Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  John Jr. and Isaac eventually realized that the winds were changing. In 1825, as Isaac Ball, forty, lay dying of malaria, he called for a clerk to draw up his will. When he dictated his last wishes, he inserted a worried remark about the future of the business: “I consider the tenure by which certain species of property is held in this state may become very uncertain.” If emancipation was imminent, Isaac made clear, then all of his people should be sold before it happened, so his children would not lose their inheritance.

  When the subject of emancipation took the national stage, however, it first wore the costume of a debate over taxes. The elite of the South remained tied to the agrarian economy, while in the North the rich had moved into manufacturing and trade. In 1828, Congress passed a protectionist tax to shield new Northern commerce: duties of thirty to fifty percent on all imported goods. With their farm economies, Southern whites took no benefit from the tax, which they saw as a hardship directed personally at them. The tariff pitted one regional system against the other, forced labor against free. Southern newspapers called it the “Tariff of Abominations”; South Carolina went into rebellion, and the Balls went along.

  John C. Calhoun, son of a middling Carolina family who had married a rice heiress, had been Secretary of War under President James Monroe, and Vice President under John Quincy Adams. When the tax passed, Calhoun was Vice President under Andrew Jackson. In an essay denouncing the bill, Calhoun devised a theory of “nullification,” by which states had the hypothetical right to cancel laws made in Washington. The national government, Calhoun said, was a union made of individual state powers, or sovereignties. Since only joint power of the states could change the text of the Constitution, each state must also give consent to a change in its political condition, such as vulnerability to tariffs. The Constitution gave federal courts high jurisdiction in U.S. law, but final say over national laws was a right reserved to the states. Nullification meant that a state reserved the authority to reject Washington’s decree on the basis of states’ rights.

  When Calhoun in this manner gave them a reason, the Balls came out of their silence and became tax resisters. The family had long stayed away from public life, but in 1830 John Jr. broke tradition and went into politics, joining the states’ rights cause. Calhoun’s scheme launched a political movement and a party. As a big slave owner, John Jr. was just the sort of person nullification was meant to defend, so he went on the ballot for the South Carolina legislature. But the Balls were not known as vigorous speakers or crowd pleasers, and in the October election John lost. Staying with the movement, however, he did some maneuvering and six months later got himself appointed a vice president of the States Rights Party.

  By the logic of states’ rights, the grab of power by the federal government, in the form of taxation, might open the way to the control of slavery from Washington. Sometimes this view was expressed outright; sometimes it stayed tacit. The States Rights Party called on South Carolina to “interpose her state sovereignty,” in the words of Calhoun, and refuse to let customs officials collect the money. In July 1832, Congress raised the stakes by passing another tax, and John Jr. used the occasion to run on the States Rights ticket for the Charleston City Council, this time winning for his home ward. A bit later, when the South Carolina legislature called for a special congress on the tariffs, to be held in the capital at Columbia, John Jr. was chosen as a delegate.

  The so-called Nullification Convention met and solemnly “nullified” the 1828 and 1832 tariffs. President Andrew Jackson threatened a military siege of Charleston, and the hero of the movement, Calhoun, resigned the Vice Presidency. Governor Robert Hayne persuaded South Carolina lawmakers to fund a state militia in the event Washington invaded, and upwards of twenty-five thousand men volunteered for the hypothetical ranks of a “secession army.” Other Southern states sent resolutions denouncing South Carolina and ridiculing nullification. Yet the secession army caused Washington to lose its nerve. In March 1833, Congress passed the Compromise Tariff, which shrank the tax rates, and when Calhoun supported the compromise, the states’ rights movement was able to claim victory. Two weeks later John Jr. and the other nullifiers met again and reversed their earlier acts. The party backed down, and the crisis was defused.

  Soon after the climax, a report arrived on John Jr.’s desk from the overseer at Comingtee plantation, which would have freshened his memory with regard to the reasons behind nullification. Thomas Finklea, the dutiful Ball manager, wrote his boss to say that he had just had a field hand named Morris shot for trying to escape.

