Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The white inhabitants of Nova Scotia did not welcome the influx of black Americans, and as the years passed, the lives of the immigrants worsened. Land that was promised to them never materialized, and the black villages were subjected to attacks. For their part, many workers raised on large, fecund plantations could not adjust to the small plots and cold soils of the north. In 1792, nine years after the evacuation to Nova Scotia, the British government called for another resettlement plan that would bring some twelve hundred people to a new colony, in Africa.

  The destination of this new exodus would be a port where the king had influence, a peninsula on the western bulge of the continent, at Sierra Leone. Though Sierra Leone was a major slave center, home to Bunce Island, the British organizers of the colony included several abolitionists who hoped to stamp out the human market with the settlement of free blacks. Boston and Violet King, who were more comfortable than most in Nova Scotia and under no obligation to leave, signed on to the scheme. “Their intention being, as far as possible in their power, to put a stop to the abominable slave-trade,” King wrote, “I resolved to embrace the opportunity of visiting that country.”

  A flotilla was outfitted to set sail, and at age thirty-two, accompanied by Violet and many from his congregation, Boston King walked onto yet another gangplank. On March 6, 1792, he and the other colonists arrived on the western shore of Africa, once again to begin a new life. Boston King became one of the first citizens of a society founded by ex-slaves, a founding father, so to speak. The colonists called their settlement Freetown.

  Some years after he arrived in Africa, Boston King sat down to write the story of his unusual life. He had seen much and had become something of a weary man from all of it. “It is by no means an agreeable task to write an account of my life,” King began. Thinking back to his old masters, Ann Ball and Richard Waring, King offered a stark assessment: “In the former part of my life I suffered greatly from the cruelty and injustice of the Whites, which induced me to look upon them, in general, as our enemies.”

  12

  THE WIDTH OF THE REALM

  There is a joke in my family about the way we used to marry each other: Each time a Ball baby was born on the plantation, his or her parents would hold the infant up to the light. If they could see through the child, the next person in line to marry was told to pick someone from farther away.

  Marriage between cousins was common in the planter families—rather, it was expected. To choose a mate from inside the cousinhood seemed right, because a wedding within the clan kept intact estates and black villages that would otherwise be divided by fresh blood. Since other colonial families did the same, the fund of suitable mates never grew much. Anthropologists call it endogamy—the prohibition of marriage outside the group, in this case the caste of slave owners. The Anglican Church, citing the book of Leviticus, banned sex between close kin. Nearly all the rice families, including the Balls, were careful Episcopalians, but they did not mind trespassing the old Mosaic law. So they married each other, as an aunt of mine used to say, “until they all grew tails.”

  The habit ended when the plantations died. My father told me that when he was a young man, he dated one of his first cousins. The two went to dances, tea parties, events at the local college—and they might have married had they not been cousins. When my father met my mother, Janet Rowley, it was in her hometown, New Orleans, some seven hundred miles from Charleston and the watery Ball blood. His choice to marry someone “from off,” as it was called, was part of a new family trend, one that developed in the twentieth century and saved us from genetic backwash.

  The third generation of the Balls came into its role after the American Revolution. Earlier, I described how John Ball, in the middle of the war, married his first cousin, Jane Ball, daughter of John’s uncle, John Coming Ball. Jane was a delicate-looking woman from Hyde Park, the plantation next to John’s own, Kensington. She seems to have been devout and dutiful, to judge from her letters, which dwell on the subject of God and her happiness as a mother. Jane’s health gave her trouble throughout life, however. Sometime in her thirties, she developed an uncontrolled swelling in one hand. The hand grew so large, and so painful, that Jane was obliged to keep it on a pillow whenever she sat at a table. “[M]y hand has prevented me any social intercourse with my Neighbors,” she wrote a relative, “being [that I am] confined to the House.” Jane’s husband, a practical man, thought the solution would be for Jane to give up a few fingers. “Your mother has been very poorly with those unfortunate fingers of hers [which] have continually increased in size,” John told one of his sons. “I am sure there is one cure & that is, to get them cut off … but she can’t bear to hear of it & I am afraid will never stand the amputating knife.”

