Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  While the fight raged in Mexico and Washington, William Ball went about family routine, teaching himself to be an entrepreneur. Records show he experimented with his workforce, rotating people from one plantation to another depending on the season and his whim, until hundreds were moved around over a ten-year period. In addition, William involved himself in the marriage life of his workers, to the extent of choosing partners for them. Half a century later, a former Ball field hand, William Gaillard, said in an affidavit that he had been one of the ones Mr. Ball picked up and moved. Gaillard, by then an old man, told a hearing officer that “I was owned by William Ball. I was born on Limerick plantation but was sent to Cedar Hill before I was grown.” In the same case, an army pension hearing, a former worker named Patty Moultrie testified that she was married to her husband, Stepney Moultrie, at William Ball’s command. “I don’t know my age, but I am over sixty,” Patty Moultrie told a magistrate in 1903. “I was owned by Mr. Ball … was born and raised on Halidon Hill but was taken over to Cedar Hill before I was grown. About three years before the [Civil] war started I was given to Stepney by my master and we were married on Cedar Hill.”

  In April 1852, at another states’ rights convention, South Carolina delegates voted to withdraw from the union, but they backed down when other Southern states balked. Ordinary Northerners could not make sense of the posturing of the Carolina radicals, and apparently neither could William. Ball family lore has it that William thought secession was a bad idea. The white South would risk its social system, he believed, and probably lose. In the North, while no whites (save perhaps a few around Garrison) wanted to go to war on behalf of black people, after twenty years the abolitionists had begun to pique the mass conscience. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a daughter and sister of clergymen, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the melodramatic novel that depicted slavery as a passion play with a cast of saintly blacks and sadistic whites. A typical scene of the book is an episode in which Eliza, an escaped slave, trudges from Kentucky toward freedom across the frozen Ohio River, in effect, walking on water. Uncle Tom’s Cabin would eventually outsell every other book printed in nineteenth-century America, with the exception of the Bible. In 1854 the Republican Party was founded in the North—a movement staked on the idea that the Western territories should be settled by free workers rather than slaves—and one early convert was Abraham Lincoln, a former congressman looking for a way to renew his political career. Meanwhile, the Underground Railroad out of the South, which had brought thousands from the plantations to Northern cities, fell afoul of the new Fugitive Slave Law. Many more than just abolitionists denounced the statute, which required public officers in the Northeast and Midwest to help recapture escaped blacks and levied heavy fines and jail terms on those accused of aiding runaways to freedom.

  To judge from their behavior, and from the chatty tone of their letters, William and his cousins seem to have been unconcerned with the clash between North and South. As it long had been, the family remained spread out across St. John’s Parish. In addition to the six tracts he now controlled, William had a cousin at Comingtee and one at Buck Hall, and by marriage he was related to most of the rice families within twenty miles. The Balls focused alternately on easy living and how to make the biggest crop, and William threw himself into church work, becoming a leader of the vestry at the local chapel. For something more to do, William, his cousin Keating S. Ball, and several neighborhood men formed a business group they called the Strawberry Agricultural Society. At their meetings, the men discussed not politics, not secession, but the vagaries of com, peas, and potatoes. Minutes from the monthly roundtables, with William’s name on them, show that the twenty-five-member group wrote reports on different methods of curing bacon and appointed committees to study livestock and rice. The society left no list of assignments, only committee names, but William may have been among the members of the “committee on manures.”

  William and Julia’s second son, Isaac Ball, my great-grandfather, was born at Limerick on April 21, 1844. Isaac never knew Buzzard Wing, who died when he was an infant, but his generation, more than any other, would feel her malediction. He came of age on the battlefield, turning twenty-one the week his unit surrendered to the Yankees in North Carolina, and until his death he never forgot that his patrimony went the way of the capitulation at Appomattox Court House.

  William and Julia did everything they could to insulate their children, and I suspect baby Isaac arrived to many welcomes, but the birth of the boy was rung in by a murder. Sometime in the spring of 1844, not far from the Limerick mansion, two Ball field hands, a mother and son, killed their work-gang leader. William kept no notes about what happened, but a newspaper reported that the criminals were Amelia and Sambo, of William’s Halidon Hill, and the victim a man named Jingo, the plantation driver. Amelia (who was known to William as Melia) was about forty-four and the partner of a man called Pino; they had seven children, ages four to twenty-one. Sambo, Amelia’s second son, was nineteen. Amelia’s family had lived on Limerick before William shifted them off to Halidon Hill, a few miles downstream, where they came under the rule of the black foreman Jingo. It was two years later that Amelia and Sambo killed Jingo—for what reason, no evidence survives. They were swiftly taken away and tried before the Court of Magistrates and Freeholders, which judged Sambo the murderer and his mother an accessory; and the two were sentenced to be hanged near the scene of the crime. Sambo did hang, the first day of August, but his mother received a commuted sentence, to be sold out of state. In 1847, William sold Amelia for $400 to a Daniel Cook, a slave dealer who probably took her in the direction of Mississippi. Her six remaining children were thrown to the care of her partner Pino, on Halidon Hill. The name Amelia lingered on at the plantation, when one of her daughters later named a child after the murderess.

