Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  A number of slaves had already made their way from Charleston to St. Augustine, the Spanish outpost in Florida a little more than two hundred miles away. So many had run south, in fact, that escaped slaves filled a black village north of St. Augustine, at a place called Fort Mose. Jemmy’s band marauded through the Stono district, evidently heading toward Florida. As they marched, the rebels burned houses and killed every white person in their path. By midmorning, the insurgents numbered about fifty and were marching with drums and a banner when they were spied from a distance by the lieutenant governor of the colony, William Bull. Bull rode off for help and got word of the rebellion to Charleston, where alarms went out to the white population. Some years later, one of Elias’s grandsons, John Ball, would write down the story of how his grandfather once found himself in a fort inside the city “in time of an alarm”; I suspect this was during the Stono events. Although he had been a militia captain in a war against Native people twenty-five years earlier, this time Elias hid. According to his grandson, however, he still had some taste for the fight. While behind the barricades and awaiting the all-clear, Elias “offered to turn out and take a wrestle” with one of the other old men in the fort.

  Back on the Stono, William Bull converged on the uprising with a mounted army of whites. The rebels had swelled to between sixty and a hundred slaves, and had stopped in a field near the Edisto River, several miles from their starting place. When the militia arrived, they turned their guns on the rebels. Some blacks fired first (according to white accounts), while others fled into the brush, and many were caught and killed. A few slipped away and returned to the plantations from which they had escaped. Later found out, some in this group were decapitated and their heads placed on mileposts along the Stono River road.

  Memories of the Stono Uprising reverberated among whites for generations, and the rebellion no doubt also survived in lore passed down among slaves. It would later emerge that most of the rebels came from the Angola region. A new slave law soon tightened the grip of tyranny: “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes …” was passed by the legislature in May 1740. Added to a group of “black codes” already on the books, the so-called Negro Act of 1740 became the main law governing black life for the next eighty years.

  The Negro Act ordered a system of passes for slaves who left the company of their owners. People discovered away from their plantation home could be seized and whipped, and those resisting arrest might be killed. The law stated what clothing slaves were permitted to wear (“negro cloth … blue linen, check linen … callicoes, checked cottons, or Scots plaids”). It prohibited blacks from carrying guns, except when hunting for food for a master. And it reasserted the principle of white rule, such that any slave “who shall raise or attempt to raise an insurrection in this province” would face death.

  Not having been affected by the Stono Uprising, Elias applied himself to leisure. In the forty years since he had come to America, Charleston had grown into a commercial center as active as Philadelphia or New York. A gridiron of streets extended half a mile across the marshes of the peninsula, and new trenches for runoff and sewage kept things relatively clean. There was a market square with shops and taverns in the middle of town, at the corner of Meeting and Broad streets, as well as gardens and public squares. The city had plenty of diversions for whites—social clubs like the South Carolina Society, where men played cards and talked business, taverns with cockfights, and a horse track on the outskirts of town. But the most appealing new entertainment for both men and women was a new theater on Dock Street, near the wharfs. White townspeople flocked to the stage to see local troupes put on popular plays imported from England.

  Charleston was only the fourth largest but easily the blackest American city. The population of South Carolina stood near sixty thousand, of whom over thirty-nine thousand were black. About twelve thousand people lived in Charleston, more than half of them in slavery.

  Elias’s townhouse stood near the Cooper River, overlooking the wharfs, on the corner of what would later become Pinckney and East Bay streets. To the east of the house lay the river and to the south, a little creek. Elias did not necessarily make housing provisions for his domestic slaves. The majority of black people in Charleston lived behind the houses of their owner, in the backyard, in huts or even under the stars. Perhaps Elias followed the lead of some of his neighbors and put up a small, secure building at the back of his lot. Although they were not yet common, a few such buildings had appeared around town. These slave dwellings, called dependencies, were sturdier and more comfortable than the cabins of the plantation.

