by Edward Ball
With the building of Hyde Park and Kensington, the transfer of authority from Red Cap to his sons came to an end. The Ball family stood at the center of a little world consisting of five plantations—Comingtee, Hyde Park, Kensington, St. James, and Strawberry. The Cooper River was the Balls’ river, or so everyone might have thought.
In the summer of 1748, word of another slave uprising was whispered down the stream, and a bloody revolt almost exploded on the lawn of Second Elias’s new home, Kensington. A hundred-page report commissioned by the royal governor after the incident tells the story of the alleged conspiracy.
The events began a short distance downstream from the Ball lands, on Back River, a tributary that entered the Cooper, where a family called Akin owned a plantation. The master of the place, James Akin, was well known to the Balls, since Red Cap had once leased him a woman named Cornelia for six months. Akin’s brother Thomas owned a second plantation closer to Kensington and Hyde Park, near the headwaters of the east branch of the Cooper River, at a place called Irishtown. On the Akin place at Back River, known as Akinfield, there lived a slave named Agrippa, a boatman.
One day in June 1748, Agrippa and several other men set off in a boat on an errand to Charleston. Their owner, James Akin, gave them passes and sent them to bring back some oyster shells to make lime. A few miles downriver, Agrippa and the other men stopped at the plantation of one Colonel Alexander Vanderdussen, on Goose Creek. An immigrant from Holland, Vanderdussen had the reputation of being a violent master. On the boat dock, Agrippa fell into conversation with three of Vanderdussen’s slaves—his black driver Pompey, Pompey’s wife, and another man called Billy. According to the official account, the men began to talk about the chances for a black uprising on the river. Everyone recalled the Stono events eight years before; then the black rebels had been slaughtered, but what was to prevent the revolt from succeeding this time? The rebellion would begin on the plantations, move to Charleston, climax in the killing of white people and burning of the city, and end with the escape of the rebels by boat to Florida. Agrippa and his would-be cabal finished their conversation by discussing where they could comandeer the right ships for the getaway.
The men completed their errand and decided to meet again. A few weeks later, Agrippa went by boat with Joe, another man from Akinfield, up the east branch of the Cooper. They ostensibly went to visit Joe’s brother Ammon, who lived on the other Akin place at Irishtown. Between Akinfield and Irishtown lay the main Ball tracts—Comingtee, Kensington, Hyde Park.
When Joe and Agrippa rowed upriver, they stopped at Fish Pond, the plantation owned by the Harleston family, cousins of Second Elias, where they had words with the black driver, Thom Paine. It’s clear that Thom Paine was well known to the Balls, because Second Elias used to summon him to take rum and food over to the Harleston family. (The Thomas Paine who was the pamphleteer and author of the democratic manifesto Common Sense, and is famous for his role in the American Revolution, would not arrive from England to the colonies until 1774, so the slave Thom Paine seems to have gotten his name from some other source.) Thom Paine got into the boat, and the men shoved off for the Ball place, Kensington.
Second Elias would not have been surprised when Thom Paine, Joe, and Agrippa pulled their boat up to his dock; it would have appeared to be business as usual. The young men were met at river’s edge by Second Elias’s man Pompey. Pompey was about twenty, and a recent arrival from Comingtee. Another man, Tom, also appeared at the riverbank. This Tom (in the governor’s account) was actually “Tom White” to the Balls. Bought and brought to Comingtee in 1731, when he was nine, Tom White was an Angolan. At the time of these events, he was twenty-six years old and married to a woman named Julatta, who had three children. At the edge of Kensington, the rebels seemed to be meeting a second time to make plans.
Joe fixed the canoe, and Pompey stepped aboard. In their conversation, Joe told Pompey and Tom White about a rendezvous planned for that night upriver, at Irishtown. Pompey told Joe that he couldn’t come, but said he would tell some other people at Kensington, and they might show up. Tom White agreed to go. The men made their good-byes, and Joe shoved off.
