by Edward Ball
Isaac B. Gibbs was born in 1840 to Mathurin Guerin Gibbs and Maria Louisa Poyas, both from families who had intermarried with the Balls. Isaac grew up with the Ball brothers and their cousin Shoolbred, and joined “Hagood’s Brigade,” a regiment under General Johnson Hagood, whose fights took Isaac up and down the South. In August 1864, Isaac was with his regiment south of Petersburg, Virginia, which had been under siege as the last stand of the Confederates against Federals who were trying to get at the capital, Richmond, a few miles away. An army of seventeen thousand under General Ulysses Grant arrived from the east to meet Petersburg’s defenders under General Robert E. Lee, twenty-five hundred men arrayed in fifty-five batteries around the city. Grant swept from the east to the west, trying to outflank the Confederates, and along the way came to the tracks of the Weldon Railroad, which ran from Richmond through Petersburg to states farther south. Hagood’s Brigade was called on to defend the rail.
On Sunday, August 21, 1864, the Federals started to tear up the tracks, and Hagood made a stand. At 9:00 A.M., Confederate artillery hit Union positions, after which Hagood advanced. The Federals answered with guns, and most rebels stopped their charge, with the exception of Isaac Gibbs’s regiment, which continued. When seven hundred men headed for the top of a hill near the rail, they faced a three-sided fusillade from several thousand Federals. An hour later, five hundred lay dead or wounded; one was Isaac Gibbs.
A eulogy was published in the Charleston Courier: “I. B. Gibbs of Company B, 25th Regiment, after hours of intense agony, is supposed to have expired during the night. … He died in his 24th year leaving the odor of a good name and a life of sanctity.”
Mary Ball remembered, “We heard of my brother Isaac’s death from a comrade who had been a prisoner but was exchanged. He had spoken to Isaac when he lay dying on the field of battle, suffering fearfully.”
At the place where Isaac died, there is an eight-foot granite obelisk, put there by relatives of the five hundred Confederates a generation after the Civil War. The empty field is quiet, despite a two-lane road passing along its edge, and the remains of a Federal fort stand within a hundred yards. The inscription on the monument reads: “Here a brigade … commanded by Brig. Gen. Johnson Hagood charged Warren’s Federal Army Corps, 21st day of August 1864, taking into the fight 740 men, retiring with 273. No prouder fate than theirs who gave their lives to liberty.”
“It is Christmas again,” Willie wrote home from John’s Island in 1864, after two and a half years in the same muddy tent. “This is decidedly the darkest day that the Confederacy has yet seen, and I fear that our turn to suffer and lose our homes is nigh at hand. … I trust we will be able to show a good fight for the old city. … Wishing you all a quiet, happy Christmas, and hoping that we will all meet in safety at home by the next.”
By the end of 1864, Jane, her mother Eliza, and their house slaves had come home from Columbia to Limerick, evidently because the women wished to be present when the Yankees eventually arrived. The Federal assault that would finally succeed came in January 1865 from Georgia, in the form of General William T. Sherman’s army. To coincide with Sherman’s arrival in South Carolina, a Yankee assault from the sea was planned at Bull’s Bay, about twenty-five miles north of Charleston. At Sewee Bay, just south of the expected landing, the Confederates put together a token defense consisting of 250 men from the Ball boys’ unit, armed with only four artillery pieces.
On January 18, 1865, Willie wrote home:
The city is to be evacuated, and very soon. I have no “official” notice of it, but every indication proves that it is to be done. … I now regard our chances of success as more than doubtful, and unless Providence interferes in our behalf, I think that there is no hope for us, as our people are thoroughly “rotten.” A great many people are moving to the city, intending to take the oath of allegiance. I can’t advise you what to do, as the whole country may be overrun. I felt the other day [on furlough] that I was seeing the last of my dear old house, and it was a severe trial to me. I can’t see why God has sent such trials upon us, but he must have some reason for it. … May he protect you all from the outrages of the enemy, for Christ’s sake.
The Federal landing was set for February 12, but the action stalled until the 16th, by which time the evacuation of Charleston had been ordered. From Sewee Bay, Captain Edward Parker and the Ball boys withdrew upstate. The road of retreat led right through Limerick, and Parker’s company stopped on the plantation for the night.