  Thomas Finklea ran Comingtee and another Ball place for some ten years. In about half his letters to his employers, he describes beatings he gave to disobedient workers. In July 1833, when Captain Nancy and John Jr. were in Charleston, Finklea reported that four escaped men had been sighted near Comingtee. He had called up the slave patrol, consisting of white neighbors, but to no avail. A few days later he heard that the men had been spotted again “near Mrs. Laurens’ gate.” One of them, Morris, had been at large for four months. This time, after calling out the patrol, he said, “I wished eatch to be well armed as those runnaways I understood had bayonets & one or two guns.” Finklea was accompanied on the hunt by Scipio, an obedient Ball slave, as well as Ned, a house man who belonged to Benjamin Read, owner of neighboring Rice Hope. Ned carried a gun, as did the white men. The orders of the hunting party were to hail the runaways three times, then, if the prey would not surrender, to shoot. The men prowled until Scipio spied Morris in a pasture. Evidently when Morris was called to stop, he refused, causing Scipio to move in and Morris to reply by brandishing a sword. Finklea reported, “Ned shot the fellow as I had ordered for the runnaway wold not stand but resisted & tried to kill Sipio with a sword.” Morris’s gunshot wound stopped his running but didn’t kill him. He survived, recovered, and was put back to work.

  After decades of fitful protest, the abolition movement was beginning to get on its feet in the North. In 1831 in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison, a twenty-six-year-old journalist, founded the Liberator, a newspaper devoted to bringing an end to human property. The State of Georgia announced a reward of $5,000 for Garrison’s arrest, on a charge of sedition. Not all Northern whites, or even many, cared for Garrison; in 1835 a Boston mob grabbed him and pulled him through the streets at the end of a rope. But Garrison stuck with his paper and continued to hector whatever audiences would listen. Meantime, in the West, Theodore Dwight Weld lectured the antislavery cause on the same circuits traveled by revivalist preachers. Weld was married to Angelina Grimké, who, with her older sister Sarah, was one of two prodigal daughters of Judge John F. Grimké, chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court. As I’ve already described, in the 1820s Angelina (along with Sarah) left her slave-owning family and moved North, where she spent much of the rest of her life publicizing the brutalities of her family and former friends. Theodore Weld would eventually publish a book, called American Slavery As It Is, which included Angelina’s bloody stories about Charleston. In December 1833, William Garrison, Theodore Weld, and a handful of others formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. A few years later Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in Maryland and joined the cause. Then, in 1843, Sojourner Truth, emancipated in New York, left the state to crisscross the country on an abolition crusade. Two years later Douglass published his popular autobiography, while Truth became a magnetic draw on lecture tours.

  Abolition got under way at the same time as nullification, and the moral badgering heard in the North was probably received with jeers and backslapping in the meetings of John Jr.’s States Rights Party. Eight months after the first issue of Garrison’s Liberator, Nat Turner, a slave in Virginia, staged an uprising with seventy comrades, in which almost sixty whites were murdered. To Southern whites, the Liberator seemed to lead directly to Nat Turner. Reacting to the abolitionist press, Southern writers coined their own new genre, the pro-slavery essay. One Charleston pamphlet, “Refutation of the Calumnies Circulated Against �
� Southern … Slavery,” by Edmund Holland, pointed out that forced labor was sanctioned by the Bible and that it was simply necessary to agriculture, since without blacks the Southern economy would collapse. Another Charlestonian, Edward Brown, in “Notes on the Origin and Necessity of Slavery,” explained that “slavery has ever been the step-ladder by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization” and concluded by saying, “universal equality [is] but another name for barbarism.”

