by Edward Ball
After the French and Indian War, which ended by treaty in 1763, taxes fell on the colonies to support the British armies that remained in their midst. The Stamp Act of 1765 was supplanted by the Townshend Duties of 1767, which stirred a protest movement to ban imports to America. In between, the Declaratory Act of 1766, in which Parliament asserted sovereignty over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever,” angered American merchants. The Balls paid little mind, because taxes on paper, paint, and manufactured goods did not affect plantation grandees, whose black people made most everything consumed. And, since the family fortune came from rice exports to England, it would be unwise to risk upsetting the client whose business paid for one’s luxuries. It was probably against the better judgment of the Balls that in September 1774, delegates from around the colonies came together in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress and, defying the Crown’s taxation and policing measures, voted to ban most trade with Great Britain. When five South Carolina delegates threatened to walk out unless an exception to the embargo was made for rice exports, the grain was removed from the list of banned goods, and the Balls narrowly missed economic ruin.
The first member of the family to take an interest in the rebellion was the oldest son of Second Elias of Kensington, Elias Ball III, the one who—in his dotage thirty years later, ridden with gout—would be known as Old Mas’ ‘Lias. In 1775 he was still young (just twenty-three) and so it would be better here to call him Third Elias. A few months after the Continental Congress, a Carolina version, the Provincial Congress, was called in Charleston. Stepping forward to prevent more risks to the business, Third Elias ran for and won a seat.
In spring of 1775 the rebellion became linked in the minds of Southern whites with a threat to slavery. On May 3, a letter arrived in Charleston from a man named Arthur Lee, a Virginian then visiting London who was known to have antitax, or rebel, sympathies. Lee reported he had heard that King George’s ministers had been meeting about how to put down the resistance. The British government, Lee said, was discussing a new tactic, namely, to offer freedom to blacks who deserted their rebel owners and joined the king’s troops, which were bivouacked in the cities. In other words, if war came the British would call on the rice workers to revolt. News of the letter’s contents spread throughout the city. Five days later, on May 8, word came from Massachusetts that fighting had actually broken out. A pair of bloody battles between rebels and a British company had erupted three weeks earlier in the towns of Concord and Lexington. The rumors intensified in Charleston when, on May 29, the South Carolina Gazette published the text of a second letter, also from an American in London, also on the subject of black revolt. According to the latest hearsay, King George now planned to arm American slaves against their masters. “[S]eventy-eight thousand guns and bayonets,” wrote the anonymous correspondent, were soon “to be sent to America, to put into the hands of N*****s.” (The newspaper printed asterisks instead of the word “Negroes” so that black couriers would not be alerted by a word they were likely to know.) This latest report implied direct British backing of an uprising. For whites, what had started as a tax quarrel was now an issue of how to protect their own lives.
A few weeks after the warning about the “N*****s,” Third Elias decided the time had come to join a militia; he signed up with Job Marion’s Company, one of several private armies mobilizing in the crisis. “I have entered into a Volunteer Company,” he wrote to his brother John. “I am much in want of a gun to have a Bayonet fixed as my old piece is too short. I beg you will let me have yours … til we have better times [and] then I shall give you one equally as good.”
Other news from London told Third Elias that the old arrangements with workers were not necessarily permanent ones. In 1765, an American slave named James Somerset had gone to London with his owner, Charles Stewart. Stewart then left England without Somerset but later returned to London and tried to reclaim his property. The black man went to court to protest that he was now free and, in February 1772, the presiding justice, Lord Mansfield, agreed, ruling that as soon as a slave set foot on English soil, he or she became free. News of the case echoed through American drawing rooms—the first repudiation of forced work by the mother country and, in effect, the beginning of an antislavery cause that would eventually work its way across England and travel to America.
As whites armed themselves for the struggle, blacks did their own planning. In early 1775, the South Carolina Gazette reported an indictment against a white citizen for allowing his house to be used as a meeting place for black discussion. The citizen, Peter Hinds, was accused of bringing “Negro Preachers” into his living room, “where they deliver doctrines to large Numbers of Negroes, dangerous to and subversive of the Peace, Safety, and Tranquility of this Province.” The debates included the idea that the fight with London might mean emancipation.
White fear grew when news arrived that the governor of Virginia, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, had actually issued a freedom proclamation. Murray decreed that slaves who left their masters for the royal side would be set free, and it was reported that three hundred blacks had formed a regiment under Dunmore’s command, with special uniforms that bore the inscription “Liberty to Slaves.”
When a new royal governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, arrived in Charleston in mid-June 1775, he entered a city churning with white fear and black discontent. Campbell wrote to his superiors in England that “it was … reported and universally believed that to effect [a slave insurrection] … 14,000 stands of arms were actually on board the Scorpion, the sloop of war I came out in.” The governor was astonished at the level of white alarm. “Words … cannot express the flame that this occasioned amongst all ranks and degrees; the cruelty and savage barbarity of the scheme was the conversation of all companies.”
