by Edward Ball
After six months in England, Alwyn and Elias O. dropped out, to the relief of the schoolmaster. Crowder wrote to John Jr. that he tried to get them a private tutor to carry on their education. After actually meeting the brothers, however, no tutor would take the job. Finally, Crowder found a recent graduate of Cambridge who agreed to teach the two at home, for £100. Alwyn and Elias O. were sent to live with the young man’s mother.
The lessons had just begun when Alwyn went to Crowder and announced that the money John Jr. had sent to pay for his education was really his and that he wanted it. When Crowder refused, the brothers stopped seeing their tutor and began stealing away at night. Crowder reported that they quickly got into bad company, carousing with what he called “strolling players,” hard-drinking minstrels. Alwyn and Elias O. demanded money to travel around England, evidently with the minstrels, but Crowder again refused. Frustrated, the boys decided they would just go home. In a last letter, Crowder said that Alwyn and Elias O. had appeared at his door and handed him invoices for debts they had run up, which came to more than half the annual salary of their teacher. The tutor demanded to be paid in full for the year, because he had turned down other offers to instruct the wild Ball boys. Politely, Crowder told John Jr. that he was fed up. “It is clear that nothing but an unlimited credit would satisfy them,” he wrote, and that “a desire to improve themselves is not in their intuition. … I should be very unwilling to take upon myself the responsibility which an idle life led in this country by them would entail upon me.”
Alwyn and Elias O. sailed for Charleston in February 1825. John Jr. added up the money he had spent on his brothers’ English lark—$2,674 for seven months—and charged it against their future inheritance.
Despite having twelve plantations and a capacity to spoil children, the Ball family were members of an increasingly obsolete class. Since 1670 and the founding of South Carolina, Charleston had been the reigning city in the South. Rice had built the regional economy and had driven the capture of countless Africans. But in the early 1800s, money and influence began to ebb from the hands of old rice landlords like the Balls. Rice lost its role as a symbol of Southern life, and King Cotton took its place.
I’ve pointed out how the decline of the rice barons began with Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Cotton had long been grown in South Carolina, but only on the islands between Charleston and Savannah, where the “long-staple” variety of the plant did well, staple being the fiber or wool in the boll. This premium strain would not grow in the rolling piedmont of the upstate, where only “short-staple” cotton, with its coarser, shorter fiber, thrived. Short-staple cotton required never-ending handwork to clean, because its fibers clung to the seed more firmly than those of the long-staple variety, so the more common plant did not catch on—that is, until the invention of the cotton gin. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, with its revolving cylinder lined by teeth, pulled the seed from the raw fiber, and made the piedmont cotton profitable.
The second strike against rice came in the form of a long ditch, the Santee Canal. The Santee River, whose tributaries drain half the state, reaches deep inland in a curving path toward the middle of South Carolina. Compared to the Santee, the Ashley and Cooper, two rice rivers that end in Charleston harbor, are little streams. Rice planters could drift their crop down to the city on the Ashley and Cooper, but because the Santee emptied into the Atlantic in the wrong place, so to speak (to the north of Charleston), cotton growers in the middle of the state had a harder time delivering their harvest. In 1800, the state government opened the Santee Canal, which, by linking the Santee and Cooper rivers, allowed upstate cotton planters to float their yields directly to Charleston. Within a few years, the canal brought millions of pounds of cotton down the Cooper, past the Ball lands, to ships waiting in the harbor. In 1830, a typical year, 720 cotton barges made their way through the canal to the sea, carrying a harvest of seventy thousand bales, each bale five hundred pounds. The Santee Canal helped feed the new textile mills of England and the American Northeast, and sped the shift from rice to cotton.
“Cotton is king” became the motto of state boosters. Ambitious white men, born low but looking for wealth, turned to the plant. As cotton drained influence from the rice landlords it handed power to new families, who had no stake in the paternalism that the Balls told themselves should govern dealings with black workers. With their ancient lands and dissipated sons, the Balls must have seemed past their time, a weak elite ready to be pushed aside.