“We took as many in our house as we could, and some camped in the yard,” Mary Ball remembered. “When they went, we felt truly desolate. I wept when they burnt Huger’s bridge after going over it. … The last night they were with us at Limerick we tried to sing hymns together. It was Sunday. Some could not sing, but wept.”
The last day of slavery came at Limerick on February 26. William Ball sat in the dining room, a Bible in front of him, reading aloud to his family and a few of “his people.” The local clergyman had made himself scarce during the fight, so William read church services for gatherings at home. It was a Sunday, and everyone in the room, black and white, knew the end was upon them. Before long, a dispatch of “greasy Yankees,” as William’s son Isaac called them, would arrive in the allée of oaks outside the door.
The prayer group numbered perhaps ten. Seated around the table were William’s mother Eliza, his sister Jane, and his wife Mary; rounding out the table was William and Mary’s four-month-old daughter, Eliza. Behind the whites, in the corner and along the plastered wall, stood an elderly black woman, Maum Hetty, the plantation’s black matriarch, who lived nearest the family and ranked first among Limerick’s house slaves. Hetty had brought up William’s four sons by his first wife, and raised her own children on the side. Next to Hetty, probably, stood Robert, or “Robtie,” the butler as well as the Ball brothers’ companion and valet. Robtie was said to be especially good with a story, and used to bewitch the boys for hours with tales of an old trickster, Brer Rabbit.
The Bible reading, from the book of Lamentations, was a mournful passage about the miserable fate of Jerusalem, condemned by God for its sins. “She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces,” read William. “She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks … for the Lord hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions.” According to Mary Ball, the white people in the room thought the Bible passage fit their predicament.
At the end of 1864, an army of sixty-five thousand under General William Tecumseh Sherman had marched from Atlanta to Savannah, pulling down buildings, tearing up railroads, and burning a giant swath. Sherman’s army stayed in Savannah for six weeks, then headed for South Carolina. Everyone expected Charleston to be the next target, but the marauding Federals turned away from the city and burned the capital of Columbia instead. Charleston surrendered the same day, February 17, to gunboats in the harbor. A week after the victors arrived, they sent raiding parties to the plantations; as William was reading from the Bible, a cavalryman and his company suddenly rode up to the mansion. A man in a blue uniform dismounted, threw open the door, and demanded to talk to the black village.
The crowd came from the cabins behind the house. Among the group was Henry, a nine-year-old boy with a broad face and light skin. Years later, Henry (by then known as P. Henry Martin, whose family story I told earlier) would recall this day in a letter to Mary Ball. A young woman named Sylvia, one of the plantation seamstresses, also came down. Before the war, Sylvia’s owners had bought their clothing from stores; but after the blockade of Charleston, Sylvia had been pressed into service, making William’s shirts from coarse homespun. The gardener Daddy Ben, who kept the yard and flower beds around the big house, hobbled out as well. (When he was a boy, Ben had fallen from a horse and broken his leg. Plantation medicine was severe—someone called for an amputation and Ben got a wooden leg.) Then the rest came down, and the Yankee told the crowd they were free.
The Ball women at this
time evidently worried about rape. Throughout the war, the Confederate press had stoked morale with charges that if the Southerners gave in, Yankees would “ravish the South,” and with hints that freed black men would do the same. Mary Ball wrote that when the celebration began outside, she and her sister-in-law, Jane Ball Shoolbred, ran upstairs. Each woman put on two heavy dresses, loading themselves down in a way that would frustrate sexual attack. William had buried the family silver in a swamp near the house, but some of the more delicate jewelry could not stand the mud. Grabbing these last pieces, Mary and Jane put them in cloth bags and stowed the loot next to their bodies, under layers of petticoats.
The first soldiers appeared and caroused through the house. They did little damage, and the worry that the women might be forced to have sex with the enemy, or with field hands, vanished. Later Mary Ball remembered that some of the Yankees were actually gentle. (“We thought they were rather polite.”) Mary and Jane took off their double dresses, which were too hot.
The family had heard that the raiders usually went straight to the liquor. A second cavalry company rode up to the main house, and two young men from this new group surprised everyone by asking for a pitcher of milk and molasses. Maum Hetty brought some out and gave it to them. When they had drunk it down, Mary remembered, the soldiers remarked that it was the best molasses they had ever tasted.
