Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  In addition to the new land, the profits from the rice boom also went into education, as Second Elias and his generation hired tutors and governesses, and sent their boys to local academies run by European teachers. The Ball sons studied mathematics and rhetoric (for the sake of business), while the girls went to finishing schools or a domestic arts academy where, under the guidance of well-dressed matrons, they learned to do needlework, to speak French, and to dance. Although they paid attention to literacy, the Balls were not interested in serious study. Some sons of plantation owners went to England to be educated, but not the Ball boys. Literature did not arouse the family, except as an adornment to table conversation, and the art of painting they regarded as the work of craftsmen. In fact, Second Elias appears to have been suspicious of people who thought too much, though in this he was not alone. In 1748, the Charleston Library Society, the first public book collection, was established in the colony. The initial subscribers amounted to seventeen people.

  The Balls and their friends took strongest interest in fine things you could put your hands on. To judge from his letters, Second Elias was a mild-mannered, even shy, man, but he seemed to know what he liked. One of the main interests of the Balls was to have just the right decor for their houses, for which Second Elias turned to an English carver named Thomas Elfe. Born in London in 1719, Elfe moved to Virginia and finally made his home in Charleston, where, between 1747 and his death in 1775, he carved furniture for the slave-owning rich. Elfe worked in mahogany, the favored material for china cabinets and chests of drawers. He used raw wood from forests in the Caribbean, which in contrast to the muddled brown of some mahogany had a luminous, golden hue. In one year, Second Elias had Elfe make him a mahogany bed, an armchair and a footstool, two mahogany dining tables, a dozen dining chairs with scroll backs, and what he called a slab table, apparently with a marble top.

  In addition to collecting furniture, the Balls commissioned paintings of themselves, calling again on the portrait artist Jeremiah Theus, as Red Cap had done. Second Elias commissioned Theus to paint him twice, the first time about 1760, when the master of Kensington was fifty. In the second, later portrait, he wears a white wig with little curls over the ears, and a silvery blue jacket over his large stomach. Around the same time, Second Elias had Theus paint his sons, Elias III and Isaac, who emerged from the process looking like two child dandies. In his painting, Elias III, about twelve, wears a royal blue waistcoat, satin vest, and ruffled shirt; his blond hair has been set with curlers, and he holds a small leatherbound book. Little Isaac looks about the same, only in place of the book he has a red-headed bird perched on his left hand.

  The children’s pictures must have gone over well, because many other family members soon headed for the artist’s studio. From Hyde Park, Ann Ball, daughter of John Coming and Catherine Ball, came to sit for her portrait. She was eighteen, and on the eve of her marriage to Richard Waring, of neighboring Dorchester County. Ann’s portrait shows the teenage bride-to-be in a velvet jacket, white satin waistcoat, and a string of pearls.

  On top of pictures, good furniture, carriages, silver, and china, the Balls liked their clothes. The girls went to Charleston to be fitted for dresses. On one occasion, a daughter of John Coming Ball, Eleanor, took herself to a clothier named Jacob Tobias. Tobias was one of the city’s population of Sephardic Jews, immigrants who went into businesses like shopkeeping and dry goods rather than plantations and slaves. According to the receipt, Tobias fitted Miss Ball with a brown dress and “whalebone corset,” and finished it with a mantua, a loose-fitting silk gown. The Ball women did not necessarily spend more than the men on finery; in fact, the conspicuous peacock of the family was Second Elias’s youngest son, John Ball. Born in 1760 on Kensington, by his teens John Ball had accumulated an extensive wardrobe. He first got a slave seamstress to make ruffled shirts for him, and by the time he was fifteen his armoires were so full that the young master felt obliged to keep a notebook about what he owned. For each item, John wrote down when the piece was laundered by his female valet, Diana.

