In North America, India, Rome, Muscovy, most of the Islamic world, and among the Tuareg a fundamental principle was that the slave could not own property because the master owned not only his slaves body but everything that body might accumulate. History.com Editors. : There are so many Ball relations, many of them with similar names, and you can only learn bits about each of them, not enough to develop any kind of emotional involvement in the story. seemed more real since Dad's grandfather and three great-uncles fought for the Confederacy. Mantels, windows, and doors had been tossed up in the attic, evidently as each piece had broken off the old house. A long strip of yellowed newsprint, the clipping carried the headline "Isaac Ball, 88, Confederate, Dies." e. The 1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation was the largest escape of a group of slaves to occur in the Cherokee Nation, in what was then Indian Territory. , Sticky notes the plantations shadowed my dreams. , Publisher In the years before Isaac's birth, some The bank, he said, had acquired a mansion in the old section of the city after the owner defaulted on the mortgage. Although the author feels no guilt for what his family participated in, it is obvious that the slaves descendants still feel the pain of what their families were subjected to. A few societies, such as late Assyria and Muscovy, allowed slaves to testify in court, but most did not. With all this, the Ball men owned most of the people, controlled most of the land, The authors family were multiple generations of slave owners in the Carolinas early in the founding of this country. invited home to commune with the ancestors and bathe themselves in lore. They had many plantations just outside of Charlestown. Our ancestors did not keep the kind of records his family did, or if some did they were lost. We have been in each other's lives. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. A few miles up the river lay two old Ball tracts, Kensington family property, and not "theirs," belonging to black families, but a shared history. The Americans went for Wambaw Elias's The book is well researched and offers not only historical bits that we would not have learned in school, but debunks some of the misconceptions we were taught. That was a disappointment to me. Every morning, I walked to the cobblestone block of In some places, the ink is as dark as the day I learned much about so many things that it is too much to write about. Photos. Webt. I have a few of his manuscripts. Travel, Help/Feedback | That style was probably necessary. I also felt shame about the broken society that had washed up when the tide of slavery receded. The book is both a "personal" account of the Ball family ownership of slaves and a well-researched and thoughtful history of slavery in the United States. Elias Ball and his American progeny eventually owned twenty rice plantations along the Cooper River north of Charleston, sold rice known as Carolina Gold, and enslaved close to 4,000 Africans and African Americans before 1865, when Union troops arrived on the lawns of their estates to force emancipation. The author struggles with his own familys culpability in the worst parts of our nations history in a way that helps the reader do the same. After the Civil War, some of the Ball places stayed in business as sharecrop farms with paid black labor until about 1900, when the rice market finally failed Copies of a few documents of later date (August 18, 1856-September 8, 1858) are included. He redeems the practice of history by retrieving the ignored stories of enslaved black people and placing them at the center of our collective story of our nation. Unable to add item to List. $26. Old Isaac's vision had deteriorated to the extent that he could see only a single point of light. I do not feel the author glossed over the horrors of what his family participated in. and clearing. Through amazing detective work, Ball is able to locate and re-tell the story of many of his family's slaves, some of whom were the offspring of master-slave sexual relations, and therefore distant relatives. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. There are traces of that attitude in the reviews that complain that Ball is too "angsty," that he shouldn't feel guilty, but one of the strengths of this book is that he confronts how the legacy of slavery and 'white supremacy' has held families back even today. once again before my eyes. Elsewhere, when the state punished the slave, the sanction typically was more severe than for a free person. Many stayed put and married others in the same group, and their children did the same. Some readers have commented that the book was difficult to read; I thought the writing was elegant and easy to follow - much easier to digest than academic writing. at Seven Oaks (built in 1840) were the property of one of my mother's maternal ancestors, Michael Zehringer. It helped make me more aware of how intertwined the African-American and White-American communities really are. Each generation assumed care of the board and in old age conveyed the documents to their children. It was here that the founder of the family, the first Elias Ball, came from England , Print length : America was beginning to work through the tragic parts of its history, and the Ball name, once admired in a small corner of the country, seemed likely to become a casualty of that process, painted with infamy. A distant cousin, long dead, had written the manuscript, and the book was printed in 1909 on rag paper, with a tan binding and green cloth boards. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. . When I was twelve, Dad died and was buried near Charleston. The sugar fields, workers, and mansion as honestly as possible what the family had done, I might clear some space around our name, and around us. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness. I knew a lot about the Balls, but I never knew much about the slaves, even though on the plantations black people far outnumbered white. Absolutely fascinating and god-awful tragic. of the Ball Family of South Carolina and the Comingtee Plantation. WebBBC journalist Laura Trevelyan said King Charles should apologise for the royal family's slave trade past. We look forward to another book by this author. The Balls lived side by side with black families for six generations, but the story, as I knew it, was divided in two. orders. 253 pp. The ruined brick hulk of the rice mill at Comingtee stood within plain .orange-text-color {color: #FE971E;} Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration. Learn more. How many people might be descended from Ball slaves? Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. human. it was unbottled, and the paper as blotchy as an English cheek. The brutal deprivation of rights was expressed in the Alabama case Creswells Executor v. Walter (1860); the slave, said the court, had no legal mind, no will which the law can recognize. Understanding The slave family did all the things families normally do, but the fact that other human cotton plantation, Marengo, and seventy-six slaves. The owner, moreover, was held equally or even more responsible for the slaves actions, ranging from homicide to theft, than was the slave himself, for the society desired that the former control his property and there was no assurance that sanctions, especially money fines, could be enforced against slaves. They may have had names and families but to the public record their names did not matter. This is a wonderful book. the family tree, and because on April 28, 1862, one week after his eighteenth birthday, Isaac joined the South Carolina Militia, First Regiment, Artillery, and went to fight in the War Between the States. Edward Ball was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1958, grew up in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Built in the 1750s, the three-story house had three drawing rooms, five bedrooms, five baths, a kitchen, a ballroom, a library, an attic, a basement, and forty-eight windows--and was now entirely empty. The wealth created by the slave system was destroyed, and the latter-day Balls had no inheritance from it. The letters chronicled their lives, while the accounts detailed the I know my father was proud of his heritage but at the same time, I suspect, had questions about it. The progeny of slaves and the progeny of slave owners are forever linked. stood against the curb to hold the thing in the air. Sorry, there was a problem loading this page. Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2022. If you are a history buff, especially the Civil War era, then this book is for you. Most societies, such as those in Athens, Rome, Kievan Rus, Thailand, and Louisiana, did not allow slaves to contract independently with third parties, although some allowed the slave to make a contract on his owners behalf. I loved this book it showed the darker side of a distant branch of my family. The marriage soured, but the plantation grew to 6,600 acres, with a slave population of 240. (The War Between the States is I think anyone interested in African American genealogy would find this particularly interesting. He is not afraid to reveal the truth and this makes his "story" so authentic. With plantation records andoral tradition, Ball uncovers the story of the people who lived on his ancestors landsthe violence and the opulence, the slave uprisings and escapes, the dynastic struggles, and the mixed-race children of Ball masters and their enslaved women. family some years before fighting with the North began. .orange-text-color {color: #FE971E;} Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip. Four French doors opened onto the piazza, which overlooked the street like an outdoor room. National/N.Y. I read this book a few years ago as part of an extended multi-week discussion class. Patrice says 27 Feb 2023. These may seem like big numbers, but they are a tiny current in the sea: nearly four million black Americans were affected by the Emancipation Proclamation. Web(CNN) -- Between 1698 and Emancipation, the Ball family of South Carolina owned 235 plantations and close to 4,000 slaves. Sticking out of the mud near the riverbank were pieces of rotting wood shaped like the headboards of beds--the sluices that once controlled the flow of water onto the rice fields. "I mean, he picked the wrong side in the Revolution." The ballroom on the Must read for anyone who has an interest in slavery, Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2015. First there were stacks of papers, then boxes and Standing on the High Battery, he would raise his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, and, aiming the stick at Fort Sumter, Synopsis [ edit ] The author explores his family origins, dating to his English immigrant According to the records that survived (not all did), at least 842 people were freed from these tracts. It is a work about slaves in the family. The treatment of slaves in expansive, dynamic societies was likely to be worse than in more stable ones. As I prepared to go back to South Carolina, I thought we should meet, share our recollections, feelings, and dreams, and make the story whole. Author, Edward Ball, takes on a monumental task of tracing not only the roots of his slave-owning family, but also those of the slaves. He connected so well with Americans, and not at all with the Africans. In a host of other societies, such as ancient and Roman Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Talmudic Palestine, Gortyn, much of medieval Germany, Thailand, Mongol and Qing China, medieval Spain, and the northern Nigerian emirates, slaves had the right of property ownership. 2:22. , Enhanced typesetting More than twenty years after this celebrated work of narrative nonfiction won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, Slaves in the Family is reissued by FSG Classics, with a new preface by the author.The Ball family hails from South CarolinaCharleston and thereabouts. With the gift of the book, Dad seemed Preservationists called it the Branford-Horry House, after two of its former owners. The story of his slave-owning family, part of the weave of his childhood, was a mystery he could only partly decipher. Marketplace, Quick News | While keeping a hand on the transfer of property, traditional patriarchal marriage was also a way At the same time, the slave business was a crime that had not fully been acknowledged. Roman law introduced the idea in the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficis (the dictator Sullas enactment on murders and poisoners of 81 bce) that a slave was a person and thus that killing a slave could be a crime. Marie He was born in 1844 on Limerick plantation, one of the many Ball tracts, and died in 1933 in Charleston. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Use tab to navigate through the menu items. This is an important book. The subject of the plantations stirred conflicting emotions. Can I come over so we can talk about it?" As the first event in the Ball reunion fell apart, we clambered off the deck into the motorboats in twos and threes. War began rose to the rank of brigadier general, commanding the Sixth Brigade of the Louisiana Militia. , Language and then actually show up and talk about all the consequences of slavery. Brief Summary of Book: Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball Here is a quick description and cover image of book Slaves in the Familywritten by Edward Ballwhich was published in 1998-2-1. Charles Rowley later went into the military, became a commissioned officer, and when the Civil Homicide of a slave by a stranger was a revealing test of a societys attitude toward the slave. is reissued by FSG Classics, with a new preface by the author. WebThe thesis of Edward Ball 's book Slaves in the Family is that there is much to be learned from having an honest conversation about the legacy of slavery in the United States but WebHow did slavery shape the family life of the enslaved in the American South? 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