by Edward Ball
The “Warr,” which lasted a few days, was the first Carolina slave raid. Afterward the settlers debated what to do with their prisoners. The Grand Council decided that “every Company which went out upon that expedition shall secure and maintain the Indians they have taken till they can transport the said Indians.” To “transport” meant to deport, or export, the prisoners to faraway slave buyers. Such transactions would speed up the removal of Natives from the land.
The slave raids picked up quickly after the first one. Hundreds of people were captured by white “Indian traders,” who also sold deerskins. The majority of Native slaves were women and children, because the men, being adept hunters, proved better at escaping capture. A particular method of abduction evolved. The raiders would wait until the men of a village were away on a hunt and then fall on the people left behind. As the slave trade developed, the whites began to talk about building a wall around their settlement, an odd notion for a few farmhouses and one or two muddy streets. No retaliation ever came, however, because the English carried guns, the Natives, blowguns.
Most of the captives were sold to slave buyers in the other English colonies—Barbados, Jamaica, Massachusetts, and New York. In time, white Indian traders began to employ Native people to do their slaving for them. By distributing guns to some clans and not others, the colonists used rivalries between villages to get captives. The Carolinians goaded skirmishes and offered rifles to Natives for delivering people. Soon there appeared a steady flow of humans alongside the trade of pelts and rum. Eventually the whites, no longer fearing reprisal, kept Native workers for themselves and compelled them to labor rather than shipping them out.
Africans, meanwhile, came steadily into port. The black traffic was controlled from England. In 1672, the London-based Royal African Company secured from King Charles II a monopoly on the black slave trade into the British colonies. The company sent most of its ships to a long stretch of the West African coast between the mouth of the Gambia River and the eastern edge of the Gulf of Guinea. From depots, so-called slave factories, the ships brought their cargo to Barbados, Jamaica, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean islands. Until the end of the 1600s, nearly all of the blacks the Carolina whites enslaved were bought from Barbados.
John and Affra Coming probably were not involved in the slave raids, but Coming was almost certainly a slave trader of sorts, transporting people in and out of the colony. Soon after the first landing in Carolina, he gained the captain’s berth in a ship called the Edisto, and afterward another vessel, the Blessing. As one of the settlement’s chief mariners, Coming earned his living by shuttling cargo between Carolina and other English territories. Throughout the 1670s, when he was almost constantly at sea, it is likely that beneath his decks, Elias Ball’s uncle carried Native people out of Carolina to Barbados, and Africans from Barbados back to the mainland.
John Coming was a man of simple beginnings, but Affra Harleston came from a landed family in Essex County, England. The Harleston farm was a place called Mollands, in South Ockendon, twenty miles east of the center of London and two miles north of the River Thames. It included a twelve-room house and evidently much land. An inventory of the contents of the dwelling, made in 1631 and handed down in the Ball family, describes the Harlestons’ pewter plates, damask napkins, brass skillets, and featherbeds. These things did not signify noble status, to be sure, but they placed the family in the propertied class.
As with the Balls, the English Civil War turned the Harlestons’ world upside down. In the 1640s, having shown loyalty to King Charles I, some of the family moved to Ireland to escape the tide of Cromwell. They had estates near Dublin, where Affra’s mother, Elizabeth Harleston, controlled seven hundred acres. Affra was probably born in Ireland about 1645 and raised among English expatriates, who were accustomed to having Irish servants care for their children.
When Affra and John set up house in America, they had ambitions to build an estate, and began to look for workers. The couple turned first to other whites. In 1671, John Coming sailed the Carolina back to Britain and returned with five men and one woman—indentured servants who had contracted their labor for several years. Their names were John Chambers, Rachel Franck, George Gantlett, Samuel Lucas, Michael Lovering, and Philip O’Neil. At least some were Irish.
According to the Fundamental Constitutions, a white settler had a right to 150 acres for each laborer he or she brought to Carolina—white or black, free, indentured, or enslaved. For his first group of contract workers, John Coming got a piece of paper promising him nine hundred acres.
The six workers probably moved to the Comings’ tract within the English settlement. Within a few months, however, there was an uprising in the household. In June 1672, while her husband was at sea, Affra Coming brought charges against John Chambers, Philip O’Neil, and one other worker, complaining to the court of “their disobedience to her in refusing to observe her lawful commands.” A record of the hearing shows that the servants had been working for less than a year when they protested they were being badly fed by their employers. Philip O’Neil showed his opinion of Affra by “threatening to overset the Boate wherein she was” and by taking his food from her hands and throwing it to some dogs. O’Neil also threatened to run away and join the Natives. In her complaint, Affra sought to punish O’Neil for his “divers … gross abuses.” When the decision came down, the servants were put in their place and the court ordered O’Neil tied to a tree for “one and twenty lashes upon his naked back.”
For the next several years, John Coming continued to bring workers from Britain, although no further records show how they fared under the iron rule of Affra Coming.
About 1680, the settlement moved to a drier spot, the peninsula formed by the two rivers that came together in the harbor, a location more easily reached by ships. The immigrants had given their community a name, Charlestown. (A century later, at the end of the American Revolution, the city would be incorporated as Charleston. By using the briefer spelling, I will avoid the appearance of a scene change in midstory.)