  The Balls did their part in the defense, turning out pro-slavery writings of a more lyrical sort. One of the Ball cousins, Catharine Gendron Poyas, celebrated the happy world of the plantations in a series of sentimental poems. Catharine, known in the family as Cousin Kate, was the daughter of Henry Poyas, whose sister, Eliza Poyas Ball, was the widow of Isaac Ball of Limerick. Cousin Kate did not marry, and it was said she was melancholy due to various broken loves. In any case she had time on her hands, which she spent writing at Limerick on long visits to her aunt Eliza Ball. Kate eventually published two volumes of verse, in which the most memorable poems are the ones about slavery. She referred to blacks as “the sable train” and used the biblical designation “the sons of Canaan.” (The Canaanites were said by pro-slavery writers to be the dark clan of Africans descended from Noah’s son, Ham, whom Noah had condemned to servitude.) One poem, which Cousin Kate wrote during Christmas with the Balls and called “Limerick; or Country Life in South-Carolina,” contained the following verses:

  ’Tis christmas—and the sable train rejoice:

  Now in their humble cottages the voice

  Of song and mirth is heard; and three full days,

  They may amuse themselves their several ways.

  …

  The greater number stay at home and dance,

  And gayly, too, as any sons of France,

  From morn to night, from night to break of day,

  Still do they dance the happy hours away.

  …

  Returning, one perchance may careless roam

  To where the negroes have their village home;

  Its cleanly rows, of cottages so neat;

  The hearty welcomes that your presence greet;

  The quiet calmness that pervades the spot,

  Show that the sons of Canaan dark, are not

  The poor depressed mortals they are thought,

  Tho’ they say “master,” and are sold and bought!

  In 1834, South Carolina lawmakers passed a bill banning literacy among blacks. For teaching a black person how to read, whites would be jailed six months and fined $100, while free colored people, in addition to being fined, would get fifty lashes. The American Anti-Slavery Society responded with an avalanche of pamphlets, addressing several thousand to Charleston whites in July 1835. Seeing their contents, postmaster Alfred Huger confiscated the pamphlets, which were later burned by a mob. The Charleston City Council then passed an ordinance banning “inflammatory and seditious” writing of similar type. The following February, in Washington, Representative Henry Laurens Pinckney of South Carolina presented a bill that would prohibit Congress from considering petitions which challenged the legality of slavery. This “gag rule” prevailed, and the abolitionists were silenced.

  The curse of Buzzard Wing seemed to come into full force around the time of these events. In June 1834, at age fifty-one, John Jr., the Ball family mainstay and supporter of the secessionist cause, died of malaria. Five weeks later, on August 1, the British Parliament emancipated more than seven hundred thousand slaves in nineteen colonies in the West Indies, compensating their former owners with £20,000,000 sterling. Carolina whites murmured gravely that the end was on them. The curse seemed to spread to Buzzard Wing’s own children. In July 1835, Alwyn Ball, one of the playboy brothers, died at age twenty-eight, leaving behind five children. One of Alwyn’s sisters, Caroline Olivia Ball, who married at seventeen, died at twenty-two, leaving two children. But it was the second of Caroline’s profligate sons, Swinton Ball, who would face the most spectacular death.

  After he married the New England heiress Anna Channing, Swinton and his wife had several children, but all died as infants. Anna and Swinton traveled constantly—to New York, Newport, Europe, and back—their lifestyle supported by Pimlico, a plantation they hardly ever visited. Occasionally Swinton would sell a few of the hundred or so workers from Pimlico, perhaps when he and Anna wanted cash. He sold three women in January 1834, and ten people in March 1837. Swinton and Anna often traveled by land, because “Anna dislikes the sea exceedingly,” as Swinton wrote to a relative. In the early summer of 1838, when Swinton was thirty, he and Anna made an exception to their rule and boarded a steamship in New York, the Pulaski, bound for Charleston. En route, on the night of June 14, the boilers exploded and blew the ship to pieces. Swinton and Anna drowned.

