Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  In the early 1700s, the making of naval stores took as much time as timbering. Naval stores included tar, pitch, resins, and turpentine, all made from processing trees. Captains used these goods to seal vessels against leaks and to otherwise maintain their ships. The Comingtee account books show hundreds of barrels of tar and pitch sold for a continuous profit. Elias also kept stocks of cattle. The first South Carolina whites had imported cattle from Virginia in the late 1600s, and the animals multiplied in the semitropical climate. The dismembered livestock gave up beef, tallow, and hides, and the farmers of South Carolina exported thousands of barrels of beef and pork annually, mainly to the British Caribbean.

  To feed themselves and their owners, the workers at Comingtee grew com, peas, and sweet potatoes. (Initially both whites and blacks acquired these shared staple tastes from the Natives.) “Guinea com,” first brought to the colony on ships from African coasts, supplemented the maize, or “Indian com.”

  In his solitude, Elias Ball may have marveled at the fully formed world to which he held title. Barely out of his teens, and raised in a faraway country with its own economy, he could hardly have known how to make, raise, extract, and produce all the local goods and foods. I imagine that during the first years after his immigration, Elias had only a vague idea how to manage his copious inheritance, and that he was forced to put himself under the apprenticeship of his slaves.

  About 1699, Elias was joined by John Harleston, co-inheritor of the estate, who arrived from Ireland with his sister, Elizabeth. John and Elizabeth Harleston were probably in their early twenties, like Elias. As with her aunt Affra Harleston, who had joined John Coming on the Carolina, it is unclear why Elizabeth chose to come to South Carolina. She may have read the older woman’s letters to Dublin, been intrigued, and sought to follow in Affra’s path. It seems more likely, however, that Elizabeth came as a bride-to-be in an arranged union with Elias, because the two were married soon after she reached Charleston.

  Elias, Elizabeth, and John may have worked side by side with their human property in some tasks—cutting trees, making soap and clothing, preparing food. Life for everyone on Comingtee was fueled by a similar grueling routine. But in time, the white immigrants could remind themselves of the purpose of the system and shift the burden of work to other shoulders.

  One group of Elias’s neighbors on the Cooper River, the Anabaptists, did not take part in the arrangements growing up all around them. In December 1696, thirty families of Anabaptists arrived from Maine. They settled at a place called Biggin Swamp, six miles up the Cooper River from Comingtee, where they acquired eight hundred acres. The “dissenters,” who protested the ways of the Anglican Church, began to build their community, refused to buy slaves, and relied on their own labor. No Anabaptist writings survive to cast light on this rare self-reliance, but the reasons for it are not difficult to imagine. Their renunciation of the slave business set the New Englanders apart from other white Carolinians—so far apart, evidently, that after ten years the settlement failed. The dissenters could not build a settlement based on free labor in the midst of a captive society. In 1708, shunned by their peers, the Anabaptists began to sell off their land, and within a few years they left. With that, the single local pocket of antislavery disappeared.

  Soon after Elias arrived, an unwanted harvest came in from the fields, when in September 1700 word spread of an imminent uprising of Native slaves. It was reaping season, a time when the workload doubled and the white grip on life tightened. According to an official account, a slave owner came down the river to Charleston, trembling with fear, to spread the news that two Native slaves were planning a revolt. The report had come from one of his own workers, who had disclosed the plot. An alarm was raised and many settlements evacuated, the white planters hurrying to Charleston to batten down. But fear followed them, and “ye people in town thought themselves as little safe as those in ye Country,” according to the record. In all likelihood John Harleston and Elias and Elizabeth Ball were among those who fled; at the time Elizabeth was pregnant with the first Ball heir. The two Natives accused of plotting the revolt were captured and jailed. “Ye people are now easie again,” the account concluded, “& wee have Ordered ye 2 Slaves ye first proposers of this warr to be Transported.” In the end, the rebellious Natives were shipped away to the sugar fields of the Caribbean.

