by Edward Ball
It may have been that this method, tidal rice farming, was brought to America by West Africans, who showed the technique to the Carolina landlords. A drawing made by an English traveler in Sierra Leone in the year 1794 shows rectangular rice fields surrounded by banks, with a portal for water to pour in and out. Tidal agriculture would not have been taught to Africans by whites, because the traffic of culture between Africa and America moved in a single direction. Before tidewater farming, each field had to be weeded by hand with a hoe. By watering the plots and trapping the flood, workers now suffocated some of the weeds in a bath known as the “long water,” while the rice plants standing above the flow survived. Tidal farming saved weeks of stooped-over hoeing during the season, and fewer workers were needed to cope with more land.
Third Elias had more people than his brother. He had bought about a hundred workers in a deal with his Tory cousin Wambaw Elias, before the cousin fled for his life and for England. These workers transformed Limerick. A map of the property from 1786 shows 95 acres of rice fields in production, while a second map from a decade later shows 135 acres of fields, nearly half again as much. Third Elias, who also owned Comingtee, was complimented by his kin for converting the land. “Your present plan on improving and cultivating your tide lands at the T, I approve of much,” a cousin wrote to him. “You might remember I strongly recommended it to you.”
The work of making the new fields fell heavily on the remaining Ball workers, because merely to build the rice banks was a vast project. First, the workers cleared the marsh of trees and brush. Then, men, and probably women as well, dug canals and cleared ditches on the edge of the fields. Next, they moved hundreds of tons of earth by oxcart and shaped the miles of banks by hand. Finally, carpenters constructed dozens of the big rice trunks required for irrigation. By 1800, the combined rice banks on the plantations along the east branch of the Cooper River measured some fifty-five miles and contained more than six million cubic feet of earth. The building went on for years, and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution, the rice boom had returned. Rice exports from Charleston grew by half, from 14,500 tons in 1784 to 23,400 tons in 1789.
Third Elias rewarded the people who brought him back to solvency with a shower of extra clothing. In summer of 1787, he distributed great quantities of new blankets and cloth, as well as “6 dozen checked handkerchiefs.” Then he rewarded himself, buying new workers with his windfall profits. In one deal Third Elias added twenty-six tenants to the Limerick cabins, including a young couple named Charles and Peggy, five families with children, and a single man, Cudjo. A couple of years later, he bought again, though this time he carped about the price. “Negroes bought the 30th of March … at Ben Steed’s sale,” Third Elias wrote, “Thom & Molly, Aspath & Dido, Cuffy & Amy, Dublin & Bella—for the enormous sum of … £1365.” The African slave trade to the United States had been temporarily halted by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, as white Americans felt their first doubts about it. A few years later, it would be opened again before a final ban in 1808. Elias’s new people probably came either from Virginia or from less successful rice planters going out of business.
The new workers made a difference, but the population of Ball slaves would have grown even without them. From the account books, it is possible to reconstruct the growth of families. The clans of Angola Amy and Priscilla—to name just two women born in West Africa and bought by the Balls in the 1700s—made up large kin groups on the family lands. Amy and Priscilla now presided over their descendants as aging matriarchs. By the end of the 1700s, the women’s children and grandchildren gave birth to several babies a year, yielding dozens of workers to the rice fields and kitchens.
Although evidence is sketchy, it appears that after profits returned, new cabins now went up along the slave streets. Among the family papers is a two-page formula “for making a tar floor,” dated July 1794 and signed by Third Elias and John. The recipe describes how the “hands” are to make a hard, dry floor that can be swept and washed clean. Along with the floor formula, the brothers also wrote down a recipe for making whitewash. The thick exterior paint, concocted of boiled hides and lime, would become the standard coat for the houses of field hands, according to a family member who later saw and described the slave cabins. In 1792, a rice planter advertised in the South Carolina Gazette for someone who could build new cabins on his land, implying that other planters were doing so at this time. The ad describes a two-room house whose style would be typical on many of the Ball tracts: “A negro house, twenty Feet long and ten Feet wide, with Posts in the Ground, six Feet Story, a Division in the Middle, a Door to each Tenement, and a good Pad-lock to each Door.” And not least, throughout this period John Ball employed a team of carpenters consisting of seven men—Bristol, Daniel, Julius, Marcus, Peter, Pompey, and Strephon. According to their owner’s notes, the men were busy all the time. Under the influence of the new paternal ideal, it stands to reason John would have had them build new housing.
The Balls took back their lifestyle as rice barons. On one tax return, John noted that he owned no fewer than ten carriages. In his own tax filing for 1790, Third Elias, the thirty-nine-year-old bachelor, noted that he owned three plantations—Strawberry, Comingtee, and Limerick—consisting of 8,528 acres and 246 people. The fief made him the second largest slaveholder in St. John’s Parish. The largest was his uncle, Henry Laurens, with 298 people. A few places back on the list, with 188 hands, was brother John.