  Following the accident, a lawsuit arose, Ferris Pell v. E. O. Ball, in which the family of Anna Channing, who had brought money to the marriage, challenged the Balls for the dead couple’s wealth. Swinton and Anna had each written a will leaving the majority of their property to the other, which meant that the issue of the case was a seemingly locked riddle—who had died first? If Swinton, then the Channings would inherit; if Anna, then the Balls. The Channing family produced a survivor of the shipwreck who claimed that in the water next to the sinking steamer, the voice of Anna could be heard calling out for Swinton, but there had been no reply. From this testimony, the court concluded that Swinton had died first. Not only Anna’s property, but more than half of Swinton’s, went to the Massachusetts family.

  Pell v. Ball dragged on for years after a second issue arose, involving the Pimlico workers. Having won possession, the Channing family (from Boston, center of the abolition movement) wished to sell most of the slaves so that they could bring the money home to New England. The sale of individuals would raise more cash than the auction of intact families, and the Channings made clear this was their wish. Objecting, the Balls claimed that tradition and principle should prevent the black families from being split apart. The protest had the fragrance of spite, since the Balls themselves had auctioned off men and women one at a time. For whatever reason, however, the Southern court ruled against the Northerners, and in a decision handed down in March 1845, the judge “decreed … that the negro slaves [be] sold … in lots, according to families.”

  John Jr. had played a part in the first duel with the North, which ended in a stand-off. The last generation of the Balls to come of age in the slave period, that of John’s children, retreated from city life and hid themselves from politics. The years leading up to the Civil War produced the most acid American quarrels since the Revolution, but they were fights to which the family seemed almost oblivious. Just as they had before 1776, the Balls waited until the last before committing themselves to the revolt, and even then they were reluctant rebels. Once the struggle began, however, ten sons in the Ball cousinhood would eventually put on the Confederate uniform.

  When Isaac Ball, John Jr.’s brother, died of malaria in 1825, his will had granted the biggest plantation, Limerick, to his four-year-old son, William James. William’s fortune rested in the hands of trustees while he grew up with his widowed mother, Eliza. William’s uncle John had graduated from Harvard, but his father had skipped college, and William himself showed little interest in school. When his mother made him go to the state college in Columbia, the student argued with her. “I did not mean to say that a college education was useless in general,” he wrote home, at seventeen. “I meant to say that I thought it of not much importance to me, as I still do say.” William seems not to have finished school, and instead got married in 1842, at age twenty, to Julia Cart, a fragile seventeen-year-old.

  The rest of his father Isaac’s estate went to William’s sister, Jane (Quenby plantation), his brother John (Hyde Park), and his uncle John Jr. (Jericho). Limerick, Hyde Park, and Quenby stood within a couple of miles of one another. Photographs of William Ball show that he grew to be a wiry man wi
th angular cheeks, thin lips, and a beard. According to family tradition, he had a gracious speaking voice, which he often used to beguile the congregation in the Episcopal chapel near Limerick, where he read services when the priest was away on rounds. By the 1840s, William had become the dominant brother by default. When his sister Jane’s husband died in 1842, he took over management of Quenby. Several years later brother John died, at twenty-seven, and Hyde Park became William’s responsibility too.

  As young masters, William and Julia Ball thus controlled three plantations and some 450 black people. Then, in the month they married, William acquired Halidon Hill, downstream from Limerick; and in 1850, from a cousin, he bought Cedar Hill, an 876-acre tract so narrow as to look like a pencil on a map. William and Julia made a handsome couple in their photographs, slim and well-dressed; the young wife concentrated on her children and social rounds, while her husband built up the business.

  The slavery fight temporarily halted as America grew west. In 1845, Texas—a piece of Mexico colonized by Southerners, and briefly an independent nation—came into the union as a slave state. The following year, American armies invaded the rest of Mexico from the Texas platform to grab more land. The Mexican War ended in 1848, with Mexico giving up half its national domain; those lands eventually became Arizona, California, New Mexico, and more. Northern lawmakers saw the war as a bid by Southerners to extend slavery and seize control of Congress by force of numbers. Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania drafted the so-called Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited human property in any territory invaded by the army. Abraham Lincoln, a freshman representative from Illinois, denounced the war and supported the ban, but Wilmot failed to get the votes.