Museum is being built in charleston, south carolina. Mayor, do you want to welcome once again edward ball to our classroom . Indeed, professor. Thank you very much. Im so horn honored that edward ball has been so generous with his time to the return to our class today. Slaves in the family as known as the reason for building the museum. Such a wonderful example of the power of a book, the power of a great book. Having read the book, the international africanamerican museum would not be with under construction. Its well under construction to be finished june or july of next year, and thats all because of edward balls powerful work and wonderful work. And im sure all of you have questions, comments about book, so ill, i hope youll take advantage of this to discuss with edward [inaudible] questions or comments. Hello, mayor riley. Thank you for inviting me to come visit with you all. Im happy to do a q and a if you like, and i thought it would also be appropriate just to start by reading a couple of pages from this book that you all have had in your hands. The passage that i think is resonant more than many others in the book is one about the last day of enslavement on one of the plantations in berkeley county. And i thought that id read a couple of pages describing that day, because its the day when the back of slavery was broken and people breathed the air of liberation in many ways for the first time. The plantation as you probably remember from this book, its 25 miles north of charleston on the east branch of the river. The last day of slavery came february 26, 1865. William ball, thats the master of the place, sat in the dining room, a bible in front of him, reading aloud to his family and a few of his people. There were several africanamericans in this dining room on that day, the morning, sunday, february 26th. The local clergyman had made himself scarce during the fight. It was sunday, and everyone in the room black ask white knew the end was upon them. Before long a dispatch of yankees as williams son isaac called them would arrive in the if alley of oaks outside the door. The prayer group numbered about ten seated around the table were williams mother eliza, his stir jane and his wife sister jane and his wife mary. Behind the whites in the corner and along the plasteredded walls stood an elderly black woman, the plantations black matriarch who lived nearest the family and ranked first among house shaves. And he had brought slaves. And he had brought up williams four sons by his first wife and raised her own children alongside. Next to hettie, probably, stood robert the butler as well as the Ball Brothers companion and valet during their Wartime Service is. The bible reading was from the book of lamentations. It was a mournful passage about the miserable fate of jerusalem condemned by god for its sins. She that was great among the nations and princess among the provinces, read william, she in the night and her tears were on her cheeks because the lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions. According to mary ball, the white people in the room thought the bible asage fit their predicament passage fit their predicament. Skipping down. The week after the victors a arrived this was a spur, as many of us know, from shermans army they sent raiding parties to the plantation. As william was reading from the bible, the cavalryman and his company suddenly rode up to the mansion. A man in a blue uniform dismounted, threw open the door and demanded to talk to the black village. The crowd came from behind from the cabins behind the house. Among the group was henry, a 9yearold boy with a broad face and is light skin. Years later, henry would recall this day in a letter to mary ball. A young woman name sylvia who was the plantations seem stress also came down seamstress came down. The gardener who kept the yard and flower beds, and the rest came down, and the yankee told the crowd they were free. The ball women at this time, evidently worried about rape, throughout the war the confederate press had stoked the war morale that to the southerners gave in, the yankees and is black men would ravage the crowd. When the celebration began outside, mary ball and her sisterinlaw ran upstairs, each put on two heavy dresses, loading themselves down in a way that would frustrate sexual attack. William ball had buried the family silver in a swamp near the house. Grabbing the last pieces that were still in the house, mary and jane put them in cloth bags next to their bodies under layers. The yankee soldiers a arrived and is caroused through the house. Skipping down. Commander of the black company, the yankee black company, a colonel james beecher, came from a family of antislavery activists in the north. His half brother, the reverend henry ward beech, was an abolitionist and and pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church in brooklyn. His half sister was Harriet Beecher stowe, author of uncle toms cabin. Lets see. A similar scene was repeated on all the ball places as each was raid by yankee troops. The balls feared the worst, but in the end the soldiers just snatched a few hams. The single exception came at bucks hall plantation, formerly home to william balls cousin. The bucks hall a mansion, work buildings and crop were burned to the ground by federal soldiers and freed ball slaves. Despite the slaughter of the war, no one not even on buck hall was hurt. And so it was. Its possible to look into the telescope into the past and see how slavery came to an end on specific places and at specific times, and its a fascinating story. And i told you stories just now from a diary kept by a woman who lived on this plantation. But elsewhere i spent a lot of time with a family named lucas in charleston whose predecessors great grandparents had been on that very place, on that plantation on that very day and who handed down oral tradition and ask is stories describing that very day in terms that were nearly identical to the ones that were written down by women who were in that dining room when the yankees showed up on the launch lawn. So there is black oral tradition and white tradition, and and they came together to a fuller portrait9. Anyway, with that, have you all got anything on your mind from this book that you want to raise with me . Yes, sir. I