The rebel Carolina militias came under a committee, the Council of Safety, which directed them to harass Campbell and drill for war. Henry Laurens, the wealthy slave trader and Ball in-law, served as chair, and the Council of Safety quickly drafted a plan to defend the colony in the event of British attack. If the fight arrived by sea, Laurens argued, there would have to be an evacuation from plantations within twenty miles of the water. “All the negroes … should be removed upon the approach of the enemy … by which all communication will be cut off between the enemy in the town, and the negroes in the country.”
The administration of Governor Campbell could not contain the rebellion, and after three months Campbell realized he had no chance of holding power. In mid-September 1775, the governor moved with his entourage aboard the Tamar, a British sloop riding in the harbor. The Tamar and two warships then anchored themselves next to Sullivan’s Island, where Africans were quarantined around the pest house. Campbell’s little flotilla, five miles from the city, made the last enclave of the king’s authority in Charleston. Third Elias’s brother, fifteen-year-old John Ball, noted these events in a letter: “I dare say you know it very well there has been the dickens to pay about our Governor [Campbell] who is now found out to be an old Traitor. … [Last week] he went down on board the man of war.”
When Campbell’s ships anchored, black people, having heard of Lord Dunmore’s promise in Virginia, began to escape the plantations and head for Sullivan’s Island. They took over the pest house, evidently recruiting what slaves were there, and tried to get aboard the ships. By December 1775, about five hundred black fugitives (including some, perhaps, from Ball plantations) had camped on the island, building a village of huts in the woods. Governor Campbell, trying to wait it out, let everyone stay. In the eyes of the American rebels, the British were now conspiring with the slaves.
In late November Third Elias, the militiaman, wrote to his brother: “We are making all warlike preparations to ingage with the men of war wenever tha [they] think proper. … There is a twenty-four pounder [cannon] fixing up at the end of Mr. Laurens’ wharf. … [We may] go down & attack the men of war.”
The first fight of the Revolutionary War
in the South Carolina low country was an attack by white rebels on the campsite of unarmed blacks. As chairman of the Council of Safety, Henry Laurens ordered the assault. “Sir,” he wrote to Colonel William Moultrie, “[Y]ou are hereby ordered to detach two hundred men … to Sullivan’s Island, there to seize and apprehend a number of negroes. … The pest house to be burned and every kind of livestock to be driven off or destroyed.”
On December 19, a party of fifty-four soldiers, perhaps including Third Elias Ball, made its way to Sullivan’s Island. The raiders disguised themselves as Native people, wearing feathers and face paint, evidently because they didn’t want to be identified by Governor Campbell’s troops. The costumed whites killed several runaway slaves and burned their houses. Although most of the refugees had escaped into the woods, Henry Laurens gloated over what he called the raid’s success, saying that “it will serve to humble our Negroes in general & perhaps to mortify his Lordship [Governor Campbell] not a little.” A few days later, Campbell cut moorings and sailed for England, his three ships carrying an unknown number of escaped slaves.
Six months later, in June 1776, a flotilla of nine British warships under the command of Sir Peter Parker arrived off Charleston to retake the city. To control Sullivan’s Island was to control the narrow channel giving access to the port, and thus to dominate the city itself. By this time, rebels had buttressed and occupied a fort on the island near the old pest house. On June 28, in the battle of Fort Sullivan, Parker’s frigates tried to bombard their way past the fort and into the harbor. The 435 defenders fought back under the command of Colonel William Moultrie, who had led the earlier attack on the black fugitives. Failing to get past the island, Parker called off the siege. Ten days later the flotilla withdrew and sailed for New York. Royal authority collapsed, and the war left town for the next four years.
A first draft of the Declaration of Independence, debated in the Philadelphia Congress in June 1776, denounced the slave business. A committee of five delegates led by Thomas Jefferson presented a document that singled out King George III as the author of an incomprehensible crime. “[The King] has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” read the draft, “violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”
This passage did not sit well with South Carolina’s delegates to the convention. After delegate Edward Rutledge lobbied to delete it, the sentence was cut from the final document, to Jefferson’s long-standing disappointment. Still, the paradox of establishing the democratic ideal alongside a national system of forced labor began to dawn on American whites. The New England colonies, along with Pennsylvania and Delaware, outlawed the slave trade, and in April 1776 the Continental Congress banned the import of Africans to any of the thirteen colonies. They did so partly out of enlightened conscience, and partly to keep more collaborators away from the king’s troops.
Most of the Ball kin had no desire to change a society that placed them at the top, but there was at least one member of the family who believed the end of slavery was a goal of the rebellion. John Laurens, born in 1754, was the first son of Eleanor Ball and Henry Laurens. After his mother died in 1770, the sixteen-year-old was sent by his father to school in Europe. While his Ball cousins learned their lessons from tutors and in simple provincial classrooms, John went to London and Switzerland. As a student abroad, he seems to have come in contact with progressive political thought—Enlightenment notions of the social contract, individual liberty, and natural rights. Although I cannot say that John, in Switzerland, met François Voltaire, who lived near Geneva, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was Swiss-born, I suspect he may have read their works or at least encountered their followers. Whatever the source, John Laurens returned to America from Europe in April 1777 possessed of a remarkably broad mind.