  Isaac grew up at Limerick with the familiar comforts, including a private tutor and violin lessons. On trips to Charleston, as part of his education, he attended the theater. A letter he wrote when he was nine years old gives a glimpse of the boy’s perceptions and a look at the way blackness figured in local costume. When Isaac was a child, he went to the popular minstrel shows—comedy revues in which white musicians, wearing blackface, imitated plantation blacks for a white audience. After seeing one such show in Charleston, Isaac wrote his mother to report:

  I went to see the Campbell Minstrels. … [T]hey painted their mouths white and their faces black one had some bones rattling he could rattle them better than any one I ever saw two had banjos two had fiddles one had a harp and one had a tamborine the one tamborine when he was playing he made believe that he was vex[ed] and knocked it on his head he kicked it and boxed it and the one with the rattles rattled them as loud as he could and afterwards jumped very high and fell on the chair and played many songs and one said that one day while he was crossing a bridge something tript him down and he fell in the water and stuck as high as his eyes in mud he said that nobody was with him and there was no house within a half mile off and one asked him how did he get out … [and] he said that he ran to the house and got a shovel and dug himself out. … [After] the end of the first part & they came out again with the music and danced I never saw a black person dance the negro dance better and longer. … [G]ive my love to all your affectionate son Isaac Ball.

  Isaac had no sisters, but he and his three brothers—William (Willie), John, and (yet another) Elias—studied, courted, hunted, and (not so profligate as the three sons of Buzzard Wing) planned to follow in the steps of their parents. All ended up fighting for the Confederacy.

  William and Julia were content with the rhythm of country life, and anyway, the strong rice economy meant there was plenty to do. In early 1857, William bought Cherry Hill plantation, a tract with 1,039 acres plus 2,500 acres of pine forest. The following year, workers on Cedar Hill, the skinny tract, produced 11,097 bushels, amounting to 316,077 pounds of clean rice. Although no cosmopolitan investor like his uncle, John Jr., William did keep track of t
he business, opening, for example, a diary about sickness and death on the slave street. His death diary listed no names, just the ages of the dead and causes of demise: lockjaw (a baby, age nineteen days), convulsions (age two), drowning (a man, thirty-seven), pneumonia (fifty), consumption (fifty-eight), old age (eighty-five).

  In 1857, William had reason to hope the secessionist movement would settle down or be appeased, so the Balls could hold on, because that year a favorable decision came down from the Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Scott, a slave from St. Louis, Missouri, had sued for freedom after having passed through a free state, but his plea was rejected by Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland. Taney wrote that Scott had no standing to sue, because he was property, and, as was plain from the Constitution, the United States was a white nation in which black people could never be citizens. The Dred Scott decision gave confidence to the secessionists, and mystified blacks and whites in the North.

  Julia Cart Ball, Isaac’s mother, died in July 1858 after a long illness. In time, the widower William would remarry, at age forty-one, to a cousin, twenty-six-year-old Mary H. Gibbs. All of his papers from this period suggest that William went energetically about his business, and did little else. He schooled Isaac and his other sons in plantation management and, at least some of the time, thought about the needs of the black people. On one trip to town, William brought back fine gifts for several Limerick field hands. A notebook shows that a man named Brawley got a “pair of fancy pants”; Esau, “simple milled pants”; Aurelia, a black satin vest; Jeffrey, a pair of merino wool trousers; and Cuffie, a frock coat.

  In October 1859, John Brown, a fifty-nine-year-old white abolitionist, armed with guns and followed by eighteen accomplices, seized Harper’s Ferry on the upper Potomac River, hoping to spark a general slave uprising. Brown held his ground and issued a proclamation, but Colonel Robert E. Lee of Virginia put down the revolt, and Brown was hanged. The event threw fire on the white South’s fears about abolitionists—but William Ball was not among those who seemed to notice. A few months after Harper’s Ferry, an event that by most accounts stunned the country, William went ahead and bought still another place, The Blessing, a 631-acre tract next door to Cedar Hill. The deal, his last, brought to eight the number of plantations under his control.

  In November 1860, Abraham Lincoln, a known opponent of slavery, won the presidency without carrying a single Southern state, and the secessionists seized the moment to provoke the final split. The election probably disappointed the Balls, but William did what was normal for him—ignored the outcry. Three days after the November 6 vote, a mass meeting and debate on secession was called in Charleston, and William stayed home. A week after the election, after more rallies and demonstrations, William’s notes show that his mind was on buying little luxuries for his slavesrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. On Friday, November 14, William directed work on the harvest at Limerick, and made a note that a field hand called Molly wanted him to get her a piece of calico cloth in exchange for seven chickens she had sent to the Ball dinner table in Charleston. And, oh yes, he wrote, Leah had given him seventy-five cents to buy shoes for Caesar, her son.

