by Edward Ball
The rebellion may have begun thirty years earlier as a tax revolt, but in the words of the rebels, it ended as a war to defend the right to hold human property.
South Carolina was followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia. “If you get your papers you will see that Georgia has seceded,” Eliza Ball wrote to her son William the third week of January 1861. Louisiana and Texas came next. On February 9, in Montgomery, Alabama, the new government of the South was chosen by delegates from the seven states in rebellion. Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi, was named provisional president of the Confederate States of America.
Drafted in a few days, the Constitution of the Confederacy copied the U.S. Constitution nearly verbatim, deleting parts that interfered with slavery and adding passages that strengthened it. “We, the people of the Confederate States … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America,” it began. A new passage, Article IV, section 3, read: “The Confederate States may … form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery … shall be recognized and protected.” War was not necessarily inevitable, and negotiations to avert it were hastily arranged in Washington. But at his inauguration in Montgomery on February 18, Jefferson Davis raised the stakes, saying, “[W]e must prepare to meet the emergency and maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position which we have assumed among the nations of the earth.”
William’s four sons, all younger than eighteen, were too green for the service; but twenty-six-year-old Elias Nonus Ball of Dean Hall was not. Nonus, an unmarried grandson of Martha Caroline Ball (or Buzzard Wing), became the first family member to offer himself to the gathering army. Four days after President Davis’s inaugural, Nonus wrote to Robert Barnwell Rhett, a former U.S. senator from South Carolina and one of the leaders of the breakaway movement. Rhett had drafted the secession ordinance that started the crisis in train and had been considered for the Confederate presidency, but lost out to Davis. Nonus used the excuse that he was friendly with Rhett’s son, R. B. Rhett Jr., editor of the Charleston Mercury, the most strident secessionist newspaper in the South.
“I would respectfully ask you to use your influence in my behalf,” Nonus wrote expectantly. “I desire a captaincy, and if that is impossible, a 1st Lieutenancy in the Cavalry. I wish to enter this arm of the service as I am acquainted with its drill manual, having served four years as a dragoon officer.” Nonus meant that he had been a night rider in the slave patrol, his regular duty as a property owner. He also wrote to William Porcher Miles, former mayor of Charleston, former U.S. congressman, and a member of the Military Affairs Committee of the provisional Confederate Congress in Montgomery, with the same request that strings be pulled. “I have studied closely the different works on cavalry tactics,” Nonus told Miles, as though reading about horses would get him the job. Nonus seems to have some of the fecklessness of his father, Elias Octavus, who, forty years earlier, dropped out of military academy in Vermont, quit school in England, and never finished his education. Nonus had been master of Dean Hall for just four years, and still had not paid for it, yet he told Miles, “[I]f I succeed in getting a commission, I intend making the Army my profession, as I am tired of planting.”
Rhett and Miles did not respond, so Nonus finally wrote to the Confederate Secretary of War, LeRoy P. Walker: “I have only to say that all I have to offer to our Confederacy is a true heart, a sharp blade, and a hand that knows how to use it.” Nothing worked, and eventually Nonus gave up. A year later, in March 1862, he enlisted in Rutledge’s Regiment, a cavalry company, as a private.
A separate Southern government was already in place when, on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln addressed the Confederacy from his own inaugural lectern in Washington: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.” In Charleston, Rhett’s Mercury reviewed Lincoln’s speech, saying, “A more lamentable display of feeble inability to grasp the circumstances of this momentous emergency, could scarcely have been exhibited.”
“Well, I suppose the war will come,” wrote Eliza Ball to a friend who lived upstate. “God has so far kept us from any attack, but it does not seem as if they will settle affairs amicably.” In an afterthought she pointed out, “[T]he Ladies generally are very warlike.”
In the five months after Lincoln’s election, between November and March, rebels had seized nearly all federal depots south of Virginia—custom houses, post offices, and army outposts. Fort Sumter, in the middle of Charleston harbor, was one of a handful of stations still in the hands of the national army. Symbolically, Sumter was the most important federal presence in the South, since Charleston had triggered the Confederacy. For several months, Carolina rebels and the federal garrison at the island fort stared at each other across the mile distance separating Sumter from shore. On April 8, President Lincoln informed South Carolina that he would attempt to re-provision the fort in order to keep it in Union hands. At 4:30 A.M. on April 12, as the supply ships approached the harbor, rebel gunners on nearby James Island opened fire on Sumter, and the war began.