At twenty-three, John was handsome, articulate, cosmopolitan. By this time, fighting had spread through the Northeast, and John’s father, Henry, had become a national figure. Using the influence of the Laurens name, the pupil secured a position as an aide-de-camp with General George Washington. The fact that the young man’s mother was named Ball, and so was Washington’s, did not hinder his search for employment, either. (George Washington’s mother, born in Virginia, was a woman named Mary Ball, although the Virginia Ball family came from a different part of England than the South Carolina clan.) John Laurens began traveling with the revolutionary command. By late 1777, he felt comfortable enough with Washington, who was commander of the Continental Army, to propose to him a new phase in the war. Philadelphia had fallen and France had not yet entered the fight on the side of the Americans. The future looked doubtful. John’s idea was to raise a black rebel regiment in South Carolina. As he described it to Washington, black men who enlisted would receive their freedom after a tour of duty. In February 1778, while at the bleak winter camp in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, John Laurens wrote a letter to his father on the subject. Henry Laurens was elected president of the Continental Congress that year, and his influence over the affairs of the United States was great. Between them, father and son might change the outcome of the war.
“A well chosen body of 5000 black men,” John Laurens wrote, “properly officer’d, to act as light troops, in addition to our present establishment, might give us decisive success in the next campaign.” As implicit criticism of his father, the slave trader, John added, “I have long deplored the wretched state of these men, and considered in their history, the bloody wars excited in Africa, to furnish America with slaves—the groans of despairing multitudes, toiling for the luxuries of merciless tyrants.”
These were strange views for a young man of privilege, and the elder Laurens wrote to his son, wondering about the reaction of General Washington to the scheme. John Laurens wrote back, “You ask, what is the general’s opinion, upon this subject? He is convinced, that the numerous tribes of blacks in the southern parts of the continent, offer a resource to us that should not be neglected. With respect to my particular plan, he only objects to it, with the arguments of pity for a man who would be less rich than he might be.” In other words, Washington wanted to use blacks in the war but balked at giving freedom to black soldiers because their owners would never accept a deal that would rob them of property. Henry Laurens, his mind crowded with the politics of getting rich landowners to risk everything in rebellion, rejected his son’s plan. “There is not a Man in America of your opinion,” he wrote back. The dismissive father advised John to return to South Carolina and forget about his “Negro scheme.” He concluded, “You will have many advantages … in raising a Regiment of White Men.”
John Laurens left Valley Forge, returned to Charleston, and presented his “Negro scheme” to South Carolina’s Provincial Congress. The representatives, like John’s cousin Third Elias, were appalled, and many seem to have worried that the gallant and worldly soldier might be able to pull it off. Frightened, the delegates debated a measure to surrender Charleston to the British and take South Carolina out of the war in the event black troops were actually allowed to serve.
Returning to the front, John Laurens fought in various battles and was named a colonel. He traveled to France, raised money from the courtiers of Versailles for the Continental Army, came back to South Carolina, and got himself elected to the local assembly. Cloaked with his new status as an officer and diplomat, Colonel Laurens again brought the issue before the Carolina legislature, but this time he was shouted down. He wrote to George Washington to describe what had happened: “[I was] drowned out by the howlings of a triple-headed monster, in which prejudice, avarice and pusillanimity were united.”
Three months after his last attempt to enlist black soldiers, John Laurens was killed in a skirmish with British troops on the Combahee River in South Carolina. It was August 1782; the war was almost over. He was twenty-seven.
Another defiant
thinker, the slave who would become known as Boston King, was born in 1760 on White Hall plantation, twenty-eight miles northwest of Charleston. White Hall was a 526-acre tract whose main house stood on a bluff not far from the narrow stream of the Ashley River. The names of Boston’s parents have not survived, but during his last years, Boston described them in his memoir. His father was born in Africa, although the son does not say where, and after his capture became the black driver of the work crews at White Hall, with much influence over the fields. Boston’s mother was a nurse and seamstress who looked after the sick in the plantation infirmary and made clothes for field hands.
In the 1760s a girl named Ann Ball, the youngest child of John Coming Ball and his wife Catherine Gendron, was growing up on Hyde Park plantation, twenty miles from White Hall. Within a few years, Ann’s life would cross that of Boston, when she became one of his owners. In 1771, Ann turned eighteen and married Richard Waring, a twenty-three-year-old scion of a well-established rice family on the Ashley River. In the words of one memoirist, Richard Waring was “a gentleman of liberal education, benevolent heart, engaging deportment, and friendly disposition,” while Ann made “a courteous and cheerful companion.” The ceremony took place at Ann’s home. Two years after the wedding, when Boston was thirteen, the owner of White Hall sold his property to the young Mr. and Mrs. Waring. The couple took possession of the land and people in early 1774, and, making the purchase their own, renamed the place Tranquil Hill, evidently for the bluff on which the house stood. With the former Ann Ball in the big house, Boston became a Ball slave.