  John Ball, the former dandy, was a gourmand with an appetite for large living. In a painting he commissioned about 1800, he appears with grape-red cheeks and intelligent eyes, a full head of red-brown hair, and a satisfied smirk. I can only guess at his weight. Once, while vacationing in Newport, Rhode Island, John wrote a relative, “I was too fat before [and] coming here will, & does increase it, which encumbers me vastly. … I believe if I once get to Kensington again it will be difficult to move me.” By 1790 John and Jane Ball, approaching thirty, had five sons.

  Third Elias, John’s older brother, lived at Limerick, a half-hour walk from Kensington. The only image of Third Elias—or Old Mas’ ‘Lias—dates from his childhood, when a portrait of him was made dressed as a little lord, with a glamorous coat, haughty posture, and blond curls. Although Third Elias never married, I believe he had a companion in a slave woman named Nancy. At his death, possessed of hundreds of people, Third Elias gave freedom to this single woman: “[Nancy] shall be permitted … to reside in the House she at Present Occupies, with the use of her Garden, & be supported on the Plantation with Provisions, during her life, and … on the first day of March in every Year, so long as she shall live, [my nephew] shall pay her, in good & lawful Money, the sum of one hundred dollars.” Manumission accompanied by money was a rare thing. A pension almost never came as a simple gesture of kindness but rather was the sign of a special relationship. Every subsequent spring, the nephew noted in his ledger that he had dutifully paid Nancy’s income, proving that the Balls took her seriously, and that exceptions to the rules of cousin-marriage might be tolerated.

  On August 8, 1786, when Second Elias Ball had died at Kensington at age seventy-six, his will had left two plantations to his eldest son, Third Elias, two to his younger, John, and a house in Charleston to his daughter, Lydia. In the will, the old man had advised his heirs to do one of two things with their money, either to lend it out at interest or to “buy Young Slaves.”

  A few days after the funeral, twenty-six-year-old John Ball sat down to write a memoir of his kindred, a little ode to his own blood. He titled the eight-page manuscript “A Short History of the Family of the Balls.” In the handwritten text, John recounted the story of Red Cap’s immigration to America, described each of Red Cap’s children and grandchildren, and added a mandate to his descendants to write their own memoirs “for the satisfaction of posterity.” John’s little bit of literature was a sign of the high role that the family saw to be theirs. “I hope one of my sons will put this work into better language,” he wrote, “and continue the genealogy, with an injunction for its continuation from generation to generation.”

  With their father’s death, John and Third Elias divided “their people.” The Revolutionary War had depopulated the rice fields, and the number of slaves at Kensington stood at 123. The brothers’ aunt, Judith Ball, had died recently on Hyde Park, leaving thirty-eight people, who went to the hands of her children. On each of some five other plantations, between fifty and a hundred people lived as the property of Ball cousins and kin. On January 22, 1787, John and Third Elias summoned the remaining Kensington workers. The brothers evidently mustered the village into a line, then walked along the row, studying the black bodies, assigning each person
a value, the better to make a division. When the process was finished, Third Elias marched off to Limerick with sixty-two people, valued at £2,790, and John ordered the remaining sixty-one back to their cabins.

  In 1790, the first census of the United States recorded a national population of 3,929,214. Of these, 697,624 were black slaves, or about one in six people. Among the more than ninety-six thousand households in the new country that included slaves, nearly eighty thousand were in the South.

  With their conspicuous wealth, even if depleted, the Balls saw themselves in the mainstream of the nation’s history; but things had changed in the North. At the dawn of the United States, the English writer Samuel Johnson wisecracked about the Americans, “How is it that we hear the loudest yells for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” After the Declaration of Independence, the country began to answer. In 1785, the New York Manumission Society was formed—and John Jay, a signer of the peace treaty with Britain, was appointed its president. Whereas in South Carolina slaves confiscated from people who had opposed the Revolution were sold, in New York individuals in the same category were now freed. Schools for black children opened in Philadelphia and New Jersey. In Pennsylvania, a group calling itself the Abolition Society began agitating for the end of the whole system, and similar associations soon took shape in Delaware and Rhode Island. By 1790, each of the New England states had passed laws that gradually or immediately abolished human property. That year, Boston became the first city in the United States with no slaves at all.

