Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  Under the new ownership, sixteen-year-old Boston was made an apprentice in Charleston, an assignment that gave him a sharp taste of discipline. “After being in the shop about two years,” he wrote about this period, “I had the charge of my master’s tools, which being very good, were often used by the men, if I happened to be out of the way. When this was the case, or any of them were lost, or misplaced, my master beat me severely, striking me upon the head.” Boston remembered that once some nails were missing from the shop. “For this offence I was beat and tortured most cruelly, and was laid up three weeks before I was able to do any work.”

  Ann Waring’s Tranquil Hill was soon embroiled in the Revolution. In late 1775 the Council of Safety ordered the nearby village of Dorchester fortified against British attack. The defenses came early, but they would eventually be used in May 1778, when General William Moultrie, the former colonel from Sullivan’s Island, made camp with troops near Tranquil Hill. Boston, eighteen, would have known about the proclamation of Lord Dunmore, which offered freedom to blacks who joined the British cause, but at this point Boston was working on a plantation twelve miles distant. He may have begun to contemplate how to get his freedom, but the king’s army was nowhere in sight.

  In spring of 1779, after a long absence, England brought the war back to the Southern provinces, with royal troops and columns of German mercenaries. A British force captured Savannah, below South Carolina on the Atlantic coast, and the invaders then fought their way to a point outside Charleston. General Moultrie returned to camp near Tranquil Hill on his way to face the threat. In June, Henry Clinton, commander in chief of the British forces, issued a decree that escaped blacks would be permitted to follow the movements of the king’s troops. If the English came within reach, slaves could join them and expect to be fed and protected.

  Boston evidently decided that his moment had come, and the nineteen-year-old stole away from Tranquil Hill, leaving his parents behind. “I determined to go into Charles-Town, and throw myself into the hands of the English,” he wrote. “They received me readily, and I began to feel the happiness of liberty, of which I knew nothing before.”

  Boston attached himself to a British officer, a Captain Grey, staying with Grey for some months, working as he could for the British victory. In February 1780, Commander Henry Clinton and a large force besieged Charleston, and the British cavalry took the village of Dorchester, near Tranquil Hill. Battles were being fought around Charleston, and Boston put himself in danger to help the cause. By this time, he had finished his service with Captain Grey and begun to travel with another officer, a Colonel Small, whom he remembered with some disappointment in his memoir:

  I entered into the service of [Colonel Small], the commanding officer. … [O]ur situation was very precarious … for the Americans had 1600 men, not far off; whereas our whole number amounted only to 250. … Our commander at length determined to send me with a letter [to get reinforcements], promising me great rewards, if I was successful in the business. … [I] set off on foot about 3 o’clock in the afternoon; I expected every moment to fall in with the enemy, whom I well knew would shew me no mercy. … I came to Mum’s [Moncks] Corner tavern. I knocked at the door, but they blew out the candle. … [That night, Boston finished his reconnaissance and delivered the letter.] Next morning, Colonel Small gave me three shillings, and many fine promises, which were all that I ever received for this service from him.

  Charleston fell on May 12, 1780, and the Union Jack was once again raised over the city. With the British in control, Boston must have felt that his daring had paid off and he would certainly be free.

  A few months later, Boston’s former master, Richard Waring of Tranquil Hill, died at thirty-three. Waring, and his widow, the former Miss Ball, probably never found out what happened to the escaped worker. A few years after the Revolution, an amateur artist made a watercolor for Ann Waring, depicting Tranquil Hill. The plantation scene shows a two-story house on a bluff, flanked by several ramshackle slave cabins and a winnowing house, a work building where crops were gathered. Underneath the image, the artist placed a caption: “Tranquil-Hill, The seat of Mrs. Ann Waring, near Dorchester.” No slaves appear in the picture.

  The Ball family in general did not believe in democracy. They were pragmatists who wanted to keep their land, slaves, and social position. Four years after the Declaration of Independence, however, the fall of Charleston did cause some rift in the family. While most now took the safe course and sided with the British, a few backed the cause of the new nation.