In May 1787, delegates came together in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, where they debated a new form of government that would replace the Articles of Confederation. The subject of slavery shadowed the chambers. Arguing about population counts for the purpose of taxes based on density, Southern delegates claimed that slaves were not chiefly people but property, like livestock, and therefore should not be counted. When the issue was the apportionment of seats in the new House of Representatives, however, Southerners fought to put black workers in the category of human beings, because doing so gave the landlords more influence. Northern delegates ridiculed the double standard, but the Southern landlords would not move. As a compromise, the Constitution of the United States would include the “three-fifths rule”: in matters of both taxes and representation, an enslaved black would be counted as sixty percent of a white person. Two years later, when the First Congress was seated, slavery appeared first on the agenda. When antislavery groups petitioned the legislature, the skittish new lawmakers coughed up another compromise. This time they issued a report that recommended Congress take up the subject—but only in twenty years, after everyone had cooled off.
The Balls heard the message of democracy, and it frightened them. Although the subject was smothered by Congress, it flared more strongly abroad. Wambaw Elias Ball, the Tory in England, began to send reports to his American kin on the terrible success of the French Revolution, which had erupted across the English Channel. Wambaw Elias dismissed the idea of equal rights and made it clear that he, for one, had “so harty a detestation of the French Leveling principles.” After Louis XVI was removed and the Constituent Assembly in Paris produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the expatriate Ball worried about what might happen next. “I hope those French dogs will be thoroughly humbled,” he wrote. “Not content with destroying themselves, [they] wish to ruin all the nations around them.”
The message from France was the collapse of the caste system and the redistribution of wealth, and soon the news came home to Charleston. In 1791, in the French colony of Saint Domingue, on the island of Hispaniola, whites were killed and hundreds of plantations burned in a rebellion of sugar slaves and free mulattoes led by François Toussaint L’Ouverture. Before long, some ten thousand white refugees sailed for the United States. A good number arrived—pockets empty, and terrified—in Charleston, where they became living examples of what democracy could mean.
On their farms, the Balls kept a worried lookout for people who might try to act out the lesso
n of Saint Domingue, which would eventually become the black nation of Haiti. Since colonial days, the rice planters had organized “slave patrols,” ten or fifteen men who prowled the dirt roads at night, weapons drawn. The patrols interrogated black people, looked for runaways, and tormented the bold. A revolving system of assignments placed the Ball men on these dragnets every few weeks. In typical orders for the year 1792, John Ball received the following notice: “You are appointed Commander of the Patrol to ride at least once a Fortnight and more often as is necessary … from Hugers Bridge [at Limerick] to Comingtee inclusive.” The commission listed fifteen men to police the neighborhood, including John, Third Elias, two cousins named Harleston, and several overseers.
John and Third Elias patrolled the east branch of the Cooper River, but on the west branch different companies held sway. One spring John received word from his overseer at a west branch plantation that two Ball slaves had been attacked by the patrol. According to the overseer, R. Matthews, it was a Sunday and the two men, Guy and Peter, were out on their own errands when the patrol stopped them and asked their business. Guy and Peter “had no passes,” said Matthews, “however … in addition to beating the two men severely about the head and body, one of them was tied up and sorely whipped.”
From the family’s point of view, the disruptions in the business seemed always to be someone else’s fault, coming from rebellious field hands or from France, never from the basic order in the rice fields. Increasingly, threats also came from the North. Slavery was ending in the Northern states, and that must have been both frightening and intriguing. The trouble was that the North, in addition to taking the reckless step of outlawing human property, was the better educated and more populous section of the country—and since the war had taken the lead in the national economy. Where South Carolina had no formal higher education, New England had genuine colleges. (A modest school had been incorporated in Charleston in 1785, and a slave trader named Benjamin Smith, brother-in-law of Elizabeth Ball, left £1,000 to endow it; but nobody took the result seriously.)
John Ball had traveled to Philadelphia before the Revolution, and perhaps he wanted to see the North again, the better to understand it. Or perhaps, with his sons growing up, he wanted to look into their schooling. For these and other reasons, in 1796 John suggested to Jane a trip up the East Coast.
In the early summer, the family readied itself for a five-month journey. The entourage consisted of John, Jane, their fourteen-year-old son John Jr., an unmarried cousin named Polly Smith, a footman called Adonis, and Binah, a domestic slave. (Though they shared the same names, this Adonis and Binah came from different families than the Adonis and Binah who would become forebears of Katie Heyward, or “Bright Ma,” and whose story I’ve already told.) Binah, forty-one, and Adonis, probably in his late twenties, were Kensington’s “show people.” Adonis had been John Ball’s valet for a decade, minding his wardrobe and handling his calls for food and drink. Both Binah and her children had served in the big house for years. According to a pocket-sized travelogue, John sent spending money ahead to New York—”$1500,” he wrote, in the new currency of the dollar rather than the old English pound—and on June 11, 1796, the party of six went to a Charleston wharf to board the sloop Romeo.