have a couple questions. Ill stick to one for now. I was wondering if you could touch on the relationship of previously enslaved africanamericans with, like, their previous owners and how the dynamic was. I understand indentured slaves, servants, rather, but i was wondering like in your experience if you could relay more on that. Yeah. I think it was as various as people and families themselves. Their my best estimate is that onehalf of e chance painted africanamericans e chance painted africanamericans left the plantations where they had been enslaved and staked out new lives elsewhere in North Carolina or in georgia or in tennessee. They fled or they went to spartanning burg or somewhere because they wanted to get as far as they could from that home place. And onehalf remained on the plantations and became sharecrop farmers when the enslavement the plantations where many of them became sharecrop operations. And my experience talking to dozens of africanamerican families who have oral tradition about the reconstruction period is that their experiences varied. Some wanted to remain, if you like, in proximity to their former enslavers because those white families were the principal source of income and resources and not least a place to live. And the community remained, of africanamericans remained largely intact. And so they staked out relationships with the former enslavers that were in some ways had points of resemblance to the ones that they had just broken by freeing themselves. And on the other hand, there were those families who detested what they had been forced to experience and wanted to get as far away from mr. And mrs. Ball as they could. So i think it varied, taylor. Thank you. Sure. Hello, mr. Ball. I wanted to thank you for coming out once again. I appreciate, you know, your time. Well, actually, i had the pleasure to present my project to my fellow peers last week, and this research consisted of oops, we lost you, healthny. Oh, sorry. I dont know i why it muted. Anyway, so i had the pleasure to share with my fellow peers my midterm project that we had, and i wanted to touch on that, like, your research. I wanted to applaud you like last time i applauded you on how deep you are with your history9 and the accuracy of the history. I wanted to ask questions about, like, Just Research in general. I know its the, like, a very general, you know, question, but i found it difficult, you know, doing this research. And is i did, i was assigned five people, and i only had one person that i could really find more information on, so how did you go about in depth, you know, all of that research that you, you know, you did throughout the book . How would you explain that process or all of that . So you had five people from what period that you had to research . I believe the census that i looked at would be from 1840s up until 1950s because i have some sources here, like, just yeah. Ill just give you that range. Its not that accurate, but yeah. Well, i had the advantage in writing this book of three and a half years of fulltime labor, and and i was able to go to archives that hold the papers of the plantations that i wrote about as well as papers of white families who controlled hundreds of other plantations. So the key was a piece of good fortune able to identify where an africanamerican family lived in slavery. And if you can get that using oral tradition or circumstantial evidence from the year 1870 and 1865, and i can describe exactly what kind of evidence im referring to, then you can with some luck find the papers of the whites who had enslaved a given family which then might have anecdotal stories about enslaved individuals. And is thats whats, what is painstaking to accomplish. But around 1870 because, you know, melanie, the census records show for the first time the use of surnames by africanamericans, the first use of surnames by africanamericans. And using those surnames, lets say you have the name betty hampton, you could be lucky enough to find in the plantation records from five years earlier lists of enslaved people that include are betty and her children. And using the census records which has the name hampton and betty and her children, match these records to the plantation records of slave lists. That was what slave families did. There are other places where you can find the magic key. One of them is in the record of the fieldmens bureau freedmens bureau, the agency established in 1866 in order to try to help africanamericans to transition to freedom, and in the records there are administeringings that crypt administrations that list [inaudible] people used like the freedmens bank in which they document their Family History as a way of applying for a loan or applying for a bank account, and these records are also quite good. So theres a lot more to it, but those are the two, two of the magic keys that lead you back further into the past. All righty, thank you. Ill take that into consideration for the final, so thank you. Sure, sure. Edward, just for a, yeah, a little more context, so each family was assigned five or so names each student was assigned five or so names of africanamerican workers at the Cigar Factory in the new 20th century. Yeah, yeah. They were given the names and is maybe a connection to either a city directory or a census record okay. And they were charmed with building charged with building a profile based on mostly ancestor. Com research. And i think all of us struggled with it tremendously are. You know, some of when we were able to make the connections, i think there were some, you know, fabulous revelations that that, you know, that were made. But i think it also just gave us a little window into, you know, it was an edward ballinspired project, frankly, and it gave us a little window into the work that, you know, that you did so long ago. Right. I see. I understand. Yeah. Well, ancestry is a marvelous resource. And, yes, the public records that youre able to retrieve at your fingertips now are sometimes inadequate to instructing family narratives. They are very partial. They are a first step. Constructing a family narrative with some flesh on it does require talking face to face with folks and finding folks that will have family memories from a hundred years ago and with their participation and collaboration