  Again in command of Charleston, British authorities called for an occupation force to be made from local recruits. Third Elias was one of the first to sign up. Having served in a rebel company and as a delegate to the insurgent assembly, Third Elias now switched sides and styled himself a Loyalist. Elias’s cousin, twenty-two-year-old John Coming Ball of Hyde Park, also threw himself at the feet of the Crown. In July the two cousins became junior officers in a new British unit, and the call went out for a suitable commander. For this job, which would require a certain ruthlessness, a third member of the family stepped forward, “Wambaw” Elias Ball.

  Wambaw Elias was thirty-six and had much of the fierceness of his grandfather, Red Cap. Raised on Hyde Park, Wambaw Elias lived at Wambaw plantation, on the Santee River north of Limerick, with his wife, Catherine Gaillard, and their five children; he was a brother of Ann Waring of Tranquil Hill. When Wambaw Elias joined the royal militia, he approached the British commander, General Charles Lord Cornwallis, who gave him twenty-six men and made him a colonel, a high rank that matched the passion of Wambaw Elias’s support for the distant king. Wambaw Elias was a half brother of John Coming Ball, one of his lieutenants, and a cousin of Third Elias, another of his officers.

  Despite the family’s Loyalist, or Tory, sympathies, at least two relatives stayed with the rebel underdogs. It can be difficult to follow the lives of white women on the plantations, since their letters were less often saved and they appear less frequently in public documents, but records show that one of the patriot stalwarts was Elizabeth Ball Smith, of Old Goose Creek plantation. Elizabeth’s husband, Henry Smith, died shortly after the fall of Charleston, but that year and the next the widow allowed Continental Army troops and rebel militia to take supplies from her storehouses. The other supporter of the rebellion was John Ball of Kensington. In 1779, emerging from his youth as a dandy who loved clothes, John signed up with a militia, Daniel Horry’s Light Dragoons, a company of fifty to a hundred men. Dragoons were mounted infantry, and John’s unit was one of ten in the Second Regiment of Provincials under General William Moultrie. Though only nineteen and with no military experience, when he enlisted, John was received in the manner accorded a young man of privilege, and named second lieutenant.

  As a junior officer, John had the opportunity to keep up his stylish appearance. The obligatory uniform for his rank, as described in one muster roll, included “a blue cloth coatee, faced and cuffed with scarlet cloth, and lined with scarlet. White buttons; and white waistcoat and breeches … [plus] a cap and black feather.” For dress parade, officers were required to wear powdered wigs.

  John Ball was one of the youngest men in his regiment, but perhaps the richest, and the duty of feeding the roaming troops fell to him. The company sometimes stopped in at Kensington plantation or another of the Ball places, and John had food sent out to the field. Hundreds of rebels ate beef and pork from the Ball commissary and rice from the barn, until finally, in his account book, John complained that his entire stock of two hundred barrels of rice, or fifty tons, had been eaten up by troops. Military life was not as rough as it might have been, because a number of black people traveled with John’s unit as servants—so many that in a copy of his company’s orderly book, he mentions the barracks for the white soldiers and refers to the “Negroes apartment” nearby. The closeness of black and white on the front can be seen in one letter John wrote home, in which he describes a military maneuver, then mention
s Hammond, a valet from Kensington. But even though his every need was met by a personal servant, John seems to have had little patience for the war, and not much feeling for the cause. In a letter from Drayton Hall, a plantation where he rested a few days, he noted:

  [O]ne night at 10 O’Clock [we] sett off with Count Polaski [Kazimierz Pulaski, a Polish nobleman fighting for the Americans who was later killed at Savannah] … whose camp was then at Bacons bridge. … [W]e took a terrible route towards Ashley ferry & then retreated back again without ever seeing an Enemy. … I assure you I have seen hard duty enough & … I never lik’d the regiment but now I hate to be in it & the least thing that offend’s me now will make me quit. … Hammond came up with my Portmanteau but very few cloaths was in it & not having an oportunity of having any wash’d up this way so you must needs that I am in a very dirty condition.

  Sometimes John traveled with London, a thirty-six-year-old Gambian. London was the husband of Dinah, one of the daughters of Angola Amy and Windsor. “London is up here with me and all my things,” John wrote home from the Stono River, south of Charleston. “We are encamp’d with Polaski’s Cavalry about 2 miles in the rear of our army as I am told.” The scene of a Gambian and a young plantation dandy stalking the wilderness on the hunt for German mercenaries under the pay of King George III stands as one of the less well-known episodes of the Revolution.

