Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  The First Artillery Regiment was known as “Marion’s Brigade” because its commander, Brigadier General Nathan G. Evans, had been born in Marion, South Carolina. Evans, a thin man with a beard shaped like the tail of a platypus, was nicknamed “Shanks” by his troops because of his skinny legs. Shanks’s men, including Captain Parker’s company, were assigned to the defense of Charleston and dispatched to positions around the city. The main bastions of the harbor consisted of Fort Johnson, on James Island at the southern lip of the port; Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan’s Island facing the northeast channel; and Fort Sumter in between. Several more batteries stood on Morris Island, a strip of sand along the ocean next to James Island, the most important fortification there being Battery Wagner. Because the Federals were creeping north from Edisto, the Ball boys were sent immediately to James Island, where they joined some fourteen thousand other men hunkered against an expected Yankee invasion.

  Their first weeks in gray uniform were full of fighting. A large force of Union troops had anchored in gunships offshore and set up campsites on John’s Island, another muddy sea island separated from James Island by the thin Stono River. On May 23, 1862, Captain Parker’s artillery, along with eight companies of infantry and two companies of cavalry, crossed the Stono and swarmed onto John’s Island in order to drive the Yankees back to their boats. To the rebels’ surprise, however, the island was empty of both Yankees and plantation owners, and peopled by slaves. Shanks Evans wished to prevent the blacks from fleeing to the Yankee side. In his report on the maneuver, he wrote, “[The] negroes were immediately ordered to be removed, and the troops had collected about 200 before I left. … I have directed them to be sent to workhouse to be fed and taken care of by the owners. I was compelled to issue rations to them till provisions could be secured.”

  The Federals next managed to land seven thousand troops on the southwest end of James Island with the intention of pushing through toward Charleston, about seven miles away. Three weeks after the John’s Island incident, Union Brigadier General H. W. Benham attacked a rebel position on James Island known unambiguously as Secessionville. On June 16, the Yankees were turned back, with nine of their officers and 187 enlisted men killed or missing, and 459 wounded, compared with the Confederates’ 60 killed or missing, and 144 wounded.

  A week later, the Ball boys’ company, stationed elsewhere on the island at Simmons’ Bluff, watched as two Union gunboats approached, a side-wheel and a three-masted vessel. The ships opened fire on the camp, and the rebel artillerymen were ordered to move their pieces; but the road was too muddy and they could not get them into firing position. A party of Yankees landed, burned some tents at the camp, then withdrew.

  The harrowing events that put the three Ball boys at risk seem finally to have frightened the older family members. From Charleston, Eliza wrote a friend upstate: “We have just returned from the country … & here find such numbers of families all on the move & every one asking you, when and where you are going?—that has quite astounded me, & I feel at a loss what to do. … Oh how sad and dreadful is this war—the general opinion is, that the whole seaboard will be taken by the enemy.”

  The Ball women made plans to move upstate and wrote Julia Obear, the former governess to William’s sons, to ask if she could spare room in her house in the town of Winnsboro. The former employee was willing, but the problem was the excess of Ball slaves. Already by this time, William’s sister Jane seems to have thought the whole predicament through, from invasion to emancipation and the aftermath. As she weighed the prospect of moving with her mother, Jane wrote Julia Obear:

  We could come to you [as refugees] easily if we knew what to do with all our Negroes, do you think we could find any places to hire any out or even to take them for their feed & clothes, I mean house servants—The plantation people I fear we will have to leave to take their chances. … [O]f course if Charleston is taken, our river will not be safe. If we leave now, we will not be able to see what can be done, but I would not like to stay here with the Yankees & Negroes who I think will be very insolent when freed. … [E]ven should we lose all our Negroes which is all the property I have, we expect to undergo hardships & trials if our Men have it, why should not we expect to have trials also? God sees that it is needful for us, or he would not permit it to come on us.

  That same month, May, Lincoln moved a step closer to the thing that Jane feared when he signed a bill that abolished slavery in the District of Columbia.

  Jane and her mother decided to rent a house in Columbia, a hundred ten miles inland, rather than Winnsboro, and moved there with William’s two younger sons and several house slaves. The disappearance of his sister and mother and the absence of all of his sons left the widowed William at Limerick, alone in the midst of the black village. The war worried him more than anyone else in the family, and he seems to have sought his typical respite from politics: plantation work. William passed the days with what he knew, dutifully counting his stock, noting that he had 161 cows, calves, oxen, steers, yearlings, and bulls at Limerick alone. In his solitude, William suddenly took interest in one of his first cousins, Mary Huger Gibbs, at neighboring Windsor plantation. Mary had a long face, straight brown hair, and sad eyes. William evidently proposed in the fall of 1862, and, two days before Christmas, they were married. William was forty-one, and Mary twenty-six. The new Mrs. Ball evidently took William’s mind off the war, because he wrote a stream of notes to his mother about his happiness. Eliza Ball, who no doubt knew Mary but was more concerned with her own hardships “marooning” in Columbia, was feebly sympathetic. “I am glad you are so pleased with your wife that you have to write [her] name so often in your letters,” she told her son.