  As I mentioned earlier, Dolly, Elias’s house slave and the presumptive mother of two of his children, seems to have lived with the old man throughout the 1740s. There are notes in Elias’s accounts about Dolly traveling from Comingtee to be with him in the city. I cannot say in what manner she lived, but she does not seem to have been an idle mistress. She probably cared for Elias’s white children in addition to her own.

  Like a benevolent patriarch, Elias distributed favors to his children and grandchildren. The treats often took the form of people whom Elias thought he didn’t need and whom he sold to his kin at discounted rates. In one such deal in 1741, Elias sold two men—”Alexander & Othello, alias Quaco,” according to the deed—to George Austin, one of his sons-in-law. Quaco was apparently the carpenter who had repaired the old house at Comingtee three years earlier. The men came with instructions that they be given to George Austin Jr., Elias’s four-year-old grandson.

  When he was not making provisions for family, Elias occupied himself with luxuries. One of the perquisites of wealth was the rare ability to produce an image of oneself. To make his gift to posterity, Elias turned to a painter named Jeremiah Theus. An English-born portrait artist, Theus showed good timing, arriving in Charleston from London in 1740, before other painters had yet come to the colony. Theus set up shop on the market square at the corner of Meeting and Broad streets, put a sign in his window, and waited for business. Soon a procession of moneyed citizens made its way to his studio—society ladies, rice planters, slave traders, politicians.

  Jeremiah Theus seems to have developed a working method suited both to the high demand and to the climate of his new hometown. The painter’s clients naturally wanted to be pictured in their best finery, but for many months of the year the heat of Charleston made long sittings in heavy clothes unpleasant. Theus made things easier by painting, in advance, a series of torsos on canvases. Some were fat, some thin, some squat, some long—but every body, though headless, wore dignified clothes. When someone came for a commission, Theus would show him or her his collection of torsos. The client would choose one, then sit for an abbreviated pose as Theus painted a head on the prefabricated trunk.

  One day in the early 1740s, Elias Ball presented himself to Theus for a portrait. He chose a picture of a heavyset body wearing a dark jacket and white scarf, a clothing style that Theus seems to have used several times. In fact, when finished, Elias’s portrait, from the neck down, closely resembled that of another Theus subject, planter Gabriel Manigault. The two portraits show the men wearing identical clothes, with Elias’s body about thirty pounds heavier than that of the slender Manigault.

  Elias’s finished portrait shows a face, heavy with jowls, that carries an expression of supreme confidence. What satisfaction Elias felt may have come from his having beaten the odds against death. He had lived most of his nearly seventy years in the British colony of South Carolina, where the majority of people made their way to the grave not long past youth. Something more, however, seems present in his blue eyes. When Elias sat for the painter, he was seated, as well, on top of an agricultural empire. Like a Roman noble, he owned vast lands and numerous slaves. In a few years the human and real estate would pass to his children, but for the time being it was his alone. In the painting, Elias wears the red velvet cap that would be responsible for his family nickname.

  Elias must have been pl
eased with Theus’s work, because before long he commissioned a portrait of his daughter Eleanor. Unfortunately, the artist was less gifted at painting women than men. When Theus painted Eleanor Ball, a girl of about twelve, he attached her face to a torso with full breasts. On top of the shimmering bodice (cut low, with a lace fringe around the bosom), he placed a head whose mouth resembled a large V. To finish, he painted a pair of globular, close-set eyes, not unlike those of a frog.

  Jeremiah Theus stayed in business for nearly thirty-five years, during which he seems to have remained the only painter in town. Elias and his kin liked, or tolerated, what Theus did for them, for eventually they commissioned him to make nearly a dozen paintings of themselves.

  After the Stono Uprising some families decided to get out of the rice business. Here and there, slave owners cashed in their estates and returned to England, driving down the cost of land. With their lives potentially at stake, Elias’s sons might have considered another path than the one cleared for them by their father. But the Ball heirs pushed forward and expanded the family empire.