  Diana was about forty when she began to care for John’s things. She had a son, Devonshire, and a daughter, Nanna, whose own clothing evidently did with less of their mother’s care. John’s laundry went to Diana every week. A fairly typical load, jotted down by the boy, consisted of ten shirts, eight pairs of socks, five pairs of stockings, four jackets, four handkerchiefs, and two pairs of breeches. These were the everyday things. A little finer, and apparently washed less often, were two pairs of white breeches, two polka-dot jackets, two purple “persian jackets,” and six pairs of “mosquito boots,” high shoes against the country mud. Diana no doubt handled them all gently. Once, John made an inventory of the best rack in his wardrobe, writing down that he owned three coats (one blue, one brown, one gray), a pair of polka-dot velvet pants, no fewer than twelve pairs of black velvet breeches, and twelve pairs of silk stockings.

  Young John’s father wrote him letters complaining that all he thought about was his looks, and the boy did play the vain prince. By later standards, however, the youth seems to have neglected one thing that can make a dandy appealing: according to his notes, John put on a fresh shirt at least every morning, and clean pants every second or third day, but sent only one pair of underwear to Diana to be washed each week.

  With spotty written evidence, the daily lives of the slaves flash up only in glimpses during the second generation of the Ball places. There were hundreds of people whose biographies boil down to just a few episodes. But single memories are better than none.

  Indiana was a field hand on Comingtee, the daughter of Igbo Clarinda. In 1762, Clarinda believed she would become a grandparent when Indiana became pregnant with her first child. The mother-to-be was twenty-two, and she had even picked out a name for the child, Carter—but the infant was stillborn. Second Elias noted the births of slaves, usually with a date and the name of the mother, but of Indiana’s son, he made a little joke. “March 10,” he wrote, “Carter, Indiana’s son was born dead as a Drnail.” No one else needed to know the wisecrack, certainly not Carter’s mother. Indiana herself did not reach an old age, dying a few years later at thirty-four.

  Death came often and unexpectedly. It struck hard in the life of one mother, whose boy, Friday, lived only ten years, until 1773, when Second Elias noted that he had “died of fits.” The numbers could hardly be worse: about half the black children born on the Ball tracts died before the age of fifteen. The most frequent cause of death seems to have been infection, but sometimes death came by accident. In 1770, a Gambian named London and his companion, Dinah, had a daughter, Pretty. Dinah, nicknamed Dye, was the daughter of the field hands Angola Amy and Windsor, who by then had many years behind them. On February 23, 1771, in her third month of life, Pretty burned to death. It was winter, and few if any of the slave houses had chimneys, the only source of warmth being an open fire kept in the middle of the room. Pretty probably was placed too near the fire on a cold day. The family may well have thought they were vexed, because some years later Amy, Pretty’s sister, was killed by lightning.

  Another cause of death was violence. Probably one of the most talked-about events on the slave streets of this period was a murder that took place in 1766 at a plantation twenty miles north of Comingtee, called Wambaw. Henry Laurens and one of his Ball in-laws shared title to the forty-three-hundred-acre tract, known by the Native name for a creek that ran through the property.

  It began with a ménage that involved two sisters and one man. A slave named Chloe, living at Wambaw, took up with a field hand called Matthias, who lived at John Coming Ball’s Hyde Park. In time, Chloe’s sister Isabel also began sleeping with Matthias, evidently without Chloe’s knowledge. On a Saturday in April, Isabel went up from Hyde Park to Wambaw, likely traveling long hours at night by foot. When Isabel finally arrived, she gave Chloe some sort of drink, perhaps as a gift. The potion contained a poison, and Chloe died the next day.

  Henry Laurens described
what happened in a letter to one of the Balls. “Wambaw, 2d May,” he began. “Dear Sir, Upon my coming to this place I was inform’d of the sudden death of Chloe. … It seems Isabel had droped some threatenings towards Chloe which [the overseer] will further relate to you.”

  No record of a trial survives. In one likely outcome, John Coming Ball, owner of the murderess, would have been forced to pay his in-law for damage to property, the loss of a field hand. The criminal herself would have faced worse—for the murder, of course, but more harshly for how she carried it out. Whites feared the knowledge of poison among blacks, because it could easily be turned on masters by their cooks. Eventually, the South Carolina legislature passed a law that prohibited black people from teaching the deadly art. “[I]n case any slave,” the law dictated, “shall teach or instruct another slave in the knowledge of any poisonous root, plant, herb, or other poison whatsoever, he or she shall suffer death as a felon.” Isabel may well have faced execution.

