Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  As a businessman with a leather shop and stable, Edward Tanner would seem to have succeeded in his world. He was one of a tiny number of his special class, free people of color. In 1760, South Carolina counted a population of ninety thousand—some fifty-five thousand blacks and thirty-five thousand whites. In 1768, about the time Tanner got under way as a shoemaker, tax records show that there were only 159 free nonwhites in all the province. Tanner did well, but he was very much alone, and the place of mulattoes could be tenuous. They often lived in isolation from both whites and from the black majority, accepted by neither.

  Edward Tanner’s life included more liberty than that of other colored people, but he was no stranger to sadness. His sister Catherine (or Kate), about whom few details survive except her name, also gained freedom from the Balls, after which she moved north of Charleston, along the coast, to St. George’s Parish. Kate may have given support to the isolated Tanner, but in 1768, when she was about twenty, Kate died. That September, the Court of Ordinary summoned her brother to the city of Charleston to administer her estate.

  In her last appearances in the plantation records, Edward Tanner’s mother, Dolly, is listed as living at St. James with her son Cupid and a man called John. John may have been Dolly’s partner after Red Cap sent her away. Once her free son had gotten on his feet in business, Dolly evidently fell sick, and Second Elias noted simply that “Old Dolly died ye 5 Dec 1774, age 62.” She was still a slave, still clothed and housed by the Balls. Manumission might come to the children of slave owners, but it was still rare for a mistress.

  According to a conservative estimate, during the centuries of the slave trade, nearly 9.5 million people were carried from Africa to European colonies in the Western Hemisphere. Of these, a little under 450,000 went to the territory that would later become the United States. The majority set foot in North America in the 1700s, and a large portion of them entered through Charleston: between 1701 and 1775, forty-six percent of the black people entering the British mainland colonies came by way of South Carolina. Another large influx arrived in Charleston in the first decade of the 1800s, in a great rush before the African slave trade was outlawed in 1808.

  The numbers of the South Carolina traffic are important in the legacy of the United States. Perhaps four out of ten black people in the United States have African ancestors who first arrived on this continent at the Charleston coast. That figure, forty percent, recalls another point of entry for Americans: Ellis Island in the harbor at New York. The same number of all Americans, four out of ten, descend from people who arrived at Ellis Island during the great wave of European immigration, between 1890 and 1925.

  During a single generation, from 1735 to 1775, 1,108 slave ships arrived with their cargoes in Charleston harbor. During this time, the peak of slave shipping, two Ball in-laws became the largest slave dealers in North America. In the ten years between 1751 and 1761, George Austin and Henry Laurens brought sixty-one slave galleys to the Charleston wharfs—the largest number of any slave importer in the city, and the heaviest volume in the territory of the future United States.

  Austin and Laurens did not write down the African names of people aboard their ships; they were simply “Negroes” until sold. Nevertheless, it is possible to estimate the numbers of people imported. In the first decade after his marriage to Eleanor Ball, Henry Laurens paid import taxes on behalf of his firm amounting to £68,010. Based on an average duty of £10 per adult slave, this amounted to sixty-eight hundred adults (an adult in the tax law being anyone above age ten). Children, who were untaxed, came to another thousand at the minimum. Therefore, in a single decade, Austin & Laurens sold a total of some seventy-eight hundred people.

  Slave traders worked on commission, ten percent of the sale price. In the decade of the 1750s, the cost of a black child in Charleston hovered around £100. A strong young man would bring up to £300, a woman slightly less than that. The average sale price for men, women, and children, estimated on the low side, stood near £200 per person. On a volume of seventy-eight hundred people, Austin and Laurens would have had revenues of £156,000, enough to make them and their wives, in only ten years, four of the richest people in America. It is impossible to state an equivalent sum in dollars, because the Balls lived in an agrarian world in which the relative cost of food, clothing, and shelter stood in entirely different proportion to that within industrial society. But in the 1770s, when plantation land was selling at about £1 per acre, a two-thousand-acre tract was thought to be sufficient to support ten whites and a hundred black workers. In other words, the ten-year income of Austin & Laurens would have been enough to purchase seventy-eight plantations, on which 8,580 people might live indefinitely.