  In January 1780, John paused in his maneuvers to marry his first cousin, eighteen-year-old Jane Ball. The couple had practically grown up together, John on Kensington plantation, Jane a mile away on Hyde Park. At the time of the wedding, Jane was living at Tranquil Hill with her sister, Ann Ball Waring. Family relations were becoming increasingly complex. Jane was a sister of Wambaw Elias, the Tory colonel, while John, the bridegroom, remained a rebel (even if less than ardent). The ceremony took place at Tranquil Hill, from which Boston had escaped. On top of all this, the uncle of the newlyweds, Henry Laurens, had been taken prisoner. Laurens, fifty-six, was sent by the Continental Congress to Holland to negotiate a loan for the United States. He was captured at sea, brought to England, and jailed in the Tower of London. At the Laurens home, Mepkin plantation on the Cooper River, the British took further revenge, burning his house to the ground.

  In late spring 1780, General Cornwallis sent a flotilla up the Cooper River to take its main crossing point at Strawberry Ferry. On the east bank of the crossing stood Strawberry plantation, property of the young Tory Third Elias, and the warships, riding at anchor, could be seen in plain view from Comingtee. Cornwallis himself and a company of soldiers took up residence eight miles to the northeast, at Silk Hope, near the headwaters of the eastern branch of the river, half an hour from Limerick and Kensington. The force of the Crown now gripped the southern and northern boundaries of the main Ball lands.

  When the British settled in, a black exodus from the Ball places began. It started with one or two people, who were followed by a few more, until a human stream flowed from the fields. John Ball, home at Kensington on furlough, wrote down the names of the fugitives. “May 7—Toby gone to the [British] camp, & Hyde Park Abraham,” he noted. Every day, someone else decided to take a chance. “May 9th—Phoebe & her daughter Chloe … 10th—Charlotte, Bessy & her children, Roebuck, January, & Betty … 11th—Yamma … 12th—Patra & daughter Julia … 13th—Flora & child Adonis …” The runaways, not including children, ranged in age from twenty-three up to fifty-seven, and the typical means of escape was by boat, at night. One morning John realized that fifteen people had disappeared in twenty-four hours. “Pino went in my flat [boat],” he noted on June 1, “and carried with him his wife Nancy, Little Nancy, Polly, Dick, Jewel, Little Pino, Nanny and child Nelly, Peter, Eleanor, Isabel, Joney, Brutus, Charlotte.” The next day a field hand named Humphrey followed.

  Sometimes people were captured on their way to British lines. John noted that “Charlotte was brought home & stayed a week,” before she left again. Among those who fled and did not return was Hammond, the valet who had brought John’s portmanteau to the battlefield. Eventually at least fifty-one people, or about one-third of the plantation, fled from Kensington and stayed away for good.

  The lure of freedom must have been great, but there were reasons not to leave as well. Some stayed because of their children, since it was difficult for parents to flee toward the unknown with babies in their arms. Others may have stayed because the British, after all, had organized the slave trade, which made their promise of freedom dubious. A few people fled but then came back voluntarily, evidently skeptical that their lives would improve with English bosses.

  Just as John Ball’s notes show there was a mass escape from Kensington, signs suggest a similar flight took place from all the Ball places. During the war the British published an occupation newspaper in Charleston, the Royal Gazette, which ran lists of fugitives and named their owners, including people belonging to the Balls. After the war, in a petition to the South Carolina Assembly, a group of landlords in St. John’s Parish complained that fully half of the adult black men they owned had gone to the British side and not come back. According to one estimate, made by a rice planter at the end of the war, throughout South Carolina, some twelve thousand black people fled their homes in hopes of getting free.

  While black workers escaped, white rebels did their best to harass the British. The most famous of the militia leaders was a gangly backwoodsman named Francis Marion. Marion, a fifty-year-old Huguenot, practiced an early form of guerrilla warfare that earned him the nickname “the Swamp Fox.” The Swamp Fox would appear without warning out of the forests at the head of a few men, strike at bewildered redcoats, then vanish like a shout. Marion was well known to the Balls from a wily trick he played during one of these run-ins. At the town of Kings-tree on August 27, 1780, Marion’s raiders pounced on the company led by Colonel Wambaw Elias Ball and his two kin, Third Elias and John Coming Ball. Colonel Ball took the worst of it, with sixty men killed or wounded to Marion’s thirty. Ball family tradition has it that at this battle, Marion took prisoner not Wambaw Elias himself but, as a practical joke, his horse, leaving the colonel to walk. For the rest of the war, the story goes, Marion could be found on the back of a black mare he called Ball.