The Balls were on their plantations, north of the city.
“I remember, I was staying with my sister at her plantation, Hyde Park, when the battle of Fort Sumter was going on,” Mary Ball, William’s second wife, wrote in her memoir. “The report of the guns from our batteries & the Fort were heard distinctly at our homes on Cooper River. The houses were jarred & windows shook. … I will never forget the feeling I had when we heard those guns, or the feeling of joy, thankfulness & triumph when we gained the victory.”
After the bombardment ended and the Yankees surrendered, the Charleston Courier asked Cousin Kate, the Ball poet, for a verse to celebrate the start of the struggle, and she gave the newspaper a poem called “Greeting for Victory”:
[O]ur God hath blessed us, brothers,
Blessed our valor, blessed our cause,
In a way shall make the kingdoms
Of the whole round world to pause,
Deep reflecting; was there ever
Such deliverance wrought on earth—
So sublimely grand a pageant
To announce a nation’s birth?
William, according to letters, feared the worst, but Mary Ball put her heart into things:
[Later] our troopers were going to Virginia to fight, & we would go to see our brave soldiers go off on the train, we cheered them until we were hoarse. Those soldiers I believe were the bravest of the brave & I love to think of them. … I never will forget the feeling we had seeing them go off at night, the stars bright over head & the bands playing the inspiriting tunes of “Dixie.”
There is only circumstantial evidence for the way the Ball slaves took the news of war. Work continued, but William’s notes show that between 1860 and 1861, harvests on five of his plantations declined sharply, falling a full third. The precipitous drop may have been due to poor weather—or just perhaps, there was a work slowdown.
By the time of secession, most of the Ball workers were third- or fourth-generation residents on the same pieces of land, members of families that had largely adapted themselves to subservience. The last attempted revolt against white power had occurred around the figure of Denmark Vesey in 1822, prior to most living memory. Open defiance had become infrequent; when resistance appeared at all, it took the form of petty theft, broken tools, or the intentional misunderstanding of instructions. As for individual acts of rebellion, the frequency of runaways had declined, even while the Underground Railroad had grown: South Carolina was too far below Pennsylvania for any but the most daring to try to flee North. With the exception of valets who traveled with white families, few blacks had been out of state. Most knew nothing of Africa, although residual medicines, conjures, and spirits survived to animate everyday life. Nearly all Southern blacks wer
e Christians, converted in the first half of the 1800s; each community had its own church and black pastors, most of whom preached that a better home awaited in the afterlife.
For many years, the Ball masters had called them “servants,” the word “slave” having been poisoned by abolitionists. As the family saw it, a typical relationship between landlord and chattel was the one William had with John, a horse-handler he called “Ostler John.” A few years before the war, William eulogized John in one of his ledgers: “Died on the 2d of January. Ostler John, a faithful, good servant, aged about 65 years, much regretted by the family, and also by his fellow servants, for many years he had entire charge of stables, garden & numerous other trustworthy occupations in which he was active and faithful unto his death.”
The day after Sumter, Lincoln’s cabinet approved his first call for seventy-five thousand troops; later he would ask Congress for four hundred thousand additional soldiers, then more. The Federal armies began to take shape when five companies of infantry marched into Washington from Pennsylvania, followed by the Eighth Massachusetts and the Seventh New York.
South Carolina was organizing its own troops, but apart from Nonus none of the Ball men were interested. The men in William’s generation stayed close to their homes, taking advantage of a provision passed by the Confederate Congress exempting large slave owners from active service. In mid-1861, Keating Ball of Comingtee, forty-two, seems to have felt the pique of conscience: he suddenly signed up with the First Regiment Artillery, a unit certain to go to battle; but his tour of duty lasted only fifty-two days. The time up, Keating resigned and joined a nominal home defense unit called the Etiwan Rangers. William followed Keating’s example and laid low, signing up with a fire company. Neither would see action in the war.