  By the mid-1750s, George Austin had largely withdrawn from Charleston to his plantation southwest of town, Ashepoo, and Henry Laurens ran the business. Laurens wrote the Balls, keeping them up-to-date on how well he was making out. In a letter to his brother-in-law John Coming Ball, Laurens boasted, “Our people [customers] bought slaves with great spirit all the last summer & even ‘till the month of October they gave so high as £330 for some very prime Gambia men.” Elsewhere he reported, “We have two … Vessells now in port, [but unfortunately] between them they have not more than 240 Slaves, which are but a trifle to the number wanted.”

  To keep in touch with customers, Laurens ran ads for his merchandise in the South Carolina Gazette. Headlines read “Just Imported,” or “Negroes,” while the ad named the African birthplace of the new Americans. The announcements were usually accompanied by a picture of a black figure wearing a skirt made of palm fronds, sporting a grass headdress.

  Though they dominated the market, George Austin and Henry Laurens weren’t the only Ball kin in the business. In 1764, another of Red Cap’s daughters, Elizabeth Ball, married Henry Smith, scion of a family that also sold people. Smith’s brother was a partner of Miles Brewton, in the firm Brewton & Smith, which occasionally rivaled Austin & Laurens in number of Africans imported. In the year following Elizabeth Ball’s marriage into the Smith family, Brewton & Smith docked fourteen slave galleys. At a low estimate of 200 per ship, that meant nearly 250 people per month.

  So large were the numbers, and so small the feeling of the slave dealers, that a term came into use: “refuse Negro.” A refuse Negro was a person who either was unhealthy, did not listen to commands, or was simply bad tempered. Planters wanted to avoid buying refuse, by which they meant “human trash.” Laurens explained to a customer: “Several small parcels of Negroes have been imported here from the West India Islands and the best of them have sold pretty well but there is generally a mixture of refuse Negroes among such.”

  With slave traders in the family, it was an easy matter for Second Elias and his brother to get people. Records show that after the marriage of Eleanor Ball to Henry Laurens, Austin & Laurens became a main supplier of slaves for the family, since, like any clan, the Balls bought from their own. In June 1756, Second Elias opened the South Carolina Gazette and read the following ad:

  Just imported in the Hare, Capt. Caleb Godfrey, directly from Sierra Leon, a Cargo of Likely and Healthy Slaves, To be sold upon easy Terms, on Tuesday the 29th Instant [day of] June, by Austin & Laurens.

  Sierra Leone lies on the west coast of Africa about five hundred miles south of the mouth of the Gambia River. It was given its name by Portuguese explorers in the sixteenth century, but by Laurens’s day, the British had taken the trade away from the Portuguese. At the trading depot, a short river emptied into the Atlantic where a peninsula thrust into the ocean. Along the coast and going a hundred miles inland lived the Limba, Kono, Mende, Susu, Temne, and Vai tribes, among others.

  Henry Laurens’s ships traded from a prison near the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, on an oval rock called Bunce Island. About a third of a mile long, Bunce Island stands in the current of the river several miles upstream from the Atlantic. It was leased from local chieftains by a business associate of Laurens’s in London, Richard Osw
ald. On the northwest end of the island stood a fortified manor, ringed with cannons, where the English slave handlers lived, and where they received the captains of the galleys. Behind the manor was a walled yard where captives were held, chained together in circles, until their numbers grew large enough to fill the belly of a ship.

  In early 1756, after spending from a few days to several weeks at Bunce Island, one group of 170 prisoners was herded into the hold of the Hare, which weighed anchor for Charleston.

  Henry Laurens was a formal man with a sharp temper and a judgmental eye with his merchandise. When the Hare was still at sea, he wrote several letters to friends complaining that he was already swamped with business, and saying that he would prefer that the ship go to another port. “The place is quite clog’d with slaves that God knows what we shall do with them,” he told one man. When the Hare reached Charleston, only about 110 people on it were still alive. “[R]eally they are a wretched cargo,” Laurens wrote a friend. “They are a most scabby flock, all of them full of the Crocheraws”—meaning the yaws, a contagious skin disease. Nevertheless, Laurens placed his advertisement for this group of “Healthy Slaves.”

