by Edward Ball
On April 6 came the last major fight between Grant and Lee, with huge losses to Lee; and on April 9, Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. The fighting continued, however, in North Carolina. Sherman moved toward Raleigh on April 10 to meet Johnston’s return, with skirmishes along the way. Isaac wrote that on that day his unit camped outside the town of Smithfield, five miles from Sherman. On April 11, Sherman’s troops entered Smithfield and learned the news of Lee’s surrender; fighting still continued, as the Confederate government, fleeing Richmond, arrived in an entourage in North Carolina. The Ball brothers fell back with Johnston toward Raleigh, then beyond, retreating seventy-five miles. By this time, President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had joined the retreat with Johnston and set up a temporary Confederate capital in the town of Greensboro, under Johnston’s guard, in north-central North Carolina. The Ball boys camped outside town with the units that surrounded Davis and his last stand.
On April 14, Lincoln was assassinated in Washington. Johnston decided to negotiate with Sherman, and after a meeting near Durham on April 17, the two generals signed an armistice. The Ball boys waited for orders. A week later, the armistice was rejected by Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, because the agreement called for the Federals to recognize existing Southern state governments. Jefferson Davis told Johnston to keep fighting, and take his army south, but Johnston defied his president and returned to the negotiating table. This time, on April 26, the Confederates relented, and agreed to give up all weapons and public property. The following day came the surrender, and Isaac wrote: “guns turned over to the Quarter Master in Greensboro.”
Six hundred twenty thousand Americans were killed in the Civil War. The Ball boys had participated in the last fighting east of the Mississippi. According to a history of their regiment, written by an officer in their unit, on the day of surrender, “the companies were skeleton companies.” The retreat from Charleston had gone into the field with forty-five officers and 1,000 infantry, and ended with eleven officers and 125 men.
Isaac seems to have been aware of the new world he now occupied. An event he recorded in his journal shows that he got a taste of the new order, in which all had been turned upside down. When he and his brothers were running from the Yankees, and hoping not to be killed, one day, Isaac wrote, “Begged for the first time for a meal.”
16
AFTERMATH
One summer my parents took my brother and me to the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C. I was five years old, thirsty, and not much interested in Abraham Lincoln; but I knew in some way that he was the most significant of the presidents, and his big statue marked a highlight of our pilgrimage from the South to the capital. The sun bounced sharply off the white Colorado yule marble of the fake Athenian temple, and in the blinding light, it was impossible to see past the columns through the great open door. Inside, our eyes adjusted to the dim and our ears to the voices that banged against the vaulted ceiling. My mother, who had a reverence for authority, quieted her two sons with hushing noises as we approached the rope cordon behind which Mr. Lincoln tucked his feet. Ignoring the statue, my father turned to read the words chiseled on the wall—the Second Inaugural Address, the address at Gettysburg—and to look at the murals, “Unification” on the north wall and “Emancipation” on the south, the latter with its image of the Angel of Truth freeing a slave and the allegorical figures of Justice and Immortality as witness. In his shorts and tropical shirt, Dad looked like the Everyman of summertime Washington, and not especially like a person who had heard Lincoln-hating stories as a young Charlestonian.
From my short perspective, the huge head of Lincoln, with its high brow and concave cheeks, and the fingers like marble cucumbers, appeared grotesque. But despite feeling a vague repulsion in the presence of the stone giant, I remember being fascinated by the statue’s eyes. They were weary, cavernous eyes, focused on some distant scene—perhaps the future of America, or the tour buses releasing crowds on the lawn.
In spring of 1862, near Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, black Americans began to use surnames for the first time. Federal troops had occupied part of the state, and the whites had fled, prompting a Union commander, Major General Ormsby M. Mitchel, to tell former slaves they could now use two names. Three years later, after the final surrenders, freedpeople around the South followed suit.