It was Saturday night, the only night when black people did not have to worry about work call the following day. The meeting went off as planned at the Akin place in Irishtown. Tom White was there and, while Pompey stayed away as he said he would, several other Ball slaves showed up. Among them was a man named Carolina, a young fisherman immediately recognizable by a scar on his arm. Violet, a field hand in her twenties, also stopped by. It is impossible to say exactly what happened at Irishtown that night. When the Ball workers were later interrogated, they claimed to have played music and danced through the early morning. But whatever happened, a fierce act of repression soon killed the memory of it. After the Saturday rendezvous, Joe, who had first rowed up to Kensington, was accused of having burned a barn. Perhaps the arson came as the initial act of the rebellion, or perhaps Joe could no longer contain his rage. Joe may even have been framed. In any case, the plantation patrol, a nighttime posse of armed whites who rode through the rice district, arrested him. He was tried in Charleston by the court that dealt with charges against slaves, and executed. If a plot had been imagined by the Ball workers, Joe’s death put an end to their dreaming.
When rumors started to circulate, the governor, James Glen, appointed a committee of prominent slave owners to investigate. The committee summoned witnesses, and a slave named Robin, from Akinfield plantation, was brought down to Charleston to testify. Robin implicated Thom Paine of Fish Pond, as well as a slave named George, on the Akin land. Then she fingered the four slaves belonging to Second Elias—Tom White, Pompey, Violet, and Carolina.
The four from Kensington were brought down to Charleston and locked up in the Work House, the prison for slaves. Tom White, the Angolan, was interrogated first. Both whites and blacks would have remembered that the plotters of the Stono Uprising came from the same region as Tom, so perhaps he was chosen because of his homeland. By this time the Ball slaves must have realized that they faced the penalty of death. None of the Stono rebels had gotten away alive, and the Negro Act of 1740 called for executions. Tom White decided to talk his way out.
In his testimony, summarized by his white questioners, Tom admitted that on the Saturday in question he had seen Joe and had spoken to him. Tom further admitted that he had gone to the Akin place at Irishtown that night but, he went on, the meeting was a house party. There were “a good many Negroes” there, Tom said, and no whites. Someone had brought a banjo, and the blacks “ate and drank, played and laughed,” and the dancing went on all night. Trying to throw his questioners off the trail, Tom finished by admitting that he knew the Harlestons’ Thom Paine, also in jail, but that Thom Paine never showed up at Irishtown.
The investigation continued for weeks, with a stream of witnesses called before the committee. James Akin testified that from time to time runaway slaves hid out on his plantation. He remembered one slave named Limerick, who he said had fled from the Balls. Limerick, said Akin, “was afterwards shot and killed” by a plantation patrol. (No record of Limerick appears in the Ball papers from this period, and I found no mention of his murder beyond this passing reference.) The investigators filed Akin’s testimony and continued their probe.
Dozens of slaves testified, as did several whites. The witnesses brought to the examining room gave incompatible stories, and some simply stonewalled. The conflicting tales bewildered the esteemed citizens of the governor’s panel, who soon decided they were getting nowhere. The problem was the slender evidence—a single dead slave, Joe (or perhaps two, counting Limerick), and a welter of rumors. For the blacks the problem was that conspiracy to revolt meant a guaranteed death penalty, perhaps by torture. The suspects had no choice but to deny everything.
Months after the alleged events, in January 1749 Thomas Akin, owner of the Irishtown plantation, came forward in a huff. He had had enough of the confusion, as we
ll as of insinuation that his business harbored violent resisters. Akin testified that in his opinion, the Ball slaves were telling the truth: there had been no plot, and there was nothing to the affair. Furthermore, Akin (making the strangest charge yet) said that the dastardly rumor of the plot was merely a piece of trouble contrived by a few gossiping slave women. Akin claimed to know four quarrelsome women on whom the whole matter could be blamed. They belonged to his brother, James Akin, and could be found on Akinfield plantation.
