Slaves in the Family Read online

  Robert Ball’s good fortune swam along for nearly twenty years, but everything changed as England drifted into civil war. In 1642, a rebellious Parliament fielded armies that marched against King Charles I and his loyal peers. A faction of the uprising, the New Model Army, led by the austere Oliver Cromwell, won the lead. Cromwell’s army focused the energy of the vociferous Puritans, who hated the Church of England with its pompous bishops and dressed-up style of worship. As a clergyman in the state-run church, Robert Ball was a hired hand of both the king and the bishops. He was an obvious and detestable enemy.

  When the New Model Army came through Devon, the Reverend Robert Ball climbed into his pulpit at St. Mary’s and told his congregation to remain loyal to King Charles. For this, the vicar was captured and jailed. After paying bail for his freedom (perhaps from his wife’s purse), Robert Ball took his family and fled. A year or so after the incident the fighting subsided, with Charles I pushed out of England onto the Isle of Wight. During the stalemate, Robert Ball returned home to find his house looted, his property confiscated, and St. Mary’s in the hands of the Puritans. The war resumed in 1648, and Cromwell’s army was victorious. King Charles was beheaded, and Cromwell took his place as chief of state. Robert Ball was ruined. The vicar spent his middle years fending off Cromwell’s lieutenants, who demanded money from him, and trying to get back his wife’s fortune. In the late 1650s, he regained control of St. Mary’s. The Ball family, however, seem to have been broken by the events of the English Civil War.

  Elias Ball’s father, William, inherited nothing and acquired little. William Ball grew up and moved to the village of Stokeinteignhead, an hour’s walk from Torquay. There he married a poor woman named Mary. The couple had four children, of whom Elias was the last.

  During Elias’s boyhood royal clashes came home a second time. After Cromwell’s death, Charles II, son of the beheaded king, was restored to the throne. Many in the new regime wanted to take vengeance against the Puritans on behalf of the Church of England. But the new King Charles leaned toward Catholicism and ignored the Anglican Church, causing murmuring among the lords, who began to worry seriously when, upon Charles’s death in 1685, the throne passed to his brother, James II, an avowed Catholic. King James looked to the Vatican and promoted the papacy, a turn of events that raised a panic in the old Protestant faction. In 1688, a cabal of English aristocrats invited William, Prince of Orange, to come to England from across the Channel in order to seize the throne from James.

  Elias was twelve. To begin what would be called the Glorious Revolution, William of Orange landed in November with his army at Tor Bay, a half-hour gallop from the Ball home. The invaders would have swept past Stokeinteignhead on their way to Exeter and London, meaning that once again armed masses drove through the Ball homeland. As ardent supporters of the royal family, the Balls may have had to flee a second time. King James certainly fled, to France, and the quieter reign of William and Mary began.

  It is not difficult to imagine how Elias’s family, penniless on a little piece of land, might tell and retell stories about the luxury in which some of their relatives once lived. In this setting, the story of how Ball family money was cheated away would get a special hearing. The injustice seemed to link the little clan to great events. Wrongs could be traced in a line, from the lowly villages on the River Teign all the way up to the king. The Puritans, a mob of fanatics, had killed the head of state, who had ruled by divine right. And look at us now.

  I suspect that the Ball family’s experience of the English Civil War might have forced some of them to the most conservative side of the politics of their day. And, just perhaps, it might have left children like Elias with an appetite to wrest back what had been stolen from them.

  In 1692, when Elias was sixteen, William Ball died. According to an inventory of his property, he didn’t leave much: “twelve sheep, ten lambs … one old mare & coalt … one brass pan & kettle … one bed … [and] corn in the ground.” Because Elias was William and Mary Ball’s last child, by the code of primogeniture, in which rights pass to male children beginning with the first, he would have had no claim even to this paltry inheritance.

  The village of Stokeinteignhead stood near ports that handled the growing ship traffic to America, In 1620, the Mayflower had sailed from the Devon town of Plymouth to Massachussetts, carrying a small band of Pilgrims. Since then, Tor Bay and its inland villages had given up thousands of sons and daughters as seamen or adventurers in the growing overseas empire. As they wrote home to report on their doings, and when the discouraged came back to England for good, stories of the colonies filled up regional lore.