After conquering South Carolina, cotton spread west to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—an expansion made possible by the removal of the Native people. The Creek tribe had lived in Georgia and points west since the early 1700s. After 1810, the Creeks were forced out and, with the Cherokees, marched on the infamous Trail of Tears to the Southwest. The cotton kingdom absorbed their land, and a stream of black workers sent in from South Carolina and Virginia drove the boom. Between 1830 and 1860, the tobacco planters of Virginia (another antique class) sold out of that state some three hundred thousand black people, who were walked in coffles as far as Arkansas. New Orleans arose as the South’s premier city, and Charleston fell behind. To many white Southerners, Charleston soon became like its rice planters—quaint, out-of-date.
The Ball boys were not the only ones who kept their hands in the purse; Caroline’s daughters also lived in order to spend. Eleven-year-old Lucilla Ball, in one trip to the clothing store (probably with her mother, who saved the receipt), bought some “Grecian bootees, silk shoes, [and] moroccan slippers.” Later, she picked up a “long shell comb, feather fan, kid shoes, [and] seal-skin shoes.” About the same time Lucilla was buying her pile of footwear, which she would outgrow in a few months, her younger sister Lydia picked out “an ivory-handled whip.” At $3, the whip cost more than the weekly wage of a cook.
By the time Alwyn and Elias O. failed out of English boarding school, Swinton, the third brother, had dropped out of Partridge’s Academy and returned to Charleston. His uncle Isaac was in the city when he came home. “Swinton arrived here the beginning of November,” Isaac wrote, “but what he means to do with himself I can’t say.” Before the month was out, the seventeen-year-old launched a buying spree, picking up closetfuls of clothes and sending the bills up the family chain. His wardrobe arranged, Swinton next bought a horse on which to parade himself around town. The weary John Jr. paid up, but when the young man asked for a roll of cash, John refused. Swinton wrote him an airy note, “But money I will have when I want it.”
Alwyn and Elias Octavus returned from England in spring of 1825. Not to be outfestooned by Swinton, fifteen-year-old Elias O. went to his clothier and bought a blue velvet coat, a pair of white satin pants, several silk handkerchiefs, and a black velvet vest. Although the three Ball brothers now lived just a few blocks from John Jr., they dealt with their money source by messenger, evidently afraid to ask him in person. Elias O. wrote John Jr. to request that he now be given a valet. It was only fair, Elias O. said, because his brother Alwyn had two personal slaves. Elias O. asked for “a boy from Pimlico on the same conditions which Alwyn has Joshua and Katy. If you comply with my request I shall choose a boy named Toby, as he is the only one calculated to serve as a waiting man.” John Jr. relented, and poor Toby was brought down from the plantation to follow the young playboy around.
By the terms of their trust fund, Buzzard Wing’s sons would come into their inheritance when they turned twenty-one or when they were married, whichever came first. The battle over spending money continued until the idea dawned among the brothers to marry. In 1825, Alwyn, still seventeen, was engaged to Esther McClellan, teenage daughter of a planting family north of Charleston. When Alwyn reached eighteen, they were married, and John Jr. was forced to begin liquidating the brothers’ investments to turn over a portion to the newlyweds. (Alwyn wasted no time with the new money: soon after the marriage, he bought nine people from a Charleston doctor, perhaps to staff his house.) Elias O. waited a bit longer, marrying a
t twenty to rice heiress Amelia Waring. Swinton, however, followed brother Alwyn’s example, proposing at seventeen to one Anna Channing, child of a Boston family whom he had apparently met on vacation in Newport, Rhode Island. The wedding took place in New York City in March 1827 (Swinton was eighteen years, six months), attended by a handful of witnesses. A few days later, the groom wrote to his brother John Jr., in Charleston. Now that he was married, Swinton wanted to know, exactly how much would he be receiving?
There may be something to the curse of Buzzard Wing. With the appearance of Caroline Ball, a kind of obliviousness becomes a family trait, and at the same time the destiny of the clan begins to be visible. In the decades just before the Civil War, the Balls were in some ways more detached from black life than they had been during 130 years in the plantation business.
