 941 acres on the North Newport River), their primary winter residence.
- Maybank (on Colonel’s Island), their summer residence.
- Arcadia (nearly 2,000 acres farther inland), used more sparingly as a residence, especially later during the Civil War for safety from coastal raids.
By the 1860 census, Jones held about 129 enslaved people. He supervised plantation operations while continuing missionary work, and the family correspondence later became a major historical source.
Career and Missionary Work
Jones briefly served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Savannah (1831–1832). He then focused on missionary efforts among the roughly 4,500 enslaved people in the Midway/Liberty County area. Beginning around December 1832, he organized systematic religious instruction: building or designating places of worship, conducting prayer meetings (often led by Black leaders), preaching, and teaching catechism. He founded and led the Association for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in Liberty County and issued annual reports on the work.
He held academic posts as Professor of Church History and Polity at Columbia Theological Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina (1835–1838 and again 1847–1850). From about 1850 to 1853, he served in Philadelphia as corresponding secretary of the Presbyterian Church’s Board of Domestic Missions. Failing health (ultimately consumption, sometimes described as “wasting palsy”) forced his return to Liberty County, where he spent his remaining years overseeing the plantations and continuing evangelization.
Jones viewed religious instruction as both a Christian duty and a means of promoting order, morality, and better treatment of the enslaved. He urged masters to consider their responsibilities regarding housing, clothing, food, privileges, and discipline, arguing that religion would remind them of their accountability to God. At the same time, he defended the institution of slavery itself against abolitionist critiques.
Writings
Jones produced numerous tracts, sermons, reports, and books. His most influential work was The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842), a comprehensive appeal that included a historical sketch of efforts among African Americans, an assessment of their moral and religious condition, arguments for the church’s obligations, and practical plans for Sabbath and weekday instruction. He also published a Catechism of Scripture Doctrine and Practice (1837, designed for oral instruction of enslaved people and later translated into Armenian and Chinese) and other works; his History of the Church of God During the Period of Revelation appeared posthumously in 1867. Contemporaries credited him with doing more than almost any other individual to awaken the Southern (and broader American) church to the spiritual needs of enslaved people.
Death and Legacy
Jones died on March 16, 1863, at Arcadia plantation and was buried in Midway Cemetery, Midway, Georgia. His tombstone describes him as “the devoted Husband and Father, the firm friend and Kind Master, the public Benefactor, the zealous Evangelist, the profound Theologian, the learned Author, the pure Patriot, the exalted Christian.” The extensive Jones family correspondence has made them one of the best-documented plantation families of the antebellum South. Robert Manson Myers’s The Children of Pride (1972), a massive edition of the letters, won a National Book Award. Historian Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (2005), based on an even larger body of family papers, won a Bancroft Prize and provides a detailed portrait of life on the Jones plantations for both the white family and the enslaved community. Jones remains a complex and controversial figure: a sincere, energetic Christian missionary who sought to improve the spiritual and material conditions of the people he enslaved, while fully participating in and defending the system of chattel slavery.