  Elias Jr. had just turned thirty. (In family lore he would be called Second Elias to distinguish him from more than a dozen other Eliases in the clan.) John Coming Ball, the younger son, was twenty-five. Second Elias and John Coming seemed to have viewed events like the Stono Uprising as a business risk; they merely hoped something similar wouldn’t happen again, or to them. John Coming Ball acted first in the growth plan. In March 1740, six months after the rebellion, he bought a tract about six miles up the east branch of the Cooper River from Comingtee. A neighbor, Richard Gough, let it go at a good discount. The young heir had evidently read about a beautiful park in London on land once owned by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, for he called his new stake Hyde Park.

  The six-hundred-acre parcel was vacant, and John Coming set about settling it. The early records of Hyde Park were destroyed in a fire around the time of the American Revolution; therefore, it is difficult to say much about the black people who lived there in the first years. After buying the land, however, John Coming took a large loan from his father, used, I imagine, to purchase several dozen people. To make the plantation into a working rice farm, the slaves would have begun the arduous work of clearing and laying out fields. The process took one or two years, as at least 150 acres were flattened and cut into smaller tracts. Irrigation trenches had to be dug around each field, and tons of earth shoveled out and carted off. Outbuildings were raised, including a barn and houses on a slave street.

  While this was being done, John Coming called for his own house. One of Red Cap’s hands, a builder named Amos, seems to have been instrumental in the construction. Amos lived first on Comingtee in the 1730s, when he sold his corn crop to Elias, taking clothing and money as payment. After that he became a traveling carpenter. By 1741 he was no longer confined to the plantation but began to work on the Ball family’s various houses. With another carpenter, Salisbury, Amos ranged around the rice country doing repair work. There was a time when, according to Second Elias, “Salisbury & Amos went to town to work for my father,” probably to repair the townhouse, and another when “Salisbury and Amos shingled [the] Coming Tee House in 5 days.”

  Records show that Amos went to work at Hyde Park sometime after its purchase. The house turned out to be bigger than the one at Comingtee, but equally plain, a boxy, two-story wooden building with a long covered porch and a pitched roof. Amos was likely the carpenter who laid the beams, raised the roof, and hung the window sashes. In any case, the house was finished by fall 1743, standing near a creek that flowed into the main stream of the river, with cabins for field hands nearby. That October, according to one record book, Amos left Hyde Park for other jobs.

  While the Hyde Park house was going up, John Coming married Catherine Gendron, daughter of a family of French Huguenots. The couple moved to the new plantation about the time the last rice bank was being leveled.

  His work for John Coming done, Amos returned to an itinerant life, doing construction here and there as the Balls demanded. In March 1745, he went to work for one of Red Cap’s daughters, Ann Ball, and her husband George Austin. The couple had a plantation on the Ashepoo River, southwest of the Ball tracts a day and a half on horseback. Amos may have been sold to Ann and George, just as Red Cap had earlier sold the couple Alexander and Quaco. After going to Ashepoo, Amos disappears from the extant records of the family.

  Second Elias, the other heir, already had in hand a thousand acres, the St. James tract, but when his brother moved to Hyde Park, he stayed on at Comingtee alone. According to Ball family lore, the bond between John Coming and his brother was sentimental and strong, and Second Elias felt abandoned by John Coming’s move. “There ever subsisted the utmost harmony and brotherly affection between them,” one of their sons wrote forty years later. At one point, Second Elias bought a surprise gift of a hat for his brother, who had a small head. The man sent to procure the hat reported back in a letter, “I searched the whole stores in town but could not get one hat small enough [for less than] 40 shillings. … I did not let [the shopkeeper] know who it was for.”

  Second Elias, yet unmarried, felt increasingly isolated and apparently grew disconsolate. Red Cap seems to have been aware of his son’s discouragement, because at one point the old man bought a parrot and sent it up the river to the lonely bachelor. Apparently, however, the talking bird was not enough to console him. Second Elias preoccupied himself with a garden to distract his attention, one winter noting that he had “finished ye garden here at Comingstee.”