About this time John Coming gave up the sea and, with Affra, turned in some warrants for land. The couple had already claimed about two hundred acres on the peninsula of Charleston and one three-quarter-acre lot in the new town. Because the whites distributed house lots in numerical order, John and Affra’s town property appears in the deeds as lot 49. It measured 88 by 381 feet on what would later become the northwest and northeast corners of East Bay and Pinckney streets. The third and largest piece of land the couple claimed, in February 1678, lay about twenty-five miles inland from the coast, at the joining of two branches of a river known to the Natives as the Etiwan, after the people who lived on it. To the English, it became the Cooper River, after Lord Ashley Cooper, John Locke’s paymaster. This was the river whose fork gave the name to the estate known as Coming’s T.
The Cooper River flowed down from Coming’s T along twists and turns into Charleston harbor, a water distance of about fifty miles. Though nearly twice as far as by land, traveling by water was faster, because no roads yet existed. The river was a tidal stream whose level rose five feet or more with each high tide on the coast. The brackish backflow came close to the T but went no farther, meaning that above Coming’s T, the river ran fresh.
Coming’s T was a big swath of forest (pine trees, oak, magnolia) mingled with thick swamps (cedar and gum trees). A stretch of marsh separated the firm land from the clear stream of the river. At high tide, the water covered the marsh, retreating at ebb to expose the mudflats and roots of abundant cypress trees. I suspect John and Affra were struck by the fecundity of the swamps, the draperies of moss, the tree canopies, and the abundance of game. There were alligators and rattlesnakes, bobcats, and an occasional bear—but there was also easy food for the table, including deer, duck, and possum. Close to the river, the soil felt like heavy loam in the hand, what the colonists called black mould.
Each new English plot had the rough shape of a rectangle or triang
le, with one wavy border running along the riverbank and straight sides forming inland property lines. The estates asserted themselves neatly on plats but were invisible on the ground. Neither roads nor fences marked the boundaries, and written descriptions of land grants sound like directions for a walk through the woods. One plat described the border of a tract at the edge of Coming’s T as “live oak, hickory, pine, dead pine.”
When the English came, the Natives made room for them. One group of Etiwan numbered about fifty people who moved up and down the river that once had their name. For a time there was an Etiwan village across the stream from Coming’s T, at a place called Hagan. Two Native trading posts covered the river, the nearest at a bluff known as Mepkin, three miles from the T. The Santee and others apparently passed through Affra and John’s land to get there. More traffic moved a few miles to the west, on the other side of the western branch of the river, on the main path inland from Charleston. Natives, in various languages, named this route the Broad Path or Broad Way. The English called it the Cherokee Trail. The road began at the ocean and continued four hundred miles west and north to Cherokee towns in the mountains, then farther, beyond the Appalachian range to the Mississippi River.
John and Affra probably bought their first slaves about 1680. The term of indenture for their white workers had ended, and Coming had stopped his return trips to Britain. In the most likely scenario the couple simply went to the wharf in Charleston, where John had friends in the business, and bought two or three Africans.
One of the first tasks required by the new slave owners would have been to build a house at the T. The slaves may have cut the pine and hoisted the beams under John’s direction. Eventually a simple wooden cottage stood in the shadow of two oaks. According to one member of the Ball family who saw the building before the Civil War and later wrote about it, the house survived for nearly two hundred years, until about 1866.
At the start there were no houses for the slaves. Archaeology in the area suggests that Africans and Natives built various shelters, such as huts with thatched roofs or lean-tos propped on saplings. Others slept under large shelters with four posts (but no walls) and a roof of leaves. Workers may have lived this way, half outdoors, for years before they built more permanent dwellings.
At least some of the Africans put up houses with earthen walls. Beneath the heavy soil of the Cooper River tracts lay a foundation of gummy clay. The clay, easily dug out, was mingled with thin sticks called wattle and piled in layers of ooze into the shape of a cottage. The walls were then cooked with fire to a hardness near that of brick. Topped with a thatched roof, the resulting one- or two-room house resembled some huts in coastal West Africa. Centuries later, this type of building would still be known among black Carolinians as a “ground house.” In the hot climate, a ground house was more comfortable than a wooden cabin. Cooled by the night air, the clay held indoor temperatures down during the day.
If the majority of Native slaves were women, most of the black slaves were men. The Royal African Company kidnapped mainly males, whom their buyers wanted for the heaviest work. The Native women may have lived closer to, or even in, the white household with John and Affra, who made them cook, sew, and clean. As for the men, it is possible that master and mistress worked side by side with them, especially in the first years. John and Affra wanted to make the land conform to the English idea of a farm, and the work of clearing and marking out the property could not be done if the whites merely sat by. All may have dug drainage trenches and cut trees, fields, and paths.