Before the day was out, a third Yankee company showed up on the lawn at Limerick. All of its soldiers were black, with the exception of their commander, a white colonel. Paying no attention to the mansion, the black Federals went straight to the barnyard, where they found the large bell that had been used to call the slaves to work. Saying little, they took the bell down from its mount and smashed it to pieces.
The commander of the black company, a Colonel James Beecher, came from a family of antislavery activists in the North. His half brother, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, was an abolitionist and pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn; his half sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe. James Beecher himself was a former missionary who had lived several years in China. After he joined the Union Army in 1861, Beecher, then thirty-three, was appointed lieutenant colonel of the 141st New York Volunteers, and later was given the task of recruiting a black regiment, the First North Carolina Volunteers. Beecher opened a recruiting office in New Bern, North Carolina, raised the regiment, and served as both commander and chaplain. It was this unit, most if not all of whom were freed slaves, that invaded Limerick and destroyed the work bell. Without really trying, Colonel Beecher, standing at the head of the North Carolina Volunteers, advertised the righteousness that had overtaken the war after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863. The Balls must have felt that an ambassador from President Lincoln himself had come to call.
Night fell, and the black soldiers celebrated with the freedpeople on the old slave street. The white Yankees made camp in the yard in front of the main house, while Colonel Beecher sat in the dining room with other officers, talking to William and family. William seems to have entertained the colonel with a mixture of grace and disdain. Every so often, William would call out to Maum Hetty for table service, but each time, according to Mary Ball’s memoir, Beecher refused to allow Hetty to serve him, even to bring a pitcher of water, saying that she was no longer a slave and could not be bossed. Another officer opened a bottle of wine looted from a neighboring plantation. Despite the hospitality, Beecher evidently felt a certain menace and declined to drink, saying the wine might be poisoned. William took offense at the suggestion that a Southern gentleman would poison a bottle of wine and, pouring a glass, drank it down. He offered the next one to Beecher, who took it, and the unlikely drinking partners toasted into the night.
While the Balls stayed shuttered indoors, the yard outside rocked with drunkenness and joy, and from the parlor Mary heard repeated calls to burn the house. No one dared light a match, however, because the colonel was inside. Eyeing the ruckus from the window, William invited Beecher to spend the night in the parlor and leave his soldiers to pitch tents on the grass. William’s invitation may have been a gesture of friendliness—or just as likely, he wanted fire insurance. The looting began when one soldier pried open the food storage. Half the hams and bacon were given around, while other soldiers dug through the garden behind the house, looking for hidden treasure. Some of the freedpeople looted, some not, and it went on until the Yankees grew tired and the plantation went to sleep, a crowded military camp. More looting started the next morning when soldiers burst into the main house and began rifling for hiding places. Finding nothing, and frustrated by the absence of silver, they seized on a china cabinet. Some of the former slaves carried off pieces of porcelain, and the Yankees smashed the rest on the brick cellar floor. The storeroom was broken open again and this time, cleaned out.
A similar scene was repeated on all the Ball places, as each was raided by Yankee troops. The Balls feared the worst, but in the end the soldiers and freedpeople just snatched a few hams. The single exception came at Buck Hall plantation, formerly home to William’s cousin, Ann Ball Deas, and since her death, to her husband, Horry Deas. The Buck Hall mansion, work buildings, and crop (but not the slave cabins) were burned to the ground by Federal soldiers and freed Ball slaves. Despite the slaughter of the war, no one, not even on Buck Hall, was hurt.
Twenty-four hours after reaching Limerick, the Federal troops readied to leave. The last group of soldiers pulled down the rail fence that ringed the plantation yard, then they were gone. William and Mary Ball felt bitter and humiliated. As the stragglers marched off behind the U.S. flag, Mary cringed. “It could never be my flag again,” she wrote, “after being disgraced.”
William’s four sons made their way north with the remnants of the Army of Tennessee under General Joseph E. Johnston, heading for the last battles in North Carolina. General Johnston had been stripped of command by President Davis in July 1864 but was restored to rank February 25, 1865, just in time to lead the retreat from South Carolina. Isaac Ball, now a corporal, was assigned to “Rhett’s Brigade” under Colonel Alfred Rhett, an infantry formed out of the First South Carolina Artillery after the evacuation of Charleston. Rhett’s Brigade was placed at the rear during the retreat.