Weary of the whole business and anxious to find culprits, even innocent women, the rattled investigators fixed on the rumor explanation. James Akin summoned a woman he owned named Kate, whom he described as a notorious gossip. Then Akin fingered the other three, his slaves Robin, Sue, and Susannah. The panel quickly agreed that the alleged plot must have been a false rumor concocted by Akin’s four suspects. In their final report to Governor Glen, the committee had reassuring words. Nothing, in fact, had been planned, and no slave had even discussed rebellion. Four cantankerous women had merely stirred up the panic in their desire to make trouble.
Kate, Robin, Sue, and Susannah did not get the chance to testify or to defend themselves. Scapegoats to white confusion and fear, they were sold and deported, probably to one of the Caribbean islands. The Ball slaves Carolina, Tom White, Pompey, and Violet were released from the Work House and returned home. Governor James Glen called together the owners of the many suspects to brief them on the case. The announcements took place on an afternoon in February 1749. At the meeting, Second Elias, perhaps grateful, listened carefully to the report of the politician whose job it was to protect him from harm.
Red Cap must have known he was nearing his end, but at age seventy-three he believed he had one last task. The job concerned his daughter Eleanor, the only living child from his second marriage. One of the high desires of a rice planter was to see his daughters married to good husbands. In the eyes of her father, a decent man for Eleanor would be a person with station and money. If love came in addition to these things, so much the better.
Eleanor had grown up considerably since Jeremiah Theus had painted her portrait, and soon after she turned nineteen, she was engaged to an auspicious young man, the twenty-six-year-old merchant Henry Laurens. Red Cap clearly regarded Laurens as a good match, though not necessarily because of his family background. The son of Huguenot parents, Laurens had a father who had been no more than a successful saddlemaker. Although not rich by plantation standards, the ambitious parents had nevertheless found a way to send their son to London to be “finished.” In England, Laurens served as an apprentice at an import-export firm that did business with the British colonies. Back in Charleston, he cut a figure as a young cosmopolite.
Laurens had known Eleanor since she was a girl, but he had delayed asking her to marry until she reached a suitable age, and until he had established himself. The profession Laurens chose was certainly profitable—it would allow him immediately to support a family in high style and showed every sign of future growth; if well-handled, it could make a fortune for the leatherworker’s son in a few short years. In short, putting his rare international contacts to use, Laurens became a slave trader.
Slave dealing was a business in which the Ball family already had good connections. Red Cap’s daughter Ann’s second husband, George Austin, who owned the plantation on the Ashepoo River, also sold people off the ships that arrived from Africa into Charleston. Even so, Austin was a dilettante compared to some others in the business.
When Henry Laurens returned from London, he persuaded Austin to let him come into the slave business as a junior partner. By the late 1740s, the firm was called Austin & Laurens. Soon Laurens’s indefatigable work habits, his British friends (who owned slave ships), and his sharp sales technique (he knew the merchandise better than most) made him the dominant partner. About the time Eleanor Ball said yes to her fiancé, Laurens was showing signs of being the most aggressive slave dealer in the city.
The wedding took place at Comingtee in late June of 1750. For some years, none of the Balls had lived in the Comingtee house, and the ceremony and party filled it up perfectly. Most of the white neighbors, along with a contingent of Charleston guests, came to celebrate. To host the event, Red Cap traveled from Charleston to Comingtee one final time.
What Elias regarded as a good marriage turned out to be a prize match. The family-run firm of Austin & Laurens took over the Charleston slave-selling trade. Before he turned thirty-five, Eleanor Ball’s husband would become the largest slave trader in the British colonies and one of the richest men in North America. Later, I will give an account of Austin & Laurens’s business, and of some of the people, including children, the firm sold.
With his last daughter married off and his sons established on plantations, Elias must have thought his time had come. Two months after Eleanor’s wedding, he drew up his will. In the document, dated August 31, 1750, Red Cap stated his claim: “I, Elias Ball of Charles Town in the province of South Carolina, Gentleman …” Elias had indeed become what in colonial America passed for a “gentleman.” His estate included a house in a provincial capital, Charleston, and thousands of acres of land north of the city. It also included 116 people.