Because of the scarcity of papers from the 1600s, I can only guess at the kind of force John and Affra used with their first slaves. But Affra Coming had petitioned a court to flog her Irish servant, Philip O’Neil, and John Coming, having made his way in the hard society of seagoers, was himself no stranger to brutality. Sea captains often practiced gruesome punishments on sailors, such as keelhauling, that is, dragging a man at the end of a rope beneath the hull of a ship. In the records of the colonial government are many descriptions of savage violence aimed at slaves. But about the exercise of power on Coming’s T—the individual punishments, the coaxings, or the defiance—there is no evidence.
After twenty-five years of marriage, John and Affra remained childless. Two years after arriving in America, the couple took in a four-year-old named Peter Argent, the son of a neighbor. By the terms of a contract, the boy would remain with his guardians until age twenty-one. For unclear reasons, however, the colonial government took the boy away and gave him to other adoptive parents, and afterward John and Affra did not take in another child.
John Coming died November 1, 1695. In his will he left Coming’s T and what he called his “Chattles” to Affra. “Chattel slavery,” as opposed to “freehold slavery,” was an English spin on the old system. A freehold slave was a worker, bound to a piece of land, who could not be transferred or sold away from the estate. The master of a freehold slave claimed possession of the individual’s labor, not his or her person. Freehold slaves included those in bondage to the Spanish in South America and in some parts of Africa.
The English developed a different and more thorough form of bondage. A chattel slave was the equivalent of movable property and could be sold away like a horse. Also, the children of chattel slaves automatically assumed the slave identity of their mother, not always the case among freehold workers. In 1696, the year after John Coming’s death, the colonial legislature in South Carolina passed a law asserting the new chattel status for “All Negroes, Mollatoes, and Indians which at any time heretofore have been bought and Sold.” With that, for all purposes, the system was complete. There would be a hereditary caste of workers, presumably forever.
Following her husband’s death, Affra Coming wrote home to her family in Ireland suggesting that she felt terribly alone, despite being surrounded by many people. “I am desirous to give you an account of my sad state of widowhood,” Affra wrote to her sister in Dublin in 1696. “I am as one that is forlorn; having no relations to comfort me, nor friends to assist me in this sorrowful condition. By all that I can perceive at present, I appear as a sheep in the midst of wolves; but God I hope will be my good shepherd & preserve me as he hath done in many great dangers.”
It may have been that Affra felt vulnerable, as a woman with property, around manipulative men who wanted her riches. A more likely interpretation is that she, “a sheep in the midst of wolves,” feared the Africans and Natives whom she and her husband had held for fifteen years and who now surrounded her.
According to Affra’s letters, John Coming wanted to leave part of his estate to one of his Ball nephews in England, and believed Elias’s older brother, William, was the right one for the inheritance. Half would be his, and half would go to a nephew of Affra, a young man named John Harleston, who lived in Ireland. “His desire,” Affra wrote her sister, meaning the wish of her husband, was to give Coming’s T “to my nephew John Harleston and my nephew William Ball.” Affra considered moving back to Britain from America but added, “I should be loath to leave it for their sakes till one of them come,” that is, until an heir sailed over to take control.
Affra apparently stayed in touch with the Ball family in Devon, reminding them of what awaited in South Carolina. By this time, however, William Ball had passed the age of thirty and had long since become a tailor. He must have measured the prospect of a future in which he would have to change vocations—from making waistcoats for gentlemen to becoming a slave owner in America—and decided against it. And so the option fell to Elias.
It is a ripe touch that the Ball family’s benefactor was called Affra, a name with an interesting etymology. The Phoenicians once called those who lived in North Africa “Afirs,” apparently the Semitic word for wanderer. Romans borrowed the word from the Phoenicians, modified it to “Afer” (plural “Afri”), and the place where the Afers lived became “Africa.” In the Old Testament, Ephah and Epher are descendants of Abraham and Keturah, Abraham’s concubine, and the s
ons of Midian, Keturah’s son. There was also the figure of Apherra, a servant of Solomon, whose descendants returned from exile in Babylon. It seems the name Affra, representative of North African people, was occasionally picked from the Bible by the English as a name for a daughter, such as the future slave owner Affra Coming.
The nature of Coming’s T as a slave farm was no secret to Affra’s English relatives. But what did Elias Ball, a simple young man in the provinces, actually know about American slavery? Apparently little. The Romans brought slavery to Britain with their invasion in 43 A.D., but human property had faded with the Middle Ages, replaced by the villein system, a form of serfdom. Probably the most Elias would have known was that the business was lucrative, from stories that filtered back to England of fortunes made in the colonies. Slavery was a kind of turbulence on the other side of the Atlantic that made money for those who could stomach it.
Affra Coming seems to have died in early 1699. Her will, dated 28 December 1698, contained her husband’s wishes:
I Affra Coming of ye County of Berkly in South Carolina Widdo & relict of John Coming late of ye Same County gent decd. being Sick of Body but of a Sound & disposing memory … Give & bequeath all my Lands, Tenemts Woods & Pastures wch I now have … & every of their apurtenances unto John Harleston of Dublin in ye Kingdom of Ireland gent my Nephew … & to Elias Ball Son of William Ball half Brother of ye abovesd John Coming my most beloved husband, to have & to hold … in Joint-Tenancy & to their respective heirs … for ever.