The common view is that black people adopted the names of their former owners, but that was not the case at the Ball places. Although a handful of workers took the name Ball, most chose some other name. (In a few cases, slaves seem to have had concealed surnames, which emerged after freedom.) Oral tradition in the Ball family has it that the last masters asked former slaves not to take our name. The Balls, who held themselves above blacks, thought the appearance of black families called Ball would diminish their status. An equal worry seemed to be that masters feared that darker families named Ball might be taken as sons and daughters of whites. Some freedpeople, no doubt, wanted to take the name Ball. It could be recognized far from home and might help in such things as looking for a place to live or trying to get credit to buy land. But most people went out of their way to find other names.
In the end, one or two people on each plantation took the name Ball, while most black families on Ball lands made other choices, including Aiken, Anton, Ash, Bennett, Black, Broughton, Brown, Bryan, Campbell, Cigar (or Segar), Coaxum, Collins, Dart, Drayton, Easton, Ellington, Evans, Fayall, Ferguson, Fleming, Ford, Fork, Frost, Gadders (or Gethers), Gadsden, Gaillard (Gillard), Gainey, Gamble, Garrett, Garsing, Gibbes, Gilbert, Gillon, Graham, Green, Guinness, Hamilton, Harleston, Harris, Hasgill (Haskell), Heyward (Haywood), Horlbeck, Irving, Jenkins, Johnson (Johnston), Jones, Ladson (Ladsdon), Lance, Lash, Lawrence (Laurence), London, Lonesome, Lovely, Lucas, Martin, Matthews, Maxwell, McKnight, Middleton, Miles, Miller, Moultrie, Nelson, Nesbitt (Nesbeth), Oliver, Owens, Parker, Pinckney, Poyas, Pritchard, Randolf (Randolph), Read, Richardson, Rivers, Roberson (Robertson), Robinson, Roper, Royal (Ryall), Scott, Seymour, Shepherd, Simmons, Simon, Singleton, Stewart, Thompson, Vandross (Vanderhorst), Wade, Waring, Warren, Washington, Watson, Waylan, White, Wigfall, Williams, Wilson, and Withers.
Sometimes people invented names or had them arrive by accident. I met one family called Fashion who told the story of a pair of brothers, their ancestors, who got freedom and didn’t want the master’s name. One day the brothers were talking about an alternative when they spied a box on the table on which was printed the word “Fashion”—and they took the suggestion.
From The Bluff plantation, property of Isaac and Mary Louisa Ball between 1869 and 1924, came the story of a woman named Marly One. In the early 1900s, a curious Ball, visiting The Bluff, asked Marly One about the source of her unusual name. Marly One replied that her grandfather was living on The Bluff at the end of the Civil War, when the Union troops came through, and that a short time later there came a man, working for the army, assigned to take down the names of the freed blacks.
Marly explained to Miss Ball, “And the man went up to my grandfather and said, ‘What’s your name?’ My Granddaddy said, ‘Jack.’ And the man said, ‘Jack what?’ And Granddaddy said, ‘Jack One.’ ” “Jack One” was the number one man called Jack on the Bluff.
Following the defeat of the Confederacy, the Ball family felt the slow retribution of financial decline. About a year after the fighting, William Ball, the last rice planter, sold four plantations—The Blessing, Cedar Hill, Cherry Hill, and Halidon Hill. Letters show that he wasn’t liked by the blacks on them, and that the houses for whites had been looted. Mary Ball remembered that the contents of the mansion in town, which had been removed to the country during the bombardment of Charleston, had disappeared. “The lovely furniture from the house on East Bay Street was sent up to Cedar Hill and most of it was missed,” she wrote. “The Yankees took it out of the house and gave it to the Negroes.”
William Ball tried to set himself up as a sharecrop landlord, but with l
ittle success. The sharecrop system gave former slaves a livelihood when farmwork was the only black skill that would sell on the labor market. Many black families went back into business as hired hands with the same landlords that had owned them, on terms that prolonged the old arrangements, with the modification that violence against workers would not be tolerated. In the usual deal, workers received one-half of a season’s rice crop, the balance going to the former master. William Ball found that few people wanted to work for him, although some of his cousins and sons did better at persuading people to return to the rice fields. Whereas William had some 620 workers before the Civil War, only 29 put their names on William’s first labor contract at Limerick, in March 1866. Everyone else, apparently, wanted nothing to do with him.