  To the Ball family and friends, it appeared that a menace was gathering above the Mason-Dixon line, the border that separated Maryland from Pennsylvania. Instead of stonewalling, however, the family first responded to these changes and life began to get a little easier down home. To judge from his correspondence, John Ball heard the message of humanity and even philosophized about the different political climate. Writing to one of his sons, John offered a new theory of the work system, one that combined compassion with exploitation and emphasized the duty of the master toward his people:

  [I]f revolutionary principles do not prevail to the destruction of southern property, you may enjoy the good things of this world & relieve many of your distress’d brethren. —feed the poor & clothe the naked—but always have in mind that our first charitable attentions are due to our slaves—cause the sick to be well nursed and attended—the young, aged, and decrepid to be clothed & fed with the same care as the most useful—the well to be treated with mildness humanity and justice—consider their situation and strive to make the bitter portion of slavery as comfortable as the local situation of your native state will admit.

  In the wake of the Declaration of Independence, the Balls took comfort in a new explanation of their world. The plantations had a harsh beginning, yes, but things had moderated; and in the place of grasping violence there had developed a society based on a wise paternalism. To be a slave owner now, after the war, was to be something like a strict father, demanding with one hand, rewarding with the other.

  In this period, letters between people in the big houses speak more noticeably about the workers’ health, and show a new degree of concern. “I hope Hagar and all the sick are getting better,” Jane Ball wrote in one of many notes. “I am sorry to hear there is so much sickness [at the house] in Hasell Street. It must have been a complete hospital in our yard.” It wasn’t only talk. At the beginning of the nation, the Balls turned some of their profits toward better medical care on the slave street. In the past, rice planters used to double as physicians. “[M]y father in his day had been very expert with the Lancet,” John Ball told a relative. Plantation medicine once consisted largely of bleeding, the practice of cutting the flesh with a blade, or lancet, usually at the affected part of the body. Now, however, trained doctors brought a trunkful of cures. Previously, a single epidemic of smallpox might carry a whole village to the grave, but now the Balls took care to protect their slaves against infectious disease. For example, Alexander Garden, a physician employed by John Ball, used the new smallpox vaccine to inoculate numerous people on Kensington—charging a high price.

  The family had hired doctors before, but never under contract. Back River was a plantation owned by John’s twenty-seven-year-old cousin, John Coming Ball, a war veteran on the British side. John Coming had a reputation in the family for fecklessness, but after the truce he acquired Back River, a twelve-hundred-acre tract with about eighty people, and, belying his poor fame, opened an account with a physician in the county, Samuel McCormick. For the next several years, McCormick made regular visits to Back River, and left bills that show the changes in medicine.

  In February 1785, field hands Pompey and Binah evidently picked up some bacteria that opened sores and inflamed their skin. McCormick gave them each an “antipsoric ointment” to calm their itching. Binah’s condition went away, but Pompey’s lingered. On a return call, McCormick’s answer was an “ointment lint dressing.” Three weeks later one sore needed further attention, and McCormick applied more dressing, but Pompey’s wound still did not heal. The doctor came back a fourth time and applied “ceraic ointment,” a stiff dressing made of beeswax dissolved in alcohol and mixed with lard. After that Pompey’s skin seems to have healed, or else the patient got tired of McCormick’s constant handling. Intestinal worms were a common ailment, especially among the young, many of whom died from them. To one girl, McCormick gave “3 anthelmintic powders,” hoping to kill the parasites. When a field hand named Marcus fell ill, perhaps with a flu, the doctor thought some strong purges would bring him back. One day, in two rapid swipes, he gave Marcus “a vomit” followed by “aperient salts” that emptied his bowels. The diarrheic purge seems to have been one of the doctor’s favored prescriptions, handed out dozens of times.