  As a boy, Elias heard about at least one colonial wayfarer, a man called John Coming (the name was variously spelled Cumming and Comyns), a half brother of Elias’s father, an interesting uncle who went to America.

  Uncle John had grown up in Devon and had become a sailor. In 1669 he signed on as first mate to the Carolina, a ship commissioned by investors to make the first permanent English settlement on the southeastern coast of North America. Unlike earlier attempts, the expedition succeeded. John Coming had married Affra Harleston, one of the few women aboard his ship, and returned to sea. He rose to the rank of captain and made round-trip voyages carrying people and cargo between England and the new colony, Carolina.

  I imagine that Elias Ball met his uncle on the sailor’s return trips to Devon, when Captain Coming passed through to see his kin. John and Affra had no children, and the childless captain may well have paid attention to his half brother’s family. Whether in this way or some other, the idea dawned in John Coming’s mind that there would be an inheritance overseas for one of his Ball nephews, should that nephew come to America to claim it. After much to-and-fro, John Coming ended his sailing days around 1682, then stayed in South Carolina, as the colony was known by then. (The other part, North Carolina, was largely untouched by the English, and would remain so for many years.)

  The estate where John Coming lived was known as Coming’s T. It stood on a river where two tributaries came together in the shape of the letter T. The tract was not a farm on the model of a tiny Devon holding of five or ten acres. Coming’s T was grand, some 740 acres. It had another aspect, something unique to America that no English farmer, not even a lord, could claim: Coming’s T was peopled by captive workers, African and Native American slaves.

  John Coming and Affra Harleston were pioneers who gambled their lives and won. Their wager opened a path for their nephew, young Elias Ball. It began back in August 1669, somewhere near Dover, England, when John Coming boarded the frigate Carolina, bound for America. A long and light flagship, the Carolina had two sister vessels, the Port Royal and the Albemarle. The flotilla sailed from the Downs, some shoals off the Dover coast, then proceeded to Ireland to look for more passengers. From his Irish berth, Joseph West, captain of the mission, wrote to his employers, a group of investors known as the Lords Proprietors. West informed them that fewer Irish adventurers than he had predicted had come to the docks to board.

  The muted interest of the Irish in the scheme came as no surprise, because the three ships arrived from England, which had lately done atrocious things in Ireland. During the second part of the English Civil War, in 1648, Oliver Cromwell’s army had invaded Ireland and made prisoners of thousands. To punish his enemies for siding with King Charles, Cromwell devised a plan to deport the Irish captives to work in America. By this time, owners of English sugar farms on the island of Barbados were demanding workers—black, white, red, anybody. The Irish royalists were sent off to slavery in the tropics. Although over twenty years had passed, no one could say whether Joseph West’s flotilla might be a trick to kidnap more victims.

  At least one person on the docks, the young Affra Harleston, probably in her early twenties, paid no attention to the warnings that greeted the arrival of the ships. She had been born into a wealthy English family that had moved to Ireland some years before to escape the constant wars. Although she had
been raised in Ireland and had received a fine education there, as demonstrated by several poetic letters that she wrote, later handed down among the Balls, she was evidently eager to abandon it. When the Carolina made port, Affra decided to go aboard, becoming one of seventeen women among ninety-two passengers.

  The little fleet sailed from Kinsale, on the southern coast near the town of Cork, in mid-September 1669. Some weeks later the ships arrived in Barbados to pick up supplies and still more adventurers. By this time Barbados was peopled with tens of thousands of Africans, who outnumbered their English owners by a large majority. Although no clear evidence remains, some of the people who (unwillingly) joined the Carolina’s mission in Barbados may have been black slaves.