I previously introduced Ann Simons Ball, the second wife of John Jr., who helped her husband run the family lands. Ann’s portrait, painted by Samuel F. B. Morse, shows a handsome woman of nearly fifty, flashing a severe expression. The painting seems apt, because Ann approached plantation management like a soldier, giving lie to the view that only men had the stomach for the violence of the business. For her military style, Ann acquired the family nickname Captain Nancy.
Captain Nancy’s letters to her husband are full of advice on how to handle field hands, with admonitions that he was not being strict enough. In a typical note, Ann told John Jr. to discipline the workers who seem to have been resisting orders at Midway plantation. “I really regret extremely the vast trouble you have with your Midway gang of Negroes,” she wrote. “Let me entreat you my dear John … if possible put a stop to this. … Don’t you think you had better break up that whole set, dispersing them among your other negroes, and form a new gang?” (Years later, when John Jr. died, Captain Nancy was advised by the men in the family to sell everything. Instead, she bought back 215 people from the estate auction—including Tenah, Adonis, and Binah, ancestors of the family I met in New York and South Carolina—for $79,855, and took over the business.)
Ann Ball, who was six years older than her husband, seemed to evolve a partnership with John Jr. in which she set a steely tone. One day she personally whipped the laundress, Betty, for not properly cleaning the bath towels. After the incident, Captain Nancy sat down calmly and wrote her husband to explain:
[Y]ou will not only be surprised, but provoked at the strange conduct of Betty in your absence. … She had brought in some towels so badly washed that I gave them to be done over. They were brought to me a second time too badly done to be put up—and accompanied by an impertinent manner. I was in my chamber & not saying much but taking down the little whip in our dressing room whipped her across her shoulders two or three times. Her astonishment almost made me laugh. … I immediately wrote a note & made Peter take her to the workhouse, requesting that she be kept in solitary confinement until you called for her. She walked out of the yard with a most haughty air. … If agreeable to you, I will not think of returning her to the field, but keep her [in Charleston] & make her wash.
At Ann’s command, Betty was taken to the Charleston Work House. Members of the Ball family, and most of their friends, were customers of the Work House. Account books show occasional payments the Balls made to the warden in charge for whippings or jail terms. A single whipping was priced at twenty-five cents; jail time ran higher. One year, John Jr. paid $65.25 for accumulated fees. The building, put up in the 1730s on the edge of town, not only served as a prison where disobedient blacks could be jailed, but the yard next to it doubled as a marketplace for people undergoing a second or third sale. The Work House also was one place in town used for the execution of blacks accused of crimes. In 1769, on its grounds, a slave called Liverpool, and his wife, Dolly, charged with poisoning a white baby, were burned alive.
There is no evidence of what precisely happened to Betty within the walls of the Work House, but Ann Ball knew that she had sent the laundress to be tortured. A short time after Captain Nancy used “the little whip in our dressing room” on Betty, a German nobleman, Karl Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, visited the Work House and described what he saw:
In it there were about forty individuals of both sexes. In the basement, there is an apparatus upon which the negroes, by order of the police, or at the request of their masters, are flogged. The latter can have nineteen lashes inflicted on them according to the existing law. The machine consists of a sort of crane, on which a cord with two nooses runs over pullies; the nooses are made fast to the hands of the slave and drawn up, while the feet are bound tight to a plank. The body is stretched out as much as possible, and thus the miserable creature receives the exact number of lashes as counted off!
The attendants at the Work House, the Duke noted, were black, on the theory that discipline could produce more suffering when it came from the hands of other blacks.
If Betty did not feel the lash, then she might have been subjected to a more ingenious torment, the treadmill:
A tread-mill has been erected in a back building. … [T]wo treadwheels [are] in operation. Each employs twelve prisoners. … Six tread at once upon each wheel, while six rest upon a bench placed behind the wheel. Every half minute the left hand man steps off the treadwheel, while the five others move to the left to fill up the vacant place; at the same time the right hand man sitting on the bench, steps on the wheel, and begins his movement. … Thus, even three minutes sitting, allows the unhappy being no repose. The signal for changing is given by a small bell attached to the wheel. The prisoners are compelled to labour eight hours a day in this manner. Order is preserved by a person, who, armed with a cow-hide, stands by the wheel.