  “I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.” President Lincoln had come the rest of the distance toward unconditional freedom, and the Emancipation Proclamation was issued January 1, 1863. It was merely a piece of paper, but now the North as well as the South could point to the same reason for the fight.

  News of emancipation had little effect in the Confederate camps near Charleston. William continued to send work teams from Limerick to James Island, where they dug fortifications for weeks or months. On one occasion, Willie wrote his father: “I saw Cupid yesterday, he says that the boys [black Limerick crew] … are anxious to get home again, and are continually asking when they will get off. If you could send down another squad … I think it would be worthwhile.” Later he added, “The Yanks continue to hammer daily. … Our negroes don’t like it much, as the shells come too near to please their tastes.”

  By this time, 1863, seventeen-year-old John Ball, Willie and Isaac’s brother, joined the family contingent on James Island. John had the blessing of his grandmother, who told his father somewhat ominously, “John … longs to do his share in defence of his country & a S.C. [soldier] of the low country could not meet death in a more preferable place than in defence of our dear old city.” In addition to John Ball, Jane’s twenty-year-old son John Shoolbred signed up and soon arrived to join the rest of the Ball boys. In early 1842, William’s sister Jane had married John G. Shoolbred, who died when Jane was six months pregnant, leaving a posthumous son at Quenby, John Shoolbred Jr. The boy was raised largely among his cousins on Limerick, who invariably called him by his surname. Shoolbred had a thyroid condition and grew to a weight of three hundred pounds, which made the simplest tasks difficult and caused him to rely heavily on his valet, Nat. Nat himself was born about 1845 and raised at Quenby, where he became known among the Balls as “Daddy Nat” for his reliable responses to their every need. According to family tradition, Shoolbred was so fat he could not get on his horse without Nat’s help. As I have mentioned, many of the Confederate sons of planters were served by personal slaves. When Shoolbred enlisted in a Charleston defense company, he arranged to bring Nat with him, as was his privilege.

  After Nat and Shoolbred arrived at camp, Nat
became a constant companion and servant to the Ball cousins, minding their clothes, stoking their fires, and bringing packages the thirty-five-mile distance from home. “Nat has not arrived, but we expect him today, with the boxes, which I will return at the first opportunity,” wrote Willie to his father. One Christmas in camp, according to Willie, the Ball soldiers “sat down to turkey and fried ham. I expect Nat could best tell how it was appreciated, as I don’t think he got even a bone to pick.”

  On James Island, the Ball unit settled into camp life, playing a waiting game with the Yankees. Weeks of idleness often came to abrupt end in fierce artillery fights as Federal gunboats appeared in the water and staged landings on vulnerable beaches. On January 30, on the Stono River, Isaac and Willie’s artillery unit, with infantry, took an eleven-gun Union boat, the Isaac Smith, capturing the vessel, its eleven officers, and 108 men. Sometimes the brothers wrote home to report on their doings. “I just received a letter from Willie,” Eliza told William excitedly. “They had a brisk engagement on Friday with 2 gunboats & disabled one, which had to be burned. Fortunately none of them were hurt, though shot & shell were thick over them.”

  Although Isaac did not send descriptions of his work as a gunner, there is one surviving account that gives a sense of these shooting matches. Isaac’s friend and comrade-in-arms D. E. Huger Smith kept a wartime diary, in which this passage appears:

  John’s Island, 1863

  Isaac Ball was the Corporal or Gunner of the piece at which I was serving. He was sighting the gun for the next charge when a shell struck the trail between his legs and carried away the lock-chain. I was acting as No. 6 and had in my hands a shell which I was handing to No. 2. As he reached to take it a fragment of the lock-chain actually cut the skin of his throat for one or two inches. He staggered back exclaiming, “Great God, I am wounded.” Then drawing the back of his hand across his throat, he looked me wonderingly in the eye and said, “No I am not!” Then taking the charge he placed it in the gun.

  The Federals made continual attempts on Charleston. On April 7, 1863, nine Union ironclads entered Charleston harbor and struck at Fort Sumter, the key to a seagoing invasion. The ships were pounded with twenty-two hundred shells from Confederate guns, and got off only 154 shots before being forced to withdraw. After the repulse of the ironclads came a change of command in the Federal Department of the South, and a new assault was quickly planned. Confederate defenses around Charleston had shrunk to fewer than six thousand men, as many were transferred to the interior; of these, three thousand were on James Island and a few hundred on adjacent, thinly defended Morris Island. In June, seeing this vulnerability, the Federals accumulated nearly eleven thousand men at the mouth of the Stono River in preparation for an assault that would begin at the southern end of Morris Island and move to its northern tip to overtake Battery Wagner, a Confederate fort from which Sumter could be bombarded.

  On July 10, the attack on Morris Island began; the Ball boys were on nearby James Island with the majority of troops. The Federals swept up the length of Morris Island and stopped at the face of Battery Wagner. Meanwhile, thirty-eight hundred more attackers convoyed up the Stono River to strike at positions at James Island. The first assault on Wagner, on July 11, ended in a Federal retreat. On July 18 came a second assault as five gunboats shelled Wagner from 9 A.M. till dusk. At 7:45 P.M., six hundred men in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, a black unit, charged the fort, a suicidal mission that left 262 dead, along with their commander. The bombardments and charges continued for days, then weeks, until the approach to Battery Wagner was a carpet of corpses and dead cavalry horses rotting in the summer heat.

