Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The Americans lost the fight but won back control of the countryside. Strawberry and Silk Hope plantations went back to their owners, and the British retreated to Charleston, never to come up the river again. When the occupation ended, the Ball plantations were wrecked—storehouses empty, buildings damaged, rice fields gone to seed. And everywhere the slave streets looked abandoned.

  The fugitive workers would be known as black Loyalists, because they remained loyal to the king’s cause. Most worked for the British Army as laborers or laundresses, messengers or stablehands, though some attached themselves to officers, whom they served as valets and cooks. Others were kidnapped by soldiers who treated them as loot from the war, eventually to be sold. A lucky few—among them Boston, from Tranquil Hill—managed to get completely free of all masters. Boston had taken the surname “King,” maybe in deference to King George III, who had guaranteed his freedom.

  When Cornwallis finally gave up, the general marched his army north toward the final battles of the war, at Yorktown, Virginia, and perhaps one or two thousand black fugitives went with him. Boston King found another way out, boarding a warship bound for New York. In the memoir he later published, King recalls his flight from South Carolina with unemotional calm: “I went to Charles-Town, and entered on board a man of war. [W]e were going to Chesepeak-bay … stayed in the bay two days, and then sailed for New-York, where I went on shore.”

  The Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a twenty-page autobiography printed in Britain in 1798, represents one of the earliest pieces of writing in English composed by an ex-slave. Years later, when the abolition movement gained momentum, hundreds of life histories would be printed under the names of people who escaped. The story of Boston King predates all but a few of them. In his memoir, King says little about his education but mentions that his father used to read to his family. “He worked in the field till about three in the afternoon, and then went into the woods and read till sunset,” King wrote. It was a rare thing that a slave could read and write, but by whatever means, Boston’s father had become literate. It is likely he taught his son something of what he knew.

  Boston King wrote his memoir near the end of his life, and there is little in his tale about the Ball family. As a fugitive, he was careful not to say much about his former owners, since the rest of his people were left behind on the plantation and could be dealt with harshly by an angry reader. Rather than dwell on his childhood, King focused on scenes from his long journey out of captivity.

  “[In New York] I went into the jail to see a lad whom I was acquainted with,” he wrote. “When I saw him, his feet were fastened in the stocks, and at night both his hands. This was a terrifying sight to me, as I expected to meet with the same kind of treatment, if taken in the act of attempting to regain my liberty.” Plantation owners clamored for the return of their property, some coming to New York from far down South to make a search. The Continental Army helped masters recapture people from behind British lines, and King remembered these kidnappings, which could take place without warning:

  [W]e saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North-carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds. Many of the slaves had very cruel masters, so that the thoughts of returning home with them embittered life to us. For some days we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes.

  For several months King found himself again taken captive, this time by whites in Brunswick, New Jersey. Then he escaped once more. Held by rebel forces, Brunswick lay against the Raritan River, while the British camp stood several miles away, on Staten Island. King wrote:

  I … observed, that when it was low water the people waded across the river; tho’ at the same time I saw there were guards posted at the place to prevent the escape of prisoners and slaves. … [At the end of a Sunday, his captors in bed, King made his way to the bank.] [A]bout one o’clock in the morning I went down to the riverside, and found the guards were either asleep or in the tavern. I instantly entered into the river, but when I was a little distance from the opposite shore, I heard the sentinels disputing among themselves: One said, ‘I am sure I saw a man cross the river.’ Another replied, ‘There is no such thing.’ It seems they were afraid to fire at me, or make an alarm, lest they should be punished for their negligence. … I traveled till about five in the morning. … [King hid himself the following day, and the next night, stole a boat.] I proceeded forward, thro’ bushes and marshes, near the road, for fear of being discovered. When I came to the river, opposite Staten Island, I found a boat; and altho’ it was very near a whale-boat, yet I ventured into it, and cutting the rope, got safe over. The [British] commanding officer, when informed of my case, gave me a passport, and I proceeded to New-York.

  When the United States claimed victory over the British in the South, the Ball Loyalists were called to account for having sided with the enemy. In early 1782, Wambaw Elias, his family, and at least two other Ball Tories huddled in Charleston with the defeated British. Word came that Wambaw plantation and its people were to be seized by the Americans in an act of vigilante justice. On February 24, in a last desperate act, Wambaw Elias took off into the country with a detachment of British cavalry, aiming to capture the people on the Wambaw slave street and carry them to Charleston. Arriving at the plantation, the company tried to corral the unarmed blacks, and the embittered colonel managed to kidnap some workers, but most escaped into the woods.

  Wambaw Elias knew the British cause was lost and he would soon have to leave South Carolina. The raid having failed, Elias settled on another plan to force his slaves to follow him out of the country. He sent instructions to an overseer still at Wambaw to withhold food from the black people, but the overseer evidently refused the order and continued to distribute provisions. In a letter, Wambaw Elias complained about the white man’s defiance: “[R]ice and corn [were] supplyd my Negroes contrary to my positive order. I directed they should not be supplyd in order that I might get them down [to Charleston], but my order was not regarded.” Colonel Ball believed that by starving people he could make them obey.