Encouraged by the victory at Sumter, four states in the upper South—Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia—pulled out of the Union. Later, Kentucky and Missouri would be divided, each state with both a Confederate and a Union government. Prospects seemed good for the Confederacy, and white life remained unthreatened. William’s sons stayed busy with school and finer entertainments. Six months after secession, Eliza wrote to a woman who had once been governess to William’s sons: “You ask about the Boys Music, it is really fine performing, Willie on the Piano & Isaac the Violin, they play together, all the grand Opera Music, most difficult pieces, & can play at sight, excepting some intricate passages—it is not like Children practising, but fine orchestra playing.”
With wealthy Virginia on board, the Confederate Congress voted to move the rebel capital from Montgomery to grander quarters in Richmond, Virginia, within striking distance of Washington. “Virginia don’t deserve it,” Eliza wrote bitterly about the shift of power from the deep South to the mid-Atlantic. “[H]ad she not delayed so long to secede, we perhaps might not have had such a war, now it seems that Carolina and Virginia are to have the front of the Battle & … we may lose many a true heart & brave soldier.”
President Lincoln ordered a blockade of Southern ports, and by the middle of May the U.S.S. Niagara patrolled the waters off Charleston. Union ships were sent to bottle up trade at New Orleans, Savannah, and Mobile, Alabama; the Southern economy began to choke. Fighting began sporadically with skirmishes in June at Big Bethel, Virginia, and Boonville, Missouri, and shelling of Confederate positions by U.S. gunboats on the Virginia shore. The first major clash exploded July 21 with the Battle of Bull Run, or Manassas, Virginia, between thirty-five thousand Confederates and thirty-seven thousand Union men; the day ended with a rout of the Union and 847 dead between the sides. In subsequent weeks, blood flowed again at Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, and Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
In the summer of 1861, hundreds of slaves, later followed by thousands, began to escape to the Union side, imitating their forebears during the Revolution, when blacks fled the rebel Americans toward freedom with the British. Union General Benjamin Butler, commander of Fort Monroe, Virginia, wrote Lincoln and his Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, to ask what he should do with what he called “contrabands,” meaning the nine hundred escaped blacks suddenly with his army. Instructions came back to put them to work against the South. Soon the Federals had a growing corps of teamsters, scouts, and cooks—and later, former slaves who became black soldiers in blue uniform.
Most Northern whites had only vague enthusiasm for black freedom; for his part, Lincoln did not think straightforward liberation would work. In April, a month after he took office, the President had showed interest in a freedom-and-resettlement scheme that would send black Americans out of the country. Lincoln had made contact with the Chiriqui Improvement Company, a coal-mining concern in what would become the nation of Panama, about a plan for the deportation and colonization of freed blacks to Central America. A few months later, in Missouri, Major General John Charles Frémont, in a more humane gesture, took things into his own hands, writing an “emancipation proclamation” that declared free those workers who had fled rebel Southerners. When Lincoln heard of Frémont’s unauthorized proclamation, he apparently still thought the answer to slavery was to empty the land of Negroes. The President knocked the general down, calling his decree “dictatorial” and saying, “[It] will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us.”
Charleston had been ringed with batteries, forts, and earthworks, but fifty-five miles south lay the relatively unprotected coast at Port Royal, around the mouth of Broad River, which flowed to the sea past the long-staple cotton islands of St. Helena and Hilton Head. In early November 1861, a Union fleet of seventeen vessels under Flag Officer Samuel F. DuPont and twelve thousand troops under Brigadier General Thomas Sherman sailed from Virginia to stage an invasion. After a four-hour bombardment, Yankee armies occupied Port Royal and set up a huge camp, placing a blade in the side of the Confederacy and posing a menace to Charleston, a day’s trip away. With the Yankees so near, Charleston rebels shored up fortifications. The Confederate government called for plantation owners to send blacks to do the work, and in December 1861, a month after the Port Royal invasion, William Ball complied, sending twenty-five men from Limerick, Halidon Hill, and Cedar Hill to dig trenches and strengthen Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan’s Island.