Red Cap’s slaves, with their progeny, ensured that the next generation of Balls—and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next—would never dirty a hand. Elias personified a new kind of American, a slave-owning landlord who emulated the European elite. Using his money, he had tried to equip himself with the manners and belongings of ladies and gentlemen. Many would-be gentlemen like him, however, came from people of modest means, and the English gentry and nobility were not quick to forget this. Long after the American planters had assumed the airs of a musty aristocracy, with portraits and genealogies and pounds of silver plate, their European mentors continued to regard them as something like well-dressed bandits.
In the last week of September 1751, Elias died at age seventy-five. There is no record of the cause of his death, but the end came in the fall, which often meant fever. Red Cap may finally have succumbed to the malaria of the marshes that carried away so many whites. In a posthumous inventory, the colonial government itemized his possessions. He owned slaves (valued at £19,010), land, houses, livestock, furniture, and silver—but only a single book, a Bible. By his own account, Elias had led a charmed existence, one actually bathed in the light of the Lord. In his will, Elias referred to his fortune as “such worldly Estate wherewith it has Pleased God to bless me.” He had ingested as much land and as many people as could be swallowed into a single life. As a businessman and a father, he had latched on to what was there to be taken, defended it when it was threatened, and handed it on to his children.
8
SAWMILL
In my search for the descendants of the Ball slaves, one memorable clue had come from my cousin Elias Ball Bull. Elias was the amateur historian who had spent years crisscrossing the rice district in his work as a preservation consultant, documenting the surviving buildings. After the Civil War, he had said, some of the freed workers moved out of their cabins on the Ball plantations to build a village of their own, called Sawmill. “I think it’s on Hardscrabble Road,” cousin Elias told me. If Sawmill still existed, a few of the original families might still live there.
Sawmill did not appear on any maps, and the Ball land once spread over a dozen miles. To begin the search, I drove out of Charleston along a two-lane highway that cut like a gray tendon through evergreen woods, and came to a pineland village called Cordesville. Cordesville used to be one of the dry places to which white families retreated, with house slaves, to escape the malaria that crept through the wet rice land in summer. The oldest Ball tract, Comingtee, lay a few miles south.
A white wooden shack with a porch and tin roof stood hard by a railroad crossing beneath a painted sign: COUNTRY STORE, CORDESVILLE, S.C. The store was once a railroad stop where black sharecroppers bought food, hardware, cloth. It looked shuttered, but a
television murmured behind the door. Inside, a large musty room was weakly lit by two fluorescent bulbs. The store had waned with the town. The shelves were empty, and the main item for sale appeared to be the junk food in plastic bags that hung on racks. Two black women sat at a table, watching a game show.
“Do you know how to get to Sawmill from here?” I asked. “There’s only about ten houses there.”
“Sawmill Road?” said one.
“Have you heard of something called Hardscrabble Road?” I came back.
“Hardscrabble?” said the woman. “There’s Hard Pinch Road up a little bit.”
“Hard Bench?” I asked.
“Hard Pinch.” She gave directions.
It was winter, and the damp of the nearby swamps intensified the cold. A canopy of low clouds looked like silver-and-white gloves traced in the sky. I came to a road lined by modest brick houses and older wooden cottages, unpainted for half a century. Here and there, trailers stood on cinderblocks, fighting for space with the surrounding thicket. The buildings were overwhelmed by too much land. The cottages were some of the houses where black families moved after leaving the plantations. Some headed to New York, or Washington, D.C., but a good many stayed.
A young black man with a sharp expression stalked over. “Don’t you park here!” he sneered, then spat.
At the next house, dogs leaped and barked in the dirt yard. A television inside was turned up loud enough that the laugh track echoed in the woods. I knocked, but no answer came. A gentle-looking teenager stood by the road, eyeing me curiously. I told him I was looking for families who had been around for a long time.