Book Description
In 1698, Elias Ball traveled from his home in Devon,
England, to Charleston, South Carolina, to take possession of
his inheritance: part of a plantation and twenty slaves.
Elias and his progeny built an American dynasty that lasted
for six generations, acquiring more than twenty Plantations
and enslaving close to four thousand Africans and African
Americans until 1865, when Union troops arrived on the lawns
of the Balls estates to force emancipation.
Edward Ball, a descendant of Elias, has written a
nonfiction American saga that is part history, part journey
of discovery. Ball chronicles the lives of the people who
lived in his ancestors lands: the violence and the opulence,
the slave uprisings and escapes, the white and black heroes
of the American Revolution, the mulatto children of Ball
masters and "Ball slaves," and the culminating
shock of the Civil War. He reconstructs the genealogies of
slave families—from the first African captives, through
ten generations, to the present—and travels to Sierra
Leone to visit a prison from which his family once bought
workers.
Most remarkable of all, Ball has traveled all over the
United States to meet descendants of Ball slaves (who number
between 75,000 and 100,000 living Americans). In a series of
memorable encounters, Ball hears from black
families—some of whom are his blood kin—their
stories, passions, and dreams, and reveals how the effects of
slavery live on in black and white life and memory. Slaves
In the Family is a microcosm of America's defining
national experience, a story of people confronting their
inescapable common history.