  The slaves at Wambaw were next attacked by the Americans. A company of rebel militia went to the plantation and seized several dozen workers, but the majority once again fled into the forest. The soldiers took the unlucky captives down the Santee River to Georgetown, on the coast north of Charleston. There, on June 22, 1782, fifty-two former Wambaw workers, consisting of nine families, were separated from each other and sold. The American patriots took home £1,553 for their work.

  The sale left a final group of perhaps a hundred still on the plantation. These families, who had twice evaded capture, were finally sold by their owner, Wambaw Elias, to his cousin and fellow Tory, Third Elias. Evidently with the help of British soldiers, Colonel Ball grabbed the final group and hauled them to Comingtee. Third Elias of Kensington signed promissory notes for £8,000 and took possession of the black village. With this deal Wambaw Elias had the guaranty of money, and he and his wife, Catherine, and their children fled with the British after they surrendered Charleston. The other Ball Loyalists, who had acted less fiercely for the king, stayed behind.

  In mid-December 1782, a flotilla assembled in Charleston harbor for the final evacuation. In addition to Colonel Ball and family, between 5,500 and 6,000 black Loyalists climbed aboard. Some were runaways hoping to get their freedom; others were captives of British officers, new masters; still more belonged to fleeing whites, who had no intention of freeing them. As fugitive blacks, they had no papers and no defenses, and their destiny would not be sweet. Most who left seem to have gone to Florida, which was soon to be given to Spain, and to the Crown’s colony of Jamaica. Between 1775 and 1787, the black population of Jamaica rose by sixty thousand, a good number coming from the United States. In the Caribbean, a few Carolinians lived out their lives in freedom, and some stayed under the rule of new bosses, as servants. Many, however, were put back into the labor
market, seized by traders who sold them to plantations around the islands.

  Not surprisingly, Wambaw Elias and family did better. After a period in Florida, they made their way to England. Wambaw Elias was the first member of the Ball clan to go back to Britain since Red Cap had arrived in America in 1698, but by this time three generations had passed, and Red Cap’s American descendants had lost all ties. Wambaw Elias arrived in the mother country as a stranger. He did not make much of an effort to renew family connections. Perhaps he was unsure of himself, or he might have worried that the Devon Balls, who had never tasted American wealth such as his, would be beneath him. He wrote simply, “I enquired when passing through Devonshire about people of our Name & was told their was several familys in good sircumstanceis.”

  In England, Wambaw Elias seems to have missed wielding the power of an American master. “The servants [here] are a very troublesome sett of people,” he wrote to his Loyalist cousin in Charleston. But Colonel Ball was relieved to find that a royal commission had been established to compensate Loyalist Americans for their lost estates. Elias filed a claim for Wambaw, asking for £23,573 from the Crown and locating witnesses among other Carolinians who might support his story about what he was once worth. As he waited for his hearing, Elias wrote frequent letters to his cousin in America, always asking about the £8,000 due for the last Wambaw slaves. Finally, the hearing was called, and among other witnesses a man named Francis Peyre proved to be a good talker. Peyre corroborated the colonel’s claim but added in passing that “Mr Ball was always ashamed to possess below 2 and 300 Negroes.” Whatever his shame, Wambaw Elias was given £12,700 sterling from the British Treasury, and a lifetime pension. The colonel and his family would live well on this bounty, and on the money they finally got from America for the Wambaw people.

  Moving to the outskirts of Bristol, Wambaw Elias set himself up as a rice sales agent, or factor. He sold Carolina rice on the British market, for a commission, and exported tools and manufactured goods to America. His clients were the handful of Southern planters he had managed to keep as friends. Colonel Ball’s children married into English high gentry families, and for decades he wrote a stream of vituperative letters to relatives in South Carolina, criticizing their new nation. Wambaw Elias never returned to America, and died thirty-eight years later, in 1822.

  On December 31, 1781, Henry Laurens was released from the Tower of London in exchange for Lord Cornwallis, who had surrendered in October and was captive in the United States. In 1782, Laurens went to Paris, where he met the American delegation that negotiated the preliminary terms of the peace. In France, Laurens joined his old colleagues from the Continental Congress—John Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, and Franklin’s son, William Temple Franklin—and, after some haggling, the treaty was signed. (The formal Treaty of Paris was signed September 3, 1783.) An American-born painter, forty-five-year-old Benjamin West, depicted a meeting of the preliminary negotiations. The painting shows the Americans around a table, with Laurens standing behind Benjamin Franklin, a copy of the terms unrolled in front of them. It is a curious work, the left half of the canvas full of the Americans, the right side nearly blank. West abandoned the painting midway through (and, though he lived another thirty-five years, he never went back to it). He earned a rich living from British patrons, most of whom no doubt scorned the new republic, and evidently there was some grousing about this painting that celebrated the revolutionaries. On the right of the canvas, West had planned room for the figure of Richard Oswald, Henry Laurens’s onetime business partner in London, who had helped to get Laurens out of the Tower and who represented the British in the Paris talks. Oswald, a slave trader born in Scotland, held leases on Bunce Island, in the Sierra Leone River in West Africa, the prison from which Laurens, in Charleston, extracted many workers, some of whom he sold to his Ball in-laws. West depicted Laurens, himself fresh from prison, as patchy and ghostlike.

