Slaves in the Family

By Edward Ball

Penguin Group (1998)

Book Review

Author Edward Ball uses this book to chronicle his long effort to trace modern African American families descended from the slaves his ancestors owned on historic Charleston South Carolina rice plantations. This project required an detailed search of South Carolina tax records and the extensive official and personal correspondence the Ball family left behind.

For me, the parts of the book I enjoyed most consisted of historical background he offers to provide context for important family events. Like other Americans, I learned very little about early slavery in school.

Ball’s ancestors were among the first settlers in the Carolina colony, who sailed from County Cork Ireland in 1669. They were still living aboard ship when they began importing slaves from Virginia or Barbados.

They lived according to the Fundamental Constitutions written by philosopher John Locke while he was in the employ of Lord Ashley Cooper, one of the Carolina Colony’s investors. Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions established a three-tiered system of labor.

1. Enslaved Natives or Africans (Locke discouraged the enslavement of natives, out of concern their nearby relatives might retaliate – presumably African slaves had no nearby relatives to retaliate).
2. Indentured servants
3. Free citizens (Puritans and Anglicans)

According to the Fundamental Constitutions, every white settler got 150 acres of land for every laborer they brought to America.

By 1695, Ball’s ancestors discovered the Carolina* colony’s semi-tropical low country was perfect for rice plantations. By 1698, the city of Charleston was the slave center of America. All slaves carried the brand DY (for Duke of York, who became James II following his coronation). As the principal investor in the Royal African Co., he controlled most of the slave traffic. Carolina rice farmers paid a premium for slaves from Sierra Leone and Gambia. They used their prior experience with irrigation and rice cultivation to teach their masters how to grow it.

On the rice plantation, child slaves carried water from the time they could run and started working in the fields at age 12. Prior to the Revolutionary War slaves were expected to provide their own shelter and food. Most often they built lean-to’s, huts,  mud huts or simple structures consisting of leafy roofs on four posts. They were allowed to hunt when they finished their daily tasks (rice planting allowed for more free time than cotton cultivation), as well as growing small gardens and raising pigs. They could earn spending money by selling surplus food to the master.

Carolina rice planters exported their rice to the UK, where it was taxed and shipped to Bremen, Denmark, Hamburg, Holland and Sweden.

One-third of the rice planters’ slaves left South Carolina during the Revolutionary War, after the UK troops freed them for defecting to the British side. The Redcoats employed them as laundresses, messengers, stable hands, cooks and valets during the war, and at the end of the war transported them, as free Blacks, to Canada or the Caribbean.

In December 1860, South Carolina would be was the first state to secede from the Union, followed in January 1861 by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana. Texas seceded in February, with the Confederate States of America forming the same month. Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee wouldn’t join the Confederacy until after the war started at Fort Sumter in April 1861.

Two months before the war ended (In February 1865), Yankee armies arrived at the Ball family’s rice plantation to inform the slaves there they were free. I was previously unaware fighting continued, in North Carolina and elsewhere, after Confederate General Robert E Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865 at Appomattox. Two days after Lincoln’s assassination (on April 15th), Generals Johnston and Sherman signed an armistice which was rejected by President Andrew Johnson because it recognized existing state governments. He accepted a final armistice on April 26, 1865, in which the former Confederate state gave up all their weapons and public property.

*North and South Carolina were officially divided in 1712.