  Second Elias took himself down to the docks and his brother-in-law’s office. The Hare evidently brought a good supply of children, and Second Elias picked out six of them. Although most plantation owners bought on credit, Laurens noted in his account book that Mr. Ball paid in cash. Second Elias made a note about the deal in his own records: “I bought 4 boys and 2 girls—their ages near as I can judge Sancho = 9 years old, Peter = 7, Brutus = 7, Harry = 6, Belinda = 10, Priscilla = 10, for £600.”

  In the height of a mean summer, the children were taken to Comingtee plantation. Their parents had been left either on the dock in Charleston or in their villages back home.

  After the sale, Laurens reported that some buyers had been angry, and had believed the Hare was full of refuse Negroes. “Besides many … meager ones there was several that were quite grey with Age,” he said. Still, to keep up good business relations, Laurens wrote his supplier in London, fifty-one-year-old Richard Oswald, who actually controlled the ship, thanking him for sending the business to Austin & Laurens, and apologizing that the firm did not get more money for the Bunce Island cargo.

  Second Elias, the gentle and portly father, seemed to prefer buying children. A few years after the purchase of these young ones, he made this note: “[I] Bought 13 Gambias Young Negroes … 11 boys and 2 girls for £200 a piece which is £2600 & stake them to be about 12 years of age or there abouts.”

  Austin & Laurens was dissolved in 1762, after which Henry Laurens spent less time on the docks and more time with his wife, Eleanor Ball. Taking on a new partner named George Appleby, Laurens would continue to sell people, although fewer than before. In a few years, following the death of his wife, Ann Ball, George Austin would move back to England, taking his fortune with him and ending the era of the great Ball slave business.

  The six children from Sierra Leone would have six different fates, each typical in its way. Belinda appears nowhere in the records after her purchase; she either died or was immediately resold. Harry grew up to be a field hand and seems to have lived alone until death. Brutus worked until at least 1784, when he disappears from the records—dead or sold around age thirty-five. Peter grew up to be the man Second Elias called Mandingo Peter. Peter found a partner named Monemia and had children by her. By 1777, Mandingo Peter had moved, evidently with his family, from Comingtee to Kensington, where he disappears from slave lists in 1816, apparently dead around sixty-seven. Sancho worked as a field hand on Comingtee, where he found a partner in a woman named Affie, with whom he had at least three children—Sancho, Saby, and Belinda; the family was moved to Kensington sometime before the American Revolution. In 1780, during the Revolutionary War, Sancho was one of at least fifty-one people who ran away from Kensington, seeking freedom with the British Army. He was later returned to the plantation. In February 1819, at seventy-two, Sancho was separated from his wife and children, who were sold off Kensington in an auction, bought by a man named T. Scriven. Sancho presumably was too old to interest Scriven, and may well have watched as his family was taken from him. He finally died Christmas Day 1833, at eighty-six.

  Priscilla must have been a strong girl, because she lifted herself up and carried on. Within ten years, Priscilla had found a partner, Jeffrey, and made a family. By 1770, when she was twenty-four, she had three children; later she had many grandchildren.

  Throughout the 167 years the Ball family owned slaves, and among the approximately four thousand people born or bought into slavery to the Balls, Priscilla and her five companions from Sierra Leone are among the few people about whom it can be determined, based on written evidence, precisely where they came from in Africa.

  Priscilla’s descendants would continue to live on Ball plantations until Emancipation in early 1865. That year, Priscilla’s great-great-grandson, Henry, would be freed from William Ball’s Limerick plantation. One day, I would meet some of Priscilla’s descendants.

  10

  “YOURS, OBEDIENTLY”

  There was a death in the family, and in the mail came a letter of condolence:

  Feb. 20, 1926

  Mr. Isaac Ball

  King Street

  Charleston, S.C.