The inmates of the Work House, the visitor pointed out, were said to “entertain a strong fear of the tread-mills, and regard flogging as the lighter evil!”
By the time of Betty’s punishment, attitudes among Northern whites had begun to shift on the subject of human property. As I mentioned earlier, whites in the North, after the American Revolution, seemed to lose their taste for keeping blacks captive, and most states passed laws that allowed for gradual emancipation. As slavery moved Southwest, Northern politicians now worried about the nature of a larger America and the balance of national power. The so-called Missouri Compromise of 1820, which slowed the spread of forced labor, was the first sign of a standoff of cultures that would culminate in the Civil War.
The Northwest Ordinance, an agreement on frontier policy, brought Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois into the United States as “free-soil” states, with a ban on unfree labor. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, meanwhile, joined the country as slave areas. When Missouri was proposed as a slave state in 1819, Northern lawmakers objected—partly on principle and partly because the opposing cultures, South and North, were balanced in Congress. The Missouri Compromise brought Missouri in as a slave state and set up Maine as free. Then, foreshadowing a deadlock, Congress drew a geographical line across the huge Louisiana Purchase, at latitude 36° 30’, north of which slavery was not to cross.
In 1824, the Ohio Resolutions emerged from the legislature in that state, calling for the end of unfree labor and proposing emancipation at the age of twenty-one for any slave born after the enactment of the bill. Northern states backed the plan; Southern newspapers mocked it. South Carolina lawmakers asked their governor to send a resolution to Ohio stating that “the people of this state will adhere to a system, descended to them from their ancestors, and now inseparably connected with their social and political existence.”
Many of the Balls, even while observing these threats to their society, remained nonchalant. One of John Jr.’s sons, in New York for a bit of fun, wrote home that he had gone to a show at a theater run by free blacks. The eighteen-year-old joked that during the program, all he could think about was how the black performers would be better off down South, on a plantation, bent over with a hoe. “The Black Gentry of New York have opened a theatre and tell fine stories about their brethren at the South in t
he cotton and rice fields,” young Mr. Ball wrote. “I wish that some of them were in Carolina [where] they would learn to play on the Hoeboy, which would be a useful accompaniment.”
In 1826 a series of mysterious nighttime fires swept through Charleston. Although three blacks were eventually convicted of multiple arson, the fires continued after the accused were jailed, striking the fear of general black subversion into white hearts. A year later, on July 4, the Manumission Act took effect in New York, freeing the last ten thousand slaves in that state. As the challenges came more swiftly, John Moultrie, a relative of the Ball family in England, wrote Isaac Ball to report on the British situation. Things were bleak in London, Moultrie said, because there was a move in Parliament to wipe out slavery altogether in the Caribbean sugar colonies. At the head of the campaign was a persuasive agitator named William Wilberforce.
“I must inform [you] that there will be dreadful work in the W. Indies, in consequence of that old fool Mr. Wilberforce’s infatuation,” Moultrie wrote to Isaac, “and before any steps can be taken to prevent it there will be a massacre of all the white population. … [U]nder the mark of humanity and benevolence [Wilberforce is] hatching much mischief, and ultimately doing the Negroes no benefit who are much happier and better taken care of in their present situation than they will be when emancipated.”
Though the Balls were slow to react, other white Carolinians jumped at the slightest touch. In 1826 a congress of Spanish-American nations was called in Panama, and President John Quincy Adams suggested the United States send a delegate. Southern congressmen opposed, pointing out that the conference would be attended by representatives from Haiti, the free black state founded on a slave revolt, and stating that any U.S. presence would appear to condone uprisings. The especially touchy Robert Y. Hayne, senator from South Carolina, explained in a Capitol speech: “The question of slavery must be considered entirely as a domestic question. … To touch it at all is to violate our most sacred rights—to put in jeopardy our dearest interests—the peace of our country—the safety of our families, our altars, and our firesides.” If the federal government in any way tried to interfere, Hayne finished, “we will consider ourselves as driven from the Union.”