  Soon, however, Second Elias’s loneliness ended. Family tradition has it that during his twenties the young heir had fallen in love with a woman from nearby Strawberry plantation, Lydia Child. Lydia was the granddaughter of James Child, the well-known slave catcher in the area who once made captives out of 160 Natives. After Lydia Child married a man named George Chicken, Second Elias had resigned himself to bachelorhood. (It could not have helped that Lydia had to be addressed in the street as “Mrs. Chicken.”) In 1745, however, George Chicken conveniently died, and two years later Second Elias and Lydia were married. He was thirty-eight, Lydia in her twenties, and the mother of a little girl, Catherine Chicken.

  In February of that year, 1747, the same family that had sold Hyde Park to John Coming sold another piece of land to Second Elias, for £3,400. The empty 670-acre tract bordered the south side of Hyde Park, and Second Elias wondered what to call the place. Apparently having read about the grounds that adjoined Hyde Park in London—Kensington Gardens, which had abundant green meadows and a playful building, the Orangery—Second Elias called his plantation Kensington.

  The clearing and building, house planning and barn raising began anew. Amid the activity, Second Elias arranged for the building of a dwelling that would, like the plantation itself, imitate his brother’s tastes. A tall, airy box with a veranda, the house at Kensington stood in a grove of outspreading oaks.

  When Lydia and Second Elias moved to Kensington, they arrived with perhaps seventy-five slaves. About half the families came from Comingtee, including Angola Amy and her children. By this time, three of Angola Amy’s children had been born—a boy, Christmas (born one year on that day), four; a girl, Easter (born during Holy Week), two; and another girl, Judy, one. When she moved to Kensington, Amy was forced to leave the father of her children, Windsor, who stayed behind on Comingtee. So it developed that Amy and Windsor had what would be known as an “abroad marriage,” that is, a marriage spanning two plantations, an arrangement that became common among slave families.

  There are no descriptions of black wedding ceremonies in the Ball papers, no references to “jumping the broom” or other rituals that may have taken place on the slave street. One reason could be that for the first hundred years most of the Ball slaves were not Christians, and their masters did not care to write down, or perhaps even understand, black family arrangements. Polygamy, a custom brought on the slave ships, survived in the rice district for
at least a generation or two; it faded with time and when blacks began to see it as sinful. The most likely reason that domestic partnerships between blacks often went unrecorded by the Balls is that slave marriages were not taken seriously by whites. In the eyes of the law, marriage between black partners had no legal force, because masters reserved the right to separate couples for the purpose of sale; to acknowledge unions would make this impossible. But the long togetherness of Angola Amy and Windsor proves that unions did take place, with and without wedding ritual. After most of the slave population was Christianized, which occurred in the early 1800s, plantation churches were built near the cabins and wedding ceremonies were performed by black preachers. Those days at Kensington, however, were a long way off.

  With her marriage to Second Elias, Lydia Chicken brought property inherited from her dead husband, including Strawberry plantation. She also brought the people on Strawberry, among them a young couple, Radcliffe and Amy, and a girl named Jenny Buller. Jenny Buller, about ten years old, had the rare privilege of having two names. An exception to the name rule—single names only for slaves—occurred when the number of people on a plantation grew too large, causing repetition. Jenny Buller evidently carried a surname because Second Elias already owned a field hand named Jenny, a few years older. The story behind the name Buller has died with the lore of an earlier time, but at Kensington young Jenny would become a conspicuous figure. One of the Balls, writing in the twentieth century, had much to say about her:

  [T]he name of “Jenny Buller” is frequently met with in the plantation records of the second Elias Ball, and sometimes in Lydia Child’s little memorandum-book. In the note-book it is stated that she was sent to a physician “to be cured of a sore leg,” and came back. The result of this doctoring does not appear to have been a “cure,” for she ultimately lost the leg and hobbled around on a wooden stump: “doing as much work as a man.” … The family, as a general rule, were proud and high-tempered … and many of them were prominent about the plantation and in the household.