  “What dreadful battles have gone through on Morris Island,” Eliza wrote William. “God was with us, or such a force could never have been repulsed & so many vessels at once sending their shot & shells.” William was evidently again showing his despair for the war, because his mother added, “Don’t seem to give up entirely, before the servants particularly, as I have heard you say.” A few days later she scolded her son again: “Willie says … he had a letter from you lately & says you are the most despondent man he ever knew of in his life; that you write as if we were all to be destroyed. You should not write so desponding to our dear Boys, they are bearing all the trials and hardships of the war & exposed to all the dangers, they want encouragement.”

  The defense plan called for a rotation of men at Wagner every few days. Jane described the reason this way: “The Regiments there have to be constantly changing, the men get exhausted and cannot eat [the] only good well being spoiled with the rain washing the blood of the wounded into it, and the shells send up fragments of Yankees out of the sand all outside of the Fort, for they were not buried deep, so I don’t wonder they have no appetite.”

  Soon it was the Ball boys’ turn. Eliza wrote William, “Willie tells Jane that John and Isaac leave on the 5th [of August] for Battery Wagner to be there 3 or 4 days to man 2 howitzers. … He seems to regret being left behind & parted from his Brothers & says he could not fight alongside of braver or cooler Boys.”

  Later Willie had his own tour at Wagner, and told his father what he witnessed:

  We left this island [James] last Friday week for Morris Island, and reached there about daylight on Saturday, our detachment remaining at Battery Gregg. On Monday we relieved the men at Wagner. … The Yankees kept advancing their parallels day and night, and on Tuesday their rifle pits were 25 yds from ours. Their next step was to take our pits, and on Tuesday evening about dusk, they made the assault, our boys met them bravely, and after an engagement of about an hour’s duration, they retired. The artillery did not participate as the contending parties were too close to each other. … [O]n Wednesday … they opened a heavy fire with mortars, which was kept up without intermission until sunset, when it suddenly ceased, and the next minute they were into our pits. We opened on them with canister and shell, but it was then too dark to see what damage we did. … They did not remain quiet, but poured volley after volley of minié balls amongst us, killing one or two of the other companies, but doing no damage to any of us. I can’t conceive how we escaped, as our guns were struck frequently, and the sand flung over us by their balls. … On Monday they fired three shells at a 42 pds cannonade, the first struck the gun, splitting it, and wounding five of the six in the detachment. … In addition … their sharpshooters keep up a continual practice at any one who dares to raise his head over the ramparts.

  After fifty-eight days of siege, Battery Wagner and Morris Island were evacuated by the Confederates. Now in control of Morris Island, the Federals installed an eight-inch Parrott rifle, nicknamed the “Swamp Angel,” that could hurl two-hundred-pound shells as far as Charleston, seventy-nine hundred yards away. The Swamp Angel began firing on August 22, when it unleashed sixteen shots. The next day, it fired twenty, the last of which disabled the gun after only thirty-six shells. Other Federal artillery bombarded the city. One shell struck a wall of the Ball house on Vernon and East Bay streets, ending up in the basement. The house was empty at the time.

  Increasingly desperate, Eliza wrote her son to encourage that he consider sacrificing the lives of slaves, who were, she believed, expendable: “The call for negro labour is continued & pressing. Have you sent any & cannot you arrange it? Jane is ready to spare some, as a duty to try & save our city & country. What would be the loss of them in comparison to our children & friends?”

  Jane, still writing from Columbia, feared the imminent fall of her home city, and worried about her precious possessions:

  I dread to think what a famine will be in the land if all our crops are destroyed in the low country. … The little meat that is packed up [at Quenby] had better be shared out to the people at once before the Yankees destroy it. … I hope [my] harp may someday arrive [in Columbia], but if destroyed in town, I will not break my heart as I never expected to have seen it last year again. The family portraits will be of little use to us if we have no home again in this world. … We must reme
mber Job how much he had to bear. … My dear Brother, Our time of trial is at hand and I do not see what we are to do for our poor Negroes. They will have to take to the Woods when the [Federal] Boats go up the river. I hope we will be able to prevent the Yankees landing in Charleston. I fully expect it to be in ruins.

  Despite the crisis, the city survived the Federal onslaught for another year. The number of Ball sons in gray uniform continued to grow. William’s youngest, Elias, enlisted at sixteen in a company of “Stono scouts,” who did reconnaissance against the Federals. On John’s Island in July 1864, young John Ball was hit in the cheek by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel; he recovered and kept the scar. Also that year, Shoolbred was struck in his achilles tendon by a minié ball, a wound that put him out of the service and caused him to limp the rest of his life. The worst loss came in late summer, when Isaac B. Gibbs, twenty-four-year-old brother of Mary Ball, William’s wartime bride, was killed in Virginia.