As the blockade of the harbor wore on, everyday articles like sugar, coffee, and writing paper began to vanish. At the start of the war, George Alfred Trenholm, a former South Carolina state representative, was a principal of Fraser & Trenholm, a cotton shipper with a fleet of vessels; soon Trenholm became the most successful of several blockade runners in the city. (“We have given up long ago Tea & Coffee,” William’s sister Jane wrote a friend. “This paper I am writing on is sample paper given me by Mr. Foster, who picks up many things in this way by being with Trenholm.”) Goods that Trenholm brought in—sometimes on his personal ironclad gunboat, the Chicora—sold for outrageous prices, and not everyone could afford the black market. The Charleston Courier helped by running an item about purifying sea salt, “to be used to cure bacon,” since imports had been stopped. There had been no battles, apart from Sumter, but an economic war began to be fought at home by women, both white and black, who ran the plantation households and tried to find ways to keep up the old comforts. With cheap clothing from the New England mills no longer available, one of the Ball ladies made (or had her slaves make) hundreds of shirts and trousers; she then sold them to the Confederacy.
Around the country were few fights, and the huge armies remained slow to leave their camps. Lincoln despaired at the lack of progress. On February 16, 1862, the Federals saw a breakthrough on the Cumberland River, when Fort Donelson, Tennessee, a Confederate stronghold, fell to Union hands after a brief siege; an army of twelve thousand rebels surrendered. With that, Kentucky was gone to Federal domination, and Tennessee seemed vulnerable. Ten days later, Federal troops took Nashville.
The Limerick Balls seemed not to worry. Cousin Kate wrote a friend with the news that “William Ball made his boys come home & go to college [and]
John Shoolbred [William’s nephew] is to join the boys at college the first of March.” From Charleston, Eliza wrote William with mild complaints about Confederate taxes and word of trouble at school with William’s teenage son John.
Southern whites were enlisting, but evidently not quickly enough, because the Confederate Congress began to talk of a draft. “I am glad to see that the men are volunteering as it would be a great disgrace for Charlestonians, who have always done so much talking, to be drafted,” wrote twenty-year-old William Jr. (Willie) to his grandmother Eliza. Eliza wrote Willie’s father, who may have still been waffling, to remind him of the godliness of the war: “The Bishop addressed the Ladies association on Monday. He spoke of war as a necessary evil to purify a nation & bring out good feelings in people. … [H]e told us plainly … [t]he Enemy were strong & well prepared & we of this state particularly they would wish to crush.”
In March 1862, eleven thousand Federals and fourteen thousand Confederates clashed in the Battle of Pea Ridge, Arkansas, yielding eighteen hundred killed or wounded. The rebels retreated, worsening their prospects and putting Missouri in danger of falling to the Union. A month later, a Confederate advance in the far Southwest was defeated near Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory. Then came the charnel house of Shiloh. On April 6 and 7, forty-two thousand men in Ulysses Grant’s Army of the Tennessee and twenty thousand in the Army of the Ohio under Don Carlos Buell held their ground against forty thousand Confederates at Shiloh, Tennessee. The rebels eventually retreated when reinforcements failed to materialize. The South alone counted 1,723 killed, 959 missing, and 8,012 wounded. The same month, Union troops crept closer to Charleston, occupying Edisto Island thirty miles south.
In Richmond on April 16, President Davis signed a law that called for conscription and mandated three years’ service for every white male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Rather than be summoned, the Ball boys chose this moment to enlist. On April 28, twelve days after the draft law, Hugh Swinton Ball, twenty-five-year old son of Elias Octavus, namesake of the drowned Swinton Ball, and brother of Nonus; William’s son Isaac, who had just turned eighteen; and Isaac’s older brother Willie enlisted in Captain Edward Parker’s Company, First Regiment, South Carolina Artillery. (The other Limerick brothers, John, sixteen, and Elias, thirteen, were still too young, but would later join the cause.) Although the three Ball boys were mustered as privates, Isaac evidently showed an organizational bent, because he would later be named secretary of his regiment. Drawing on his music lessons, Hugh Swinton auditioned and was made the regiment bugler. For most of the war, the young men would be artillery gunners, paid thirteen dollars a month.