  During this time Lord Cornwallis’s headquarters at Silk Hope lay a few miles upstream from Kensington. Cornwallis was a middle-aged nobleman, Second Elias, Kensington’s owner, a seventy-one-year-old widower, one of the rich old men in the neighborhood whom Cornwallis thought it appropriate to visit. The presence of the Swamp Fox in the area, however, made these visits somewhat tense. Should Cornwallis have been taken prisoner by Marion while on a social call to Mr. Ball, it would have been a great setback to the British cause. Apparently the general was afraid of being caught inside the Kensington house, surrounded by an ambush, so the visits he made followed a careful etiquette. Cornwallis positioned his guard and entourage near the house, and the general himself never actually entered the doorway. Instead, Second Elias and his guest talked on the porch, within clear sight of the approach road and the Swamp Fox’s preferred terrain, the thicket.

  The decisive battles in the Ball neighborhood took place during one week in the summer of 1781. On July 15, at Strawberry Ferry, British forces came ashore from their frigates and marched to a chapel, Biggin Church, a few miles north on the river road. As the troops disappeared up the path, a rebel detachment fell on the contingent left behind, took fifty prisoners, and burned four of the ships anchored in the river. Evidently the loss encouraged the British to mount a revenge march. At Biggin Church the dispatch from the ships met the Royal Nineteenth Regiment to make a combined force of six or seven hundred. The following night, their commander, a Colonel Coates, gave the order to set fire to the church. As the building burned, at about three o’clock on the morning of July 17, the column of men fell in and headed east, toward the Ball places.

  Colonel Coates and his men moved from plantation to plantation on a search-and-destroy march. Approaching the Hyde Park gate,
they met no opposition. As they passed on to Kensington, nothing stopped them. At Limerick no rebels appeared. Although records do not exist to confirm it, I suspect that a crowd of black people emerged from each gate, met the column, and fell in behind, because the red-jacketed infantrymen would have been seen as liberators.

  Beyond Limerick and around a corner lay Quenby plantation, on the east side of the east branch of the Cooper River. Elizabeth Ball, one of Red Cap’s daughters, had been mistress of the place, although the day the British made their march, Quenby and the people on it were owned by Elizabeth’s son, Richard Shubrick, making it a Ball plantation once removed.

  Coates’s regiment reached Quenby Creek, a stream that empties into the Cooper; a wooden bridge across the creek gave the only access to Charleston by road on that side of the river. With some five hundred men, perhaps including black fugitives, in his column, Coates crossed the bridge and waited for his rear guard. The British loosened the planks of the bridge in order to dismantle it. Suddenly a large American cavalry arrived on the scene, the Swamp Fox among them. Coates’s group fell back and headed for the Quenby settlement.

  The so-called Battle of Quenby Bridge began in the afternoon. When the Americans charged on their horses, the bridge, its boards in disarray, fell to pieces. Stopped short, they went upstream, rounded the head of the creek, and came back down to meet Coates for the fight. By this time, three o’clock in the afternoon, Coates’s detachment had taken cover in the Quenby slave houses and the Americans held positions around the two-story main dwelling house. None of the accounts say what the owners of Quenby, or the slaves, were doing at this time; but all those who had not fled for their lives had to make a decision and take sides. On the slave street stood some twelve cabins made of clay. When the seven hundred patriots led by Francis Marion and General Thomas Sumter attacked, they were easily repelled. The clay walls absorbed the American musket fire, giving safe haven to the British. Marion later wrote that Coates’s men had been “posted in houses with Clay Walls which was very Difficult to penetrate without a field piece,” meaning that nothing would have done damage but a cannonball. The firefight continued for three hours, the British inflicting most of the casualties. Marion and Sumter withdrew at dusk, with sixty killed or wounded, to the British count of six dead, thirty-eight wounded. The dead from both sides were buried along the road leading up to Quenby bridge.