The Ball mansion in Charleston had been hit by an artillery shell during the war, but later patched up. In 1866, the house was appraised at $10,000. The Balls could not pay for further repairs, and the building decayed. The appraisal fell quickly to $9,000, then lower. William and his extended family of eight moved out and began renting the house to cover taxes and insurance, letting the building to an Irish tenant at a mere $50 a month. In 1878, the appraisal dropped to $5,000, and rent slid to $33. Finally, in March 1879, William sold the house for $5,105 in railroad bonds. The building later became a dormitory for railroad workers before being demolished about 1920.
When the end came, the Ball family’s scattered members were unsure how to support themselves, and some lost control of their lives. Alwyn Ball Jr., son of William’s cousin Alwyn, moved to New York and became an alcoholic. “I went one and a half years ago to an asylum for intemperance,” Alwyn wrote from the North in 1872, “spent one year and have been home six months and can truly say that with God’s help I have been effectually cured of all desire for drink.” After the fountain of cash from the rice fields was cut off, Alwyn needed money to support his family. He sold his silver to pay creditors, and, desperate, seized on the idea of a little retail business in New York, “a butter stand in the main market.” Alwyn wrote William to ask for the money ($300) to buy the booth. If cousin Ball couldn’t provide, Alwyn said, he would start selling the furniture.
By the mid-1870s, the Limerick fields were mostly fallow, and perhaps a hundred black people lived in the old slave shacks, squeezing life from the corn fields and hog pens. A tax return from 1876 appraised the property, with its 4,603 acres and twenty-five buildings, at $10,153. In the next ten years, William sold pieces of the land to stay afloat, and in 1890, after various smaller sales, got rid of a five-hundred-acre chunk to a phosphate company, which dug up the swamps for the mineral. About the same time new county lines were drawn, and the Balls’ old district, St. John’s Parish, fell within the borders of a new Berkeley County. (St. John’s Parish became St. John’s Berkeley Parish.) As the borders of the Ball world closed in, the family grew nostalgic for slavery. In 1891, three months before his death, William sent a sentimental letter to a relative, in which he made it known he would take it all back, if he could.
“I can yet read and write without glasses, but do use them at times,” wrote William, who was sixty-nine. “I have hitherto had many, very many blessings to be thankful for through life, and if God has, seen fit to visit me with cares and poverty in my old days, it must be for some wise purpose. … We had quite a pleasant home party during the Christmas holidays. … However, Xmas now-a-days can’t compare to those of the good old days in slavery times, thanks to Mr. Lincoln and his co-adjutors.”
William died in April 1891, leaving behind his second wife, Mary, their seven children, and four grown children by his first wife. Two years later, one of William’s creditors called in a loan for $2,000 and, when a roomful of Ball heirs couldn’t pay, sued for title to Limerick. The last of William’s land, with the house, sold for $1,298. The Limerick mansion, built in 1720, quickly fell into decline. In the 1930s the interior was photographed; the building had become a boardinghouse for tenant farmers, who decorated the walls with magazine covers and filled the parlors with rickety beds. In 1945 the house burned to the ground.
The final enclave gone, the Balls moved to Charleston to look for other means of support. William’s son Isaac the Confederate had raised a family on The Bluff as a sharecrop landlord, but he gave up in the mid-1890s after a hurricane in 1893 destroyed much of what remained of the rice fields. My Grandfather Nat, Isaac’s son, remembered the move to town, when he was thirteen. The family piled belongings onto a horse cart, he said, and rode the slow thirty miles to Charleston along rutted roads. Isaac managed to hold on to The Bluff, which consisted of 1,123 acres on the west branch of the Cooper River, until 1924, when it was sold.