  Fear of a Native uprising seems to have subsided, for not long afterward, seeking to make life more comfortable, the Balls expanded operations. In 1702, Elias bought 150 acres from his neighbor, the owner of the tract known as Silk Hope, and in the next two years added another 700 acres. Most of the land sold for the token sum of one shilling per hundred acres. John Harleston does not appear on the land records. The purchases pushed the Ball land north and east of Comingtee, away from the river landing.

  To cultivate new land required more people, and although no receipts survive from these transactions, I suspect that Elias bought workers along with the acreage. At the beginning of the 1700s, the Royal African Company, headquartered in London, sold people for between £20 and £30 per adult. The company once had held a monopoly on the human traffic to the English colonies, but by the beginning of the century private traders also worked the business. These local entrepreneurs sold higher, up to £35 per person.

  Elias would probably not have hired white servants, who had gone out of favor with landlords. Indentured servants averaged £3 per year for their labor, amounting to £30 in expenses for ten years. Unlike the Puritans, their immigrant cohorts in New England, South Carolina whites were not seekers after God. They were seekers after wealth, and with Africans selling at £25, it made sense to buy them.

  When he finally bought, Elias probably would have picked Africans. Starting in the late 1600s, there was a tariff on the import of African-born slaves to South Carolina, a tax that led landowners to purchase most of their black workers from Barbados and other British islands, where many had actually been born. In 1703, however, the colonial legislature dropped the tax, and afterward nearly all new black workers came directly from the West African shore. Elias may also have bought people from a Native clan such as the Catawba or Etiwan. Compared to blacks, Native Americans were a bargain. In a pamphlet from 1712, the price of a young Native woman was quoted as low as £18. Native workers could also be purchased with animal skins rather than cash. In a court case about this time in Charleston, a Native adult slave was appraised at 160 skins, while a child was recorded sold for 60 skins. The hides usually came from deer, but beaver and other skins could be substituted. The equivalence of pelts and people would have been the idea of the white “Indian traders,” who had plenty of both on hand.

  In 1705, only five hundred whites and blacks lived in St. John’s Parish, the church district that included Comingtee (later called St. John’s Berkeley, when the county called Berkeley was divided from the county of Charleston). It was a tiny population, but already four out of ten were slaves. Evidently this was not enough. Next door to Comingtee, on a tract named Strawberry, lived landlord James Child, Elias’s friend. Early on, Child and Elias had become partners in a venture to put a ferry on the Cooper River, the Strawberry Ferry, which landed conveniently near the edge of Elias’s land on Child’s property. In 1706, Child devised a new plan, this one to bring more workers to his and Elias’s neighborhood by going into the domestic slave trade. That summer he persuaded a band of Cherokee warriors to attack a nearby village and bring the captives to him, in exchange for a share of the profits. The scheme went off and the Cherokees returned with 160 prisoners, a large human harvest. Child then traveled downriver to Charleston, where he put some of the Natives up for sale.

  No hard evidence survives that would show whether Elias Ball actually participated in the slave raid, though he would certainly have known about it. Still, in a Ball family memoir written in 1786 by Elias’s grandson John, there is a telling description of Elias’s braggadocio. “My grandfather … was bold and resolute,” the grandson wrote after E
lias’s death. “He had frequently commanded scouting parties after Indians.”

  In their first fifteen years of marriage, Elias and Elizabeth Ball had five children who lived past infancy. Ann was born in 1701, and Eleanor in 1707; a son named Elias came in 1709, and another daughter, Elizabeth, followed in 1711. Their last child was born in 1714 and named after Elias’s uncle, the first owner of the Comingtee farm, John Coming. With all the children around, John Harleston, who had been living with the Balls, apparently decided to get out of the way. In 1708, he married a woman named Elizabeth Willis and moved to the opposite end of Comingtee, about a mile east of the first settlement. There must have been a fishing hole there, because the couple called their place Fish Pond.