  After a winter spent laid up in the Caribbean, the pioneers headed for North America in the spring. In late March 1670, the Carolina arrived at a marshy shore on the southeast coast of the mainland, and the two sister ships arrived a few days later. Some Native Americans (I prefer to call them simply Native people) greeted the strangers. The English-speakers must have been careful with their hosts, because the leader, or cassique, of the Natives, a tribe known as the Kiawah, took an interest. The cassique led the Carolina north to a handsome bay formed by two rivers. This new landing place lay about 250 miles north of St. Augustine, Florida, where the Spanish, hated colonial rivals of Britain, sat grimly in their forts. The English settled just inland from the ocean on a marshy riverbend.

  First mate John Coming probably disembarked in the company of Affra Harleston. The couple had come to an arrangement during the long journey from Ireland. They seem to have expected they were in America to stay, because they were married at sea, or soon after they arrived.

  The land the invaders called Carolina consisted of a flat, wet plain that unrolled from the beach and continued inland a distance of about forty miles. West of the wetlands lay a dry piedmont, with rolling hills and pine forest, and beyond that, three hundred miles from the shore, the mountain range of Appalachia. The Kiawah, who met the ships, were among two dozen small Native tribes or clans living on the coastal plain. Others included the Edisto, Etiwan, Kusso, and Sewee, whose settlements, taken together, counted several thousand people. Farther inland lived the Catawba, and down the coast, in the direction of Florida, the Yamasee. The strongest people in the region, the Cherokee, lived farthest from the ocean. Cherokee villages stood in the foothills and mountains, but with their war-making might and constant trade down to Kiawah country, the Cherokee dominated everything in their path.

  A visitor to Carolina in its first years described the coastal Natives as having “a deep Chestnut Colour.” He reported that people wore clothing made from the skins of bear or deer, that the men had little or no hair on their chins, and that both men and women painted their faces “with different Figures of red.” Their look was “well limb’d and featured” and they wore “their Hair black and streight, tied various ways, sometimes oyl’d and painted, [and] stuck through with Feathers.” There were many competing clans, but this eyewitness description gives some idea of the people who would soon be asked to hand over their land.

  Most of the coastal Natives lived in small villages and planted com, or maize, and moved from time to time to take up new fields. The custom of seasonal drifting put them at a disadvantage against the invaders. It allowed the English to tell themselves they were not encroaching on other people’s territory, because a nomadic people could not be said to own any land. The population of the Native villages was sparse, perhaps fifty to a hundred in each settlement, in part because the women practiced abortion. An ethnographer traveling in the 1700s noted that the Catawba relied on “frequent abortions of the young unmarried women … by medicinal simples … in which fatal science they are very expert.”

  The women tended the maize, while the men fished and hunted, using blowguns as well as bows and arrows. A typical meal of the Etiwan, who lived near the whites, would have been a venison stew with corn meal, or rabbit dressed with a sauce made from hickory nuts. For drink, the Kiawah and other clans made a tea from the cassena bush, a low shrub on the coast.

  Within three months of landing, the whites revealed their long-range plans. By the end of the first summer, the immigrants, still living on ships anchored in the river, began to import African slaves. The black people were brought one or two at a time from older English colonies such as Virginia and Barbados. Within the year, the colony consisted of some two hundred whites and fifty enslaved blacks. With the black workers at their command, whites put to work a surveying instrument, seventeen and a half feet in length, known as “the rod.” They built a village with regular streets and wooden farmhouses. Fields of corn, planted with seed borrowed from the Natives, lay at the edge of town. John and Affra Coming evidently had a house built in the new village, and settled in.

  When the English arrived, they carried with them a social contract, the Fundamental Constitutions, written in London by the philosopher John Locke. At the time, Locke worked for Lord Ashley Cooper, one of the Lords Proprietors, investors in the Carolina colony. The Fundamental Constitutions consisted of 120 provisions, among which were careful terms for the establishment of slavery.

  By the time of the founding of Carolina, the English colonies in America had evolved a three-tiered system of labor: enslaved people (Natives and Africans), indentured servants (usually poor English or Irish whites), and free citizens (Puritans and loyal Church of England flock). The Fundamental Constitutions, intended as a guide to the settlement of Carolina, discouraged the enslavement of Natives. From the experience of Virginia and Massachusetts, colonized half a century earlier, Locke knew that Native people would retaliate if the English tried to sell them. Rather than say as much outright, however, Locke framed the issue of slavery in religious terms. “[S]ince the Natives of the place who will be concerned in our plantation are utterly Strangers to Christianity,” he wrote, “[their] Idolatry Ignorance or mistake gives us noe right to expell [them] or use [them] ill.”