  In addition to such violent treatments, which spread as much pain as repair, the Ball slaves had alternative medicines—cures brought from West Africa and mingled with Native American medicine. At one point, John Ball wrote a friend for advice about dysentery, which could quickly kill a person with its bloody diarrhea and dehydration. A bit later, he received the answer that a cure might be found in his own backyard. “[T]he plant [I] mentioned is the Binnay, which is cultivated in almost every plantation in [South Carolina] by our Negroes for their own use,” the friend wrote. “They commonly pound the seed and parch it, and when thus prepared its taste is exactly like our parched ground nuts; they also use it frequently to make soup.” The Balls were probably aware of the non-chemical medicine and previously had avoided it; now, from time to time, they began to turn to black doctors themselves. On one occasion white physicians apparently did not know what to do after a field hand was struck by a poisonous snake. John later noted in his account book that he personally “paid Mrs. Motte’s black man Jack for curing a fellow of a snake bite.”

  There is evidence that among the black doctors who did business on the Ball plantations, some may have had an actual role as priests. One trail of religion would seem to go back to the powerful Yoruba culture of the coasts around the Niger delta or, alternatively, to the vicinity of the Congo River. At three Ball places—Limerick, Mepkin, and Pimlico—archeological digs on the slave streets have brought up small clay pots that healers may well have used to prepare medicines. The Bakongo people live in a region near the old slave ports of Angola, from which tens of thousands came to South Carolina. Bakongo culture dominated the African coast at the time the Balls bought most of their workers. In Bakongo practice, almighty God, Nzambi, has a power that can be influenced through medicine. Priests or mediums make sacred medicines called minkisi, concoctions of plants, in clay pots about the size of half a cantaloupe.

  In the 1790s, John Ball paid Robin, a free person of color, as a plantation doctor. Robin’s first patient seems to have been a woman named Hagar. In 1795, John had leased Hagar from a neighbor, and during her tour of duty, Hagar slept with a Ball slave who was carrying a sexual disease. Hagar’s owner, Joseph Willingham, asked Mr. Ball to hire
Robin for a cure that white medicine could not provide. John later wrote Willingham to report that he had done so: “I am to pay Robin 30 [shillings] for curing Hagar of the venereal disease (by your desire).” Robin must have done something right, because records show that he stayed on around Kensington for another twenty-five years. During that time Robin saved money from his work, which he deposited with John Ball, who kept a careful account of it.

  The plantation system held on after the Revolution, despite its weakened state. John, the rebel, and Third Elias, the Tory, had put aside their differences in order to rebuild the family dynasty. At first, some of the Balls teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, and Third Elias wrote a cousin several times with the complaint that he couldn’t pay his debts. It appeared that the old ways might be forced to evolve—perhaps in the direction of free labor—but a change in farming methods intervened to help reinforce the previous arrangements.

  Earlier, I described how, in the time of Red Cap, most rice was grown in fields carved out of the inland swamps, and black workers irrigated the crop from reserves of water created by dammed streams. Some plantation owners worried that these fields had been exhausted. Meanwhile, miles of untouched marshes lined the channels of the Cooper River. Each day at high tide, the backflow from the sea swelled the river and flooded the marsh; at ebb the water dropped, exposing the mudflats. After the war, planters looked on the mud at the edge of their property and saw it as potential cropland.

  Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, the Balls and other planters directed their slaves to move the rice fields from the swamps down to the banks of the stream, creating fields that made use of the tides. The process had begun in some places before the war, but now it proceeded apace. To reclaim the marsh as arable land required earthworks. First, the workers constructed levees, or rice banks, around rectangular plots laid out in the mudflat. A rice bank stood about six feet high and had one or more openings so that tidewater could be admitted to the field. The flow was controlled by a large wooden sluice, or trunk, which resembled a guillotine with the dimensions of a barn door. When opened at high tide, the trunk allowed the tide to flood the field. With the trunk closed, the water stayed on the crop. Opened again at ebb, the trunk drained the plot and the field dried hard.