  In middle life, Elias found himself at the center of a war with Native people. Government records from the period are filled with accounts of assaults, rapes, and murders committed by whites against Native clans. The attacks seemed endless, and no appeals by Native chiefs to the colonial authorities could stop the slave trade. After decades of living at the mercy of the colonists, Natives in the Carolinas decided to put up a last fight. In spring of 1715, fifteen Native nations formed an alliance, with the aim of pushing the whites out of North America and into the sea. The allies included the Alabama, Apalache, Catawba, Choctaw, Coweta, Creek, Edisto, Etiwan, Santee, Sara, Savannah, Tallapoosa, Waccamaw, and Yamasee peoples. When the whites raised a militia to defend the colony, Elias, thirty-nine, signed on as a captain.

  Elias received command of a company on the eastern branch of the Cooper River, “his” river. The wording of his officer’s commission shows that whites believed they were about to be engulfed by a general colored uprising that might bring Natives into collusion with blacks. The owner of Comingtee was told to “take into your charge the said patrole and as you shall see occasion both by day and night to patrole from plantation to plantation and in case you meet with any opposition from Indians or Negroes or any of the King’s enemies you shall kill, destroy and take prisoners all such opposers and enemies as aforesaid.” That summer Captain Ball evidently went on a search-and-destroy campaign, killing any Natives or black slaves who got in his way.

  While Elias released streams of blood in defense of his life and property, a tiny number of English-speakers saw the war as a kind of justice visited on the whites. Gideon Johnston, vicar of St. Philip’s, the Anglican congregation in Charleston, believed the catastrophe was divine punishment for the slave owners. “[A]ll we can doe is, to lament in Secret those Sins, which have brought this Judgement upon us,” Johnston wrote to his church superiors in London. “[O]ur Military Men are so bent upon Revenge, and so desirous to enrich themselves, by making all the Indians Slaves that fall into their hands, but such as they kill … that it is in vain to represent to them the Cruelty and injustice of Such a procedure.”

  Six months later, when the fury of the so-called Yamasee War ended, the Natives were defeated and forced into a diaspora. The Creek nation migrated west toward the French colony of Louisiana. Other people, including the Apalache and Savannah, were decimated and dispersed. Only a few hundred Edisto and Etiwan, dependent for their survival on the deerskin trade with whites, stayed within reach of Charleston. The war marked the beginning of the march of English-speaking people from the Southern colonies across the continent; afterward, white settlements were no longer confined to a narrow strip along the coast.

  With the red people out of reach, the enslavement of Natives quickly diminished until it became an oddity next to black slavery. In the colonial government in Charleston, a Commission on Indian Affairs that once dealt with the Natives was dismantled. In one of its last acts, in 1716, the commission issued a decree intended to prevent further uprisings. Henceforth, it stated, white Carolinians were “not to buy any [Native] male slaves above the age of 14 years,” because captive children would be less apt to fight back than adults.

  After the war, Elias acquired still more land—in deals whose terms show the tracts were spoils awarded Captain Ball for service in the campaign. In September 1716, a few months after the last skirmishes, he picked up eight hundred acres in a bargain brokered by the governor, Robert Daniel. Three years later, he bought another twelve hundred acres, most of it through then-governor Robert Johnson. Now the land Elias once co-owned with John Harleston made up only a small part of his estate, as the Ball family holdings measured some twenty-seven hundred acres. Comingtee stretched about a mile along the banks of the Cooper River, and ran deep inland. Across the water and upriver three miles was a new Ball place, Dockum, whose name came from the Native people who fled from it. Another tract, called Cypress Grove, lay to the northeast in neighboring Craven County. Still others that Elias took up were so new to white hands that they had no English name.

  The population of Africans and American-born blacks on the Balls’ new real estate grew as well. In 1720, there were 1,439 slaves throughout St. John’s Parish—almost ten times as many as fifteen years earlier—of whom Elias owned perhaps 40. Seventy-five percent of the people in St. John’s, the Ball district, were black. This ratio—three forced workers for each free person—was much higher than that in Virginia, the original English home of American slavery.