  Shortly after he came into his inheritance, Second Elias placed the following advertisement in the South Carolina Gazette:

  Run away from my plantation … a middle sized negro man, named Carolina, has the mark of a large wound on one of his arms … and is well known in and about Charles Town, where he was for some years a fisherman. Whoever takes up and delivers him to Austin and Laurens in Charles-Town, or to me at my plantation … shall have Five Pounds reward … Elias Ball.

  Carolina and his companion, a woman named Patra, had an eleven-year-old son, Truman. To judge from the number of advertisements the Balls placed in newspapers, Carolina was only one of many slaves who tried to escape, often walking off in the night. To flee the plantation was a treacherous business, and had been since the start of the colony, long before 1690, when treatments for runaways were encoded in South Carolina law. A chronicle of sorts of the people who tried to escape captivity, and what happened to them, can be put together merely by reading contemporary newspapers.

  Carolina, the fisherman who took off, was a veteran in defiance. In 1749 he had been jailed and questioned for conspiring with other slaves on the Cooper River to rise up against the rice planters, and he was lucky to get away with his life. When he ran from Second Elias, however, Carolina did not get far; a year after his escape, plantation records show him back on the farm.

  Carolina may have gotten “the mark of a large wound on one of his arms” while plying his fishing trade, but more likely it came from a beating laid on by Second Elias or one of his overseers. Lashings with the cat-o’-nine-tails, beatings with sticks, and burnings of flesh all left tracks that Second Elias and his peers advertised as “distinguishing marks.” Carolina was not the only slave of Second Elias who had been beaten enough to leave scars. In October 1766, Mr. Ball placed this ad: “Run Away from my plantation … Three New Negro Fellows named Primus, Caesar, and Boson [Boatswain]. … Primus is a pretty tall fellow, and has a large scar on one of his shoulders.”

  The Gazette gave the Balls a place to cast the net after the escape of their workers. Advertisements for runaways usually appeared with a picture, an image of a black man running, carrying a spear. More people tried to escape in South Carolina than anywhere else in colonial America, twice as many as fled in the two other major slave provinces, Virginia and Maryland. It may have been that bondage in South Carolina was simply more violent than that farther north. Based on the number of ads, more women tried to flee the rice plantations than the more northern tobacco farms—one of four of the total. But finally, neither sex nor geography could predict who would make off; evidently the childhood memories of those who escaped had more to do with their behavior. More than six out of ten runaways from the Balls and their peers had been born in Africa.

  One February, Second Elias ran the following announcement in the local paper:

  Run away … two young Negro fellows, one this country born, named Tom, a middling tall fellow, has one of his toes cut off; the other is a fellow of the Guiney [Guinea] country, something shorter than Tom, of a black complexion, named Jemmy … a reward of ten pounds for Tom, and five pounds for Jemmy, on delivery of them.

  Like Carolina, Tom with the missing toe was evidently from a rebellious family. Young Tom’s mother was a field hand named Julatta, and his father was Tom White, the Angolan arrested in the alleged uprising scheme of 1748. By custom, Tom Jr. would have gone in the rice fields when he turned twelve, so that when he escaped, at age twenty-six, he had likely been working thirteen years. After he took off, young Tom disappears from plantation records. He may have either died or, unlike the majority who fled, gotten away for good.

  Runaways often fled, were brought back and punished, then left again. In Second Elias’s day, some slave owners may have continued to advocate castration—the penalty for repeated escape that dated from the pioneer days—though few masters actually admitted to the practice by writing it down. In a more common punishment, ears and toes were severed (though not hands, required for work). Young Tom’s missing toe, mentioned in the paper, may have indicated a previous escape attempt.

  The thought that Second Elias Ball practiced amputation on his workers is supported by other evidence from the days of his father. One year, when Red Cap was still alive, the South Carolina Gazette ran an ad stating that a slave named Booba had just been captured and waited in jail in Charleston. He “says he belongs to Mr. Ball,” the paper said, meaning Red Cap. After listing the man’s clothes, the Gazette ended its description this way: “Two Toes upon each Foot seem as if they were cut off.”