  Back in Charleston, Laurens’s nephew Third Elias Ball prepared for the worst. He had switched sides in the middle of the war, from rebel to Loyalist, and now the victors looked for revenge. The South Carolina legislature passed a resolution that Comingtee plantation would be confiscated as punishment against the Ball family. A few months later Third Elias sought and won a reversal of the judgment on the defense that he had started out the fight with the Americans. The reprieve angered Charleston whites. Third Elias wrote to a relative:

  [P]eople in my situation … we are in general lookd on as black sheep. … I was told by a man I was slitely acquainted with that there was upwards of 600 men in the town was determind we should not remain in the State above ten days & that handbills was published by them in consequence of those determinations. I felt very quare [queer] on this information. … I wish my concerns would permit my going to England.

  In the end, Third Elias was not lynched. The threat of revenge faded, and although he longed for safety in the mother country, Third Elias established himself at Limerick plantation. His brother, John Ball, the rebel, settled down with his wife, Jane, on Kensington. The two siblings got over their political differences and began to work together once again.

  A slave list made the year after the war names only 123 workers belonging to the brothers, though before the Revolution there would have been twice that number. John and Third Elias had lost much. Because so many had fled, the Ball slaves were now young, mostly in their teens, or old, some of them no doubt wishing they had taken their chances with the British. A letter written by Third Elias gives a sense of the situation after the war: “[S]ettling my plantations almost anew, [I am] plagued almost out of my life with the negroes not knowing how to work or an unwillingness in them and running away.”

  In the summer of 1783, in New York, British ships loaded with soldiers and black Loyalists prepared for the last evacuations from America. At least three fugitives who had fled the Balls in South Carolina, and made their way eight hundred miles north, readied to leave. Because American masters considered the escaped workers to be stolen property, before the ships were allowed to sail, the United States demanded a list of the runaways in hopes of later getting reparations from Parliament. Among the names on the list is that of Frank Symons. Symons, forty-five, was described by an American inspector as “formerly slave to Edward Simmons [of] Charleston SoCara.” Edward was the husband of Lydia Ball Simons, who had grown up at Kensington, and the couple lived in the townhouse Lydia inherited from Second Elias Ball. Frank Symons had apparently made his escape from the Ball house, then traveled up the East Coast, where he boarded the British frigate, the William & Mary. Another person making a getaway was twenty-year-old Polly Shubrick, who had escaped from Thomas Shubrick, a nephew of Elizabeth Ball. Polly Shubrick, only fifteen when she left Charleston, boarded the Providence.

  On July 31, at a dock in New York, the fugitive Boston King boarded the Abondance, in the company of 132 others. When King walked onto the gangplank, he was checked off by an inspector, who took down this description: “Boston King, 23, stout fellow, formerly the property of Rich. Waring of Charleston, South Carolina … left him 4 years ago.” Aboard ship, Boston King was accompanied by his wife of three years, Violet King, an escaped slave from Wilmington, North Carolina, whom he had met in New York.

  “[S]hips were fitted out, and furnished with every necessary for conveying us to Nova Scotia,” wrote King years later.

  The fate of Boston King, his wife, and the other New York fugitives would be somewhat better than that of the Charleston runaways who found themselves recaptured in the Caribbean. Nova Scotia was then a British province that did not join the new republic and that Britain had chosen as a place to relocate black Americans. On this cold peninsula lived a group of Native people known as the Mi’kmaq. Ten thousand French peasants, whose families dated from the time when Nova Scotia was a colony of France, had been exiled in 1755, and their houses stood empty.

  The black fugitives, arriving in Nova Scotia in the summer, congregated in the settlements of Bir
chtown, Preston, and Tracadie. Boston and Violet King, and the other Loyalists, met a cold reception from local whites, but eventually King found work as a carpenter and, later, a fisherman. The couple lived in the black village at Shelburne, then moved to Birchtown. At some point in his journey, Boston King experienced a religious conversion and became a Christian. Perhaps his rare good fortune had ignited his faith, which grew so strong that in Nova Scotia he began to preach.

  “In the year 1785, I began to exhort both in families and prayer-meetings, and the Lord graciously afforded me his assisting presence,” King wrote.

  King became a Methodist minister, founded a church whose congregation consisted of escaped blacks, and became a leader among the black Loyalists. Although he had survived a harrowing escape and had to struggle to make his way in a strange land, he believed his situation to be far better than that of some. “I found my mind drawn out to commiserate my poor brethren in Africa,” he wrote. “As I had not the least prospect at that time of ever seeing Africa, I contented myself with pitying and praying for the poor benighted inhabitants of that country which gave birth to my forefathers.”