  At the end of August 1720, Elizabeth Ball fell ill with malaria. The disease, a strain known as falciparum, was carried in the bite of the anopheles mosquito, which thrived in the swamps. In a letter, her brother wrote that Elizabeth “was taken with a Malignant Fever, and was very delirious,” then died. Eleven months later, in July 1721, Elias remarried. He was forty-five, but his new wife, Mary Delamare, was about twenty, the same age as his daughter Ann. Ruler of a huge realm, with a new wife half his age, Elias was no longer a bewildered immigrant but a landlord and planter, the patriarch of Ball family lore. His land, too, also took on a new identity. With its village of people and stream of exports, Comingtee was not a farm but the first Ball plantation.

  Settling in with Mary, Elias began to straighten out his accounts. After twenty years, he and John Harleston formally divided the property they had inherited together. Elias got Comingtee, as well as a piece of the townhouse property in Charleston known as lot 49, while John got several hundred acres next to the growing city. Elias bought a new account book, a two-hundred-page ledger, in which to record the pulse of the business, including the names of the black people whose lives mingled with his own. Elias and his oldest son would keep the ledger for the next fifty-eight years. The book survived, one day to yield some of its secrets.

  The first person in slavery to the Balls who can be identified by name was a woman called Bella. On November 10, 1720, Elias made a note that “Bella had of me 3 yards of negero cloth.” It was a Thursday.

  “Negro cloth” was a coarse blend of wool and cotton that slaves were given for garments, a fabric manufactured in Europe and distributed by American slave owners. Whites did not wear Negro cloth, whose name and texture separated servers from served. The fabric sometimes took another, more poetic name, “oznaburgs,” from Osnabrück, a town in northern Germany known for its textiles. The rough blue or sometimes white cloth was the standard uniform on the Ball plantations from the earliest colonial days until well into the 1800s.

  To judge from the small size of her allotment of cloth, Bella must have been young, perhaps ten years old. In the practice taking shape, adults received five or more yards of oznaburgs per year, children about three yards. Bella reappears in the account book several times, always in the context of taking her basic needs for survival—usually cloth but also blankets and occasionally a pair of shoes. According to the slave lists, Bella lived for at least another thirty-three years. No record of her birth or death, and no record of children, if she had them, has survived. We know her only as a person trying to clothe herself.

  The first record of the Ball family’s purchase of people reads as follows:

  1721

  Bought

  Fatima

  Hampshire

  Plymouth


  The woman (or perhaps girl) and two men (or boys) were bought apparently after they spent two weeks at the pest house on Sullivan’s Island. The year 1721 was a slow one for the slave traffic. In twelve months, only 165 black captives were imported to Charleston. The previous year, more than six hundred slaves had arrived, while a decade later, thousands would be brought in each year.

  Two of Elias’s new slaves were given names of places in England, the county of Hampshire and the city of Plymouth, near Elias’s home in Devon. The captives probably spoke languages that their owner did not understand; nevertheless, the two men would have to answer to place-names that Elias knew from his youth. A beguiling name, Fatima, appears on this list. The historical Fatima, the favorite daughter of Mohammed, died in the year 632 A.D., probably in her twenties, and memory of her life held long power over Muslims. Islam made converts in sub-Saharan Africa, some of whom were brought to America. Could the Fatima of Comingtee have been a Muslim who had somehow held on to her birth name?

  Perhaps a different Fatima rattled around in Elias’s imagination, the tragic Fatima of French folklore. Fatima was the unfortunate seventh wife of the Chevalier Raoul, the noble tyrant known more commonly as Bluebeard. According to the well-known French fable, soon after her marriage Fatima found the bodies of Bluebeard’s six previous wives in a locked room of the Chevalier’s castle. As punishment for prying loose his secret, Bluebeard dispatched his seventh wife to join the others.