  The slave child named Edward—presumably the son of Red Cap and his “Molattoe Wench” Dolly—presented a problem. To start, he was of the wrong blood, but he also had the misfortune of being born at the wrong time, after the Stono Uprising of 1739. Prior to the Stono rebellion, many brown and yellow children gained freedom in quiet acts of liberation, or manumission, carried out by their owners. The slave uprising changed things. The so-called Negro Act of 1740 took away from plantation owners the right to grant freedom to slaves. Afterward, a planter who wished to free one of his children would have to petition the colonial legislature in a cumbersome process that risked exposing his sexual life to public ridicule.

  Edward was born too late and therefore couldn’t easily be freed. When the child turned one, Red Cap deeded the infant to another of his many progeny, his one-year-old grandson Richard Shubrick. The child of Elizabeth Ball and Captain Richard Shubrick, little Richard lived with his parents at Quenby plantation, a few miles up the river from Comingtee. The idea seemed to be that Edward and Richard would grow up together. An arrangement like this was common, the colored child playing the part of the white child’s personal servant and companion. (Edward would also be out of the way.)

  Baby Edward did not immediately leave his mother’s side, however, and a wait of sorts commenced, until eventually death intervened to spoil the plan. In 1746, when Edward was five, Elizabeth Shubrick died. Soon her widowed husband moved to England, taking Richard Jr. with him. Edward never had the chance to join his new owner, and he and his mother Dolly stayed at Comingtee. When the Shubricks moved to England, Edward entered a legal limbo. He became the property of an absent slave owner and was thus neither free nor slave. In February 1748, a few months after the child turned seven, Elias put in place another plan. Edward, his mother, and his siblings (his half brother, Cupid, and his sister, Catherine) went by themselves to live at St. James, the tract owned by Second Elias about a mile from Kensington.

  Dolly was thirty-six, Red Cap seventy-two. Maybe Red Cap had grown tired of her, or perhaps he was tired of the mutterings of his Charleston neighbors about a house full of mulattoes. A likely explanation for the change is that none of the Balls actually lived at St. James; Elias’s white children would no longer have to see their aging father’s dark companion or their own dark kin.

  Sometime after Red Cap’s death, Edward gained his freedom. Although no papers survive that would show the date or the method of his emancipation, lat
er in life Edward would be described as free in court papers. I suspect that the second generation of Balls, owning up to their father’s child, simply began to treat Edward as an ex-slave, if not as a brother. Relationships like this were rare, but kept up over time they gained the force of law.

  Edward acquired the nickname Ned, or sometimes Neddy. At age twenty-three, he came back to the Ball neighborhood to live, and seems to have moved onto Kensington plantation, owned by Second Elias. In the cold of November one winter, one record book notes that Neddy borrowed a blanket from the main house. He must have been penniless to have asked for bed covering normally earmarked for field hands, but he also must have had special privilege to get it from the master’s dwelling house, where other nonwhites could not easily enter.

  At Kensington, Edward pulled himself up from poverty, beginning as a leatherworker. Throughout his twenties and thirties, Edward tanned hides and sold what he made from animal skins. His clients included the Balls and their neighbors, the Harleston family, while his main income came from manufacturing “Negro shoes,” the cheap footwear distributed each year on the plantation. With a large population on most places, a shoemaker with connections could keep busy, and records show that Edward sold hundreds of pairs to planters on the Cooper River. It was not the best of jobs, because the mark of a shoemaker was his smell. Leatherworkers tore skin from the backs of carrion to get raw material, and in one process that Edward may have used, cured hides in vats of urine. The smells could not be washed off. People downwind knew he was coming each time Edward emerged from his shop.

  As a “free person of color,” Edward was legally entitled to take a surname. Probably from his work, Edward became Edward Tanner.

  For a second income, Edward Tanner worked for the Balls as a hostler, or horse-minder. Accounts show that he kept a stable and provided stud services for his presumptive kin. Second Elias went often to Edward Tanner to buy riding and carriage horses or to hire a stud to impregnate one of his mares.