By 1900 the Balls in Charleston slipped into professional jobs, and lower. One of the sons of William and Julia Cart Ball worked for the Tuxbury Lumber Company, while other family members went into the fertilizer business or sold insurance. A grandson from Limerick, William Moultrie Ball, became the city’s Superintendent of Parks and Playgrounds. Another grandchild got an education better than that of his brothers and sisters and became headmaster of Montgomery Bell Academy, a private school in Nashville, Tennessee. The family gradually drifted and grew level with the rest of the white population, amid the poverty of the South. One grandson from Limerick, I. G. Ball, tried something that would have shamed his older kin—running a hardware store. Opened in the early 1900s, the Ball Supply Company, on King Street, sold caulk and screwdrivers until the late 1940s.
My grandfather, Nathaniel I. Ball, the fifth son of Isaac and Mary Louisa Ball, got a job with a fertilizer company and, when he was twenty-nine, married Susan Magdalene Porter, daughter and granddaughter of Episcopal clergymen. Later he started a small contracting business that did renovation work, using a backyard shed for an office. Eventually Grandfather Nat had four or five employees, black men who did plastering, painting, and roof repairs. My father, the contractor’s second son, Theodore Porter Ball, attended the local College of Charleston, went to Virginia Theological Seminary, and became an Episcopal priest. At forty-two, he married my mother, Janet Rowley of New Orleans, daughter of a clerk who worked for a Louisiana utility company. I was born in Savannah, Georgia, where Dad ran a parish, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and earned a clergyman’s salary of a few hundred dollars a month. I went to college, at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, on a scholarship and loans. There was no land, no inheritance, no slave money.
In 1880, the “colored” made up sixty percent of South Carolina’s residents. During the twenty years between 1860 and 1880, the black population of Charleston rose by two-thirds as thousands of ex-slaves streamed to the city, looking for work. Some families stayed close to the Balls, working as housekeepers, but most looked for a new identity. Around the South in general, blacks separated from whites, and whites pushed them away with neglect and violence. In 1896, the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson allowed segregation to become law, though by this time black and white veterans of the plantation had already set up parallel societies.
At the start of World War I, fifty years after emancipation, most families of former slaves had lost touch with the Balls, whose whereabouts they might have known but whose faces they did not. A black migration that had been trickling out of South Carolina before the war accelerated when black veterans returned from Europe, and thousands moved north to new lives. Between 1900 and 1940, the proportion of black citizens dropped by nearly thirty percent, as people left for Washington, Baltimore, Delaware, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In 1923, the white population of South Carolina outnumbered the black for the first time since the mass slave escapes of the American Revolution. White terror worked neatly with black striving to drive people away: the last of hundreds of lynchings in South Carolina occurred in 1947, for which thirty-one white defendants were acquitted. The migrants to the North built families there and lost connection with the South, until, by World War II, few of the Balls and few of the grandchildren of ex–Ball slaves knew where thei
r opposite numbers might be found.
The oldest person I believe I’ve met was the son of a Ball slave. Because his family wanted privacy, I will call him Benjamin Nesbitt, an alias. Benjamin Nesbitt’s father was born near the end of slavery on one of William Ball’s plantations, while his wife’s family came from a place that belonged to William’s sister Jane. When we met, on a country lane lined with the houses of his children, Mr. Nesbitt was in his late nineties. As I arrived at his house, the clouds opened, and a rainstorm darkened the eaves and rattled the roof. Mr. Nesbitt was a small man, further shrunken by time, with a spread of short white hair and a face of fifty lines. He had little physical energy but was a vigorous talker. His wife, nearly the same age as he, sat nearby but said nothing, leaving her husband to hold forth.
“Me and my wife are way up in age—and no thinking about it—I can’t do anything, she can’t do anything,” Mr. Nesbitt said, his voice a tray of gravel.
I asked how his family got off the plantation.
“That’s way back yonder,” he answered. “My grandmother raised her children off of com, and, to my knowledge, hard labor. At that time, things were rougher. You had to stay on that farm from black to black. You go in the dark and you come in the dark. Working for the white man, when he gave you something you said, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and you go on about your business. In those days, when they said you had to get up and go, you had to get up and go.”