Nine days later, the Romeo sailed through the narrows at the entrance of New York harbor. That evening, the Ball party checked into a boardinghouse near the foot of Manhattan run by a Mrs. Best, and the following day John bought a city directory and a map. New York, population thirty-five thousand, was already the largest city in the country, and the nation’s commercial capital. With slavery on the wane, a Southern traveling party made a conspicuous sight on the street. There is evidence that the Balls, Adonis, and Binah were quite aware they had arrived in a new world, one in which the differences between server and served were supposed to appear less brutal. John’s travelogue contains no personal observations, but much can be seen in the receipts from his expense record. One of the first things John did was to purchase new clothes for Adonis and Binah. Adonis got a pair of breeches and stockings, and later John hired a cobbler to produce a pair of shoes for Binah, who was accustomed to wearing “Negro shoes” if any. The two servants were in this way outfitted in a finery they never put on at home.
The matter of appearance settled, the Carolinians began to look around. On the first day in town, John noted that he gave Binah $1 and instructions to come back with six glasses of ice cream. With four whites and two blacks in the party, presumably everyone got a dish. Then, breaking more protocol, John arranged to give Adonis and Binah a spending allowance. The weekly sum was small, but the sight of a Southern slave spending money in New York made good diplomacy. On several nights, the Balls “went to the plays.” At the same time, according to his notes, Adonis and Binah saw the circus at Rickets Amphitheatre. The Balls shopped and took carriage tours. One day John bought himself four pairs of ribbed silk stockings and a pound of hair powder for his wig. Jane Ball treated herself to her own silk stockings and three bottles of perfume.
After ten days of carousing, the Balls brought the New York leg of their journey to an end. They made their last big purchases, John a gold watch and chain (for a crisp $148) and Jane a closetful of clothes. The travelers settled with Mrs. Best—paying $84 for the rooms, and $117 for a memorable amount of liquor—and boarded a ship bound for Rhode Island.
Newport, Rhode Island, was a resort for rich families from Boston and New York, as well as increasing numbers of slave-owning Southerners. The Bostonians came with Irish servants, the Southerners with black. In New York the Ball entourage might have disappeared in the crowd, but in the small circle of Newport society, the pressure to put on a show was heavy indeed. The day after they arrived, John gave Adonis $4 to buy himself a hat and told him to distribute tips among any servants with whom the Balls might come in contact. A few days later the performance took another turn when John bought Adonis a new pair of boots. Adonis and Binah were likely aware of the theatrical nature of their master’s doings, and knew they were to play well-born, well-treated slaves. In Newport the family went yachting, played cards, and did more shopping. John noted that while he and Jane went to a play, Adonis spent $1.50 “for riding out.”
John Jr., the only child on the trip, was a meek boy in his teens. His father seems to have been thinking about where to send him for his education. Newport, where the family passed the summer months, lay within reach of Boston, the nation’s intellectual center. At the end of the heat, on September 6, the Ball party set out for Boston to enjoy itself further, and perhaps to look at a school. Arriving the following afternoon, the family checked into a boardinghouse known as Mrs. Hatch’s, on Federal Street. Two days later, John noted that he had paid a toll to cross the Charles River into Cambridge, home of Harvard College. John made no notes about this excursion, but two years later John Jr. would return to Cambridge as a Harvard freshman.
Back in Boston, John bought some cigars and books; then the Carolinians returned to Newport. The trip was nearly done. Before leaving for home, however, there was one important matter: as they packed to leave Rhode Island, John bought twelve kegs of pickled lobsters. When the travelers set sail for Charleston, the heavy, sloshing barrels were rolled aboard ship with them. By the first week of November, the lobsters and the Balls reached Kensington.
The trip to the North began a series of tours that the Balls would take up the East Coast in the company of black servants. Each time, a handful of house slaves had the privilege of seeing a world away from the work camps down South. On one of these junkets, in 1806, John’s son Isaac traveled to Washington, D.C., accompanied by a free black man named Nat Ball. Nat Ball had been manumitted from Back River plantation and had taken the family name. When Isaac and Nat Ball visited Washington, the occupant of the President’s mansion was a Virginian named Thomas Jefferson. “[We went] from Georgetown to Washington … to visit the President’s house, with which I was much pleased,” Isaac wrote home one day from the
capital. “We met the President riding on horseback when we were on the way to the house, but as the visit was intended to the house and not the man, we proceeded.”
John Ball Jr., the first child of John and Jane, had a reputation as being timid. In a portrait made when he was an adult, John Jr. does in fact look withdrawn. Third Elias gave the opinion that his nephew was intelligent but awkward. For a while, John Jr.’s parents thought to send him to university in London, in hopes of shaking him into adulthood, but weighing their son’s personality, and mindful of American pride, they reconsidered.
Harvard College opened its doors in 1636, sixteen years after the Pilgrims dropped anchor at Plymouth. Letters of recommendation from John Jr.’s teachers did the trick, along with good money. Harvard sent word that in addition to references, a deposit of two hundred ounces of silver would be required. The family complied, and the boy was accepted. John Sr. once complained that “my education was too much neglected by my fond Father,” and to judge from the letters he wrote his son, the father tried vicariously to improve on his schooling through the young man’s own. “[Y]ou must be sensible that from your rank and fortune you might make a respectable figure in life,” John Sr. wrote to his son. “Harvard College is certainly the most reputable within the U[nited] States & upon this ground I chose it for compleating your Education. … I prefer’d your being educated in America upon patriotic principles.”