In early March, General Grant ordered General Sherman to move north out of South Carolina, and ordered another force, headed by Phillip Sheridan, down from northern Virginia to meet him. Sherman’s army left Columbia in ashes and began to chase General Johnston. The Union plan was to converge the armies in North Carolina—squeezing Johnston (and the Ball boys) in between—then to move on to the Confederate capital at Richmond. To prepare for this pincer maneuver, Federals under General Jacob Cox were sent to New Bern, North Carolina, to capture the railroad there, in order to have a straight line to ship supplies from the coast to the middle of the state. In all, the Union troops numbered ninety thousand, against Johnston’s 21,500.
With defeat in sight, Isaac began a diary as he retreated into North Carolina. He evidently thought he might be killed, and wanted to leave something for his family about the last weeks. The entries in the diary are terse, however, revealing his movements but few emotions. From time to time, Sherman caught up with Rhett’s Brigade, the rear guard, and drew them into a fight. This happened at Cheraw, South Carolina; afterward, Isaac wrote merely, “[I was] Part of the battle.” A few days later, he added: “March 3rd, Sharp skirmish in the village, Capt had his horse shot while defending the bridge. … Compelled to abandon our caissons [gun carriages] for want of horses.”
In early March, the “Hampton Legion,” a large group of cavalry and infantry commanded by General Wade Hampton, joined Johnston’s retreat. Hampton’s ranks consisted of sons of wealthy South Carolina families not unlike Hampton himself, a cotton planter. Isaac’s unit marched for a week from Cheraw, retreating seventy-five miles through constant rain, until the Ball brothers came to Fayetteville, North Carolina. “Dried clothes,” Isaac wrote on March 11. No sooner had they hu
ng out their uniforms than Sherman also reached town, pushing them farther. Isaac wrote: “Hampton had a brush with the Yanks in the town, [and we] evacuated.”
On March 8, in a last desperate act, the Confederate Senate in Richmond approved the mustering of blacks as soldiers, but the war would be over before the rebels could try to raise a black unit. Sherman, in Fayetteville, sent messengers to get troops under General Schofield to join him in a two-pronged attack on Johnston at the town of Goldsboro, fifty miles away, to the northeast. Sherman sent word he would move on March 15 toward Goldsboro after a feint at Raleigh, which lay due north. “Ordered to Raleigh to be re-equipped,” wrote Isaac on March 12, and on March 15, “reached Raleigh.”
Sherman headed for Raleigh, then swung toward Goldsboro, while Generals Cox and Schofield led troops inland from the coast. Johnston attempted to fight both advances, from his left and right, taking a stand at the town of Bentonville. Between March 19 and 21, the Confederates attacked Sherman’s left wing, but the Yankees fought off three assaults, and Johnston was defeated. The battle was the last significant rebel effort to halt Sherman. On March 23, Sherman and Schofield united forces at Goldsboro. Johnston wanted to follow Sherman north, hoping to join General Robert E. Lee, but Lee was preparing to evacuate Petersburg in the face of General Grant. In a gamble Johnston put a few troops on the roads he thought Sherman would take toward the Confederate capital at Richmond.
Isaac and his brothers, still in Raleigh, missed all of these fights. On March 24 Isaac wrote, “ordered to Hillsboro.”
Hillsborough, thirty miles northwest of Raleigh, was a town where Johnston hoped to fall back and wait for Lee, who was trying to join the fight in North Carolina. To Isaac, the zigzag retreat through the South may have seemed like the last act of the disaster—a struggle for principles in which he believed and, at the same time, a futile fight for his inheritance. The wait went on for days, because Lee was hemmed in in Virginia by a hundred thousand men under Sheridan. On April 3, Union troops occupied Richmond, and Lee broke west, pursued by Grant, who wanted to keep him from meeting Johnston. The Ball brothers waited in Hillsborough until April 5, when Isaac wrote, ominously, that he was “ordered to the front.” The front was back in the direction of Goldsboro and Sherman.