  Dear Mas’ Isaac,

  Mrs. Richardson up here told me that your wife has pass away. I’m sorry, tho she don’t know me. I consider all Balls are connected with my old Master. I have them to respect. There are no white people that I can regard more than I do the Balls. My Father told me that Mrs. Julia [Ball] named me, and that I was christind by Bishop Howe in Mistress arms. Well Mas Isaac I am up here, in Sumter Co., hoping to make sometime up here, but there are no people like those on the Coast, our white people. Our old Masters and their children. My father’s people were never free and they were never slaves, so far as the word slave may mean. I can remembered that my old Masters gave my Grandmother her Freedom and a servant to wait on her. … Hope you are well I am teaching and preaching up here. …

  Yours, P. Henry Martin. Box 38, Pinewood, S.C.

  Isaac Ball—my father’s grandfather, and the Ball Dad called Isaac the Confederate—was eighty-one when he received this note of sympathy from a former slave. Born in the 1840s on Limerick plantation, Isaac grew up surrounded by hundreds of black people. After fighting in the Civil War, he came home and married a young woman from a neighboring plantation, Mary Louisa Moultrie, with whom he had twelve children. In February 1926, after fifty-six years of marriage, Mary Louisa died. One of Isaac’s daughters had to read the letter to her father, who was blind from glaucoma.

  Dear Mas’ Isaac … My father’s people were never free and they were never slaves, so far as the word slave may mean.

  The words may have touched something in the old man and eased his grief. Isaac saved the letter, which became part of the family archive. Generations later, when I encountered P. Henry Martin’s letter, none of the Balls knew any longer who he was, and no one could say where his kin might be living. With the help of a friend, I got on the phone to families named Martin in South Carolina and soon found the grandson of P. Henry Martin.

  Thomas Martin was a retired teacher and assistant principal. The first time we spoke, Mr. Martin told me he had been trying to find out more about his grandfather. P. Henry Martin had died in November 1933, when Thomas was only a few months old. But before his death, the elder Martin had written out a family tree, beginning with his own generation. Thomas Martin had been looking at the document, he said, and wondering about the past.

  Thomas Martin lived in a prosperous black neighborhood in Charleston, on a street lined with homes from the early 1900s. Many had porches, several had columns, and a few had a picket fence around the property line. Mr. Martin lived in the handsomest building on the block, a large white two-story house, with four tall columns holding up a distinctive pediment.

  The grandson of P. Henry Martin was in his
sixties, and carried himself with reserve. His face was long and serious, showing few laugh lines. He had a high brow, pronounced jowls, gray hair at the temples, and eyes that seemed melancholy. Mr. Martin wore a sweater pulled over a long-sleeved shirt, and dark trousers.

  I entered the big house through a living room with a fireplace. Various diplomas rested on the mantelpiece, advertising the degrees in higher education achieved by members of the family. In the dining room was a large table with king-sized chairs, and a fish tank with bright tropical fish. A vinyl easy chair squeaked as I lowered myself into it.

  Thomas Martin did not know that his ancestors came from a Ball plantation. He was soft-spoken, and I responded in kind, with careful words about the subject. I handed him the letter written by his grandfather, and he read it through to the end. Mr. Martin put down the letter, and repeated the words that caught my attention.

  “ ‘My father’s people were never free and they were never slaves,’ ” he said. “That’s a very poignant sentence.”

  Mr. Martin had a phlegmatic delivery that reminded me of a personality trait among some in my own family. He seemed taciturn and, as he read his grandfather’s words about slavery, sounded almost neutral. Perhaps he wanted to be polite, because we didn’t know each other, but the words surprised both of us.

  “My grandfather seems to have been a person who possessed a lot of gratitude,” said Mr. Martin, coming around to the idea. “Maybe they, his family, weren’t treated as the average slave.”

  Mr. Martin said that his grandfather had been a minister and schoolteacher. He lived for a time in Charleston, then in a country town a day or more by horse from the city. For income, he worked as a carpenter and bricklayer. As an ex-slave, he had an incomplete education; nevertheless, it was far better than that of the majority of former field hands. P. Henry Martin devoted himself to teaching and providing for the destitute children who walked off the plantations after the Civil War. Though Mr. Martin knew all this, he said he knew little about his grandfather’s early life.