  South Carolina voters elected delegates to the final secession convention, but neither William nor any of his kin seemed to pay attention, let alone try to get on the ballot. The meeting opened December 17, 1860, in Columbia, but, amid rumors of smallpox, adjourned and reconvened in Charleston the following morning. For two days, 169 delegates debated the foregone conclusion and, on December 20, voted unanimously to secede.

  “We the People of the State of South Carolina,” read the so-called Ordinance of Secession, “[declare] the Constitution of the United States of America … repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of ‘The United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

  15

  THE SIEGE

  At the moment of secession in 1860, the Ball world was a flourishing antique, five generations and 162 harvests old.

  “Then came the war, ‘the Confederate War,’ ” wrote William’s second wife Mary Gibbs Ball, remembering events. “When the ‘Ordinance of Secession’ was signed & South Carolina left the Union, a free & independent state, what a thrill went through every son & daughter of the Palmetto State & as each Southern state came in, with what joy we looked forward to our Southern Confederacy.”

  The men in the family took little comfort in the coming of the great struggle, but the Ball women seemed to regard the end of the United States as a glorious feat. Swept up by their enthusiasm, young Ball sons enlisted as they came of age; but loath to give up their comforts, they brought personal servants with them to the battlefield. The Ball slaves, at least initially, were largely impassive. By this time, most workers lived in a necklace of pacified villages, robbed of the ability to resist. The rice harvests, in any case, continued on time until the end of the Civil War, with no black revolt and only the slightest evidence of sabotage. When the Yankees finally arrived, there was real exultation on the slave street, but emancipation brought a simple finale—no glory, merely two days of drunkenness, broken china, and confusion. Then the Northerners were gone, leaving whites and blacks as they had found them, a gulf separating the races, with new rules on paper and nothing at all like them in practice.

  At the start of the rebellion, William James Ball, thirty-nine and father of four, controlled eight plantations on the Cooper River, a checkerboard block of land six miles long and two wide; more than six hundred black workers were under his hand. William was a widower, his wife Julia having died in 1858. He fed a constellation of white dependents, including his four sons by Julia, his widowed sister Jane Shoolbred and widowed sister-in-law Maria L. Ball, the women’s four children, and his sixty-six-year-old mother, Eliza. A few miles southwest of the main tract, Limerick, stood the home of William’s bachelor cousin Keating S. Ball, Comingtee, and its village of some 160 blacks. On the west fork of the river lay Pawley and Buck Hall, properties of Dr. Horry Deas, who was the widower of Keating’s sister, Ann Ball Deas; and Dean Hall, a thirty-one-hundred-acre tract belonging to Elias Nonus Ball (in continuing Latin wordplay, the ninth Elias), twenty-five-year-old son of the dissipated Elias Octavus. All told, by my best count, at least 842 black people lived on the family lands.

  Rice remained profitable, but the Ball world had shrunk since the onslaught of cotton—from several parishes to one, and down from an earlier peak of thirteen hundred workers. Nationally, however, the slave system had quadrupled in two generations. According to the Bureau of the Census, in the summer before secession the population of the United States numbered 33,440,000, of whom some 3,950,000, or twelve percent, were in slavery (compared to one million in 1810). A little more than 375,000 heads of household in the United States owned people, a number that represented just under one-quarter of the white population in the South. Within that group, twelve percent owned more than twenty people, but this tiny minority—one of a hundred Americans—held half of the total number of black workers.

  Despite leading the rebellion, the city of Charleston was far off the national stage. Charleston counted 40,500 residents, making it only the twenty-second largest city in the country, compared to its fourth-place standing at the start of the American Revolution. Most of the Balls had traveled north at some point in life, but in 1860 the upper United States did not look the same to a middle-aged rice planter who might have seen New York in his youth. The South had not industrialized, while the smokestacks of Massachusetts now produced more manufactured goods than all of the states of the future Confederacy combined. The nation had thirty-one thousand miles of rail, most of it above Virginia; there were three thousand steamboats on American rivers, but apart from the Mississippi River, they plied canals in states between Chicago and Boston. In addition to the South’s conspicuous lag in technology, Southern whites who visited the North were sometimes embarrassed at the superior literacy of Yankees, a product of traditional neglect of books down home
. Slaves were denied reading, but so were most Southern whites, only one-third of whose children were enrolled in school, compared to three-quarters of white children in the North.

  Despite all of this, there is little evidence that the Balls personally envied the better schools, bigger cities, and booming middle class of the North. In fact, they loved their own society and seemed to regard Northerners as denizens of an excessive region—a place too fast, too crowded, too smart.

  South Carolina broke off in December. Four days later, the secession convention in Charleston produced a document—“Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union”—that explained what it had done. The pronouncement said flatly that the state had left the union because of attacks from the North on the rights of slave owners:

  [A]n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations. … [T]he non-slaveholding States … have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. … [T]he public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.