  By contrast, the Fundamental Constitutions called for the subjugation of Africans, styled “Negroes.” Locke evidently understood that an African’s black brothers and sisters, back home, would have no means of reprisal against American captors. The religious scruples vanished, and Provision 110 read simply, “Every Freeman of Carolina, shall have absolute power and authority over Negro Slaves, of what opinion or Religion soever.”

  Slavery, a kidnap-and-sale system aimed against foreign people for the purpose of forced work, was not an English invention. Neither were the restrictions on personal movement, or the inheritance between generations of the status of slave. By the time the Carolina colony was founded, all of this was already thousands of years old. Slavery had thrived among the Jews; among black Africans, Greeks, Romans, and ancient Germans; and throughout the Holy Roman Empire, especially around the Mediterranean. The word “slave” itself derives from “Slav”; the Slavs were long victims of European slavery, captured from the eastern Adriatic and trade routes along the Black Sea. In central Europe, slavery began to fail toward the end of the eighth century A.D. and fell extinct by the middle of the fourteenth. It was revived after 1492, at the start of the age of American empire, when Spanish and Portuguese ships began to carry Africans across the Atlantic. Southern Europeans turned to Africa in part because the supply of Slavs had been cut by the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. In 1508, an early shipload of blacks arrived at Hispaniola, in the Caribbean. By 1540, King Charles V of Spain tried to halt the practice, decreeing the end of African slavery and freedom for blacks in Spanish dominions. The decree failed, African slavery returned, and the English soon copied the Spanish example. In a first expedition, in 1556, Sir John Hawkins sailed from London to some landing point on the West African coast, and sent eighty men on shore to trap people. Villagers fought back, seven whites were killed, and the poachers took just ten captives. Sailing farther south, Hawkins tried again, succeeded in filling his ship, and headed for the Caribbean. Eventu
ally Europeans found an easier way of procuring workers, namely, encouraging black clans to fight one another and to sell their prisoners of war.

  With his theories of representative government, John Locke would later become the philosopher of the American Revolution. He also proved to be a good theorist of slavery, writing what is perhaps the most apt definition of human property. For Locke, slavery was not merely a labor system, that is, a way of building a foreign colony. He described it instead as a permanent state of war. Any person who “attempts to get another Man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him,” Locke wrote after he left the employment of Lord Ashley Cooper and could speak freely.

  John and Affra Coming, and other South Carolinians, did not invent the state of war that would push them to the top of their society. But what the English-speaking whites carried out in South Carolina—and throughout America—did have distinction. Through their attack on Africans, which brought millions to the New World, the English would become the most efficient slave makers in history.

  Despite the ban on abuse of the Natives, within eighteen months the Carolinians enslaved local people alongside Africans. In August 1671, an immigrant from Ireland killed a Native man—from what clan, the records do not say—probably in an argument over bartered goods. Previously the colonists had been careful not to hurt their neighbors, who outnumbered them, but this murder shifted the ethnic winds. No evidence of reprisal for the death appears in the official account, and the whites seem to have taken the unpunished crime as permission to capture Native people. One month after the killing, settlers attacked the Kusso, to the southwest. The colonists believed the Kusso had been conspiring with the Spanish in Florida to plan an attack on the English. In addition to their conniving, real or imagined, the Kusso had been taking corn from fields planted by settlers. Angry farmers complained to the governing committee, known as the Grand Council, which called for penalties. Stating that “the Kussoe and other Southern Indians … doe dayly persist and increase in their insoleneyes,” the Council declared “an open Warr,” beginning with the taking hostage of two Kusso who had the misfortune of being among the whites. In later years, John Coming, the goodly Ball uncle, would be a member of this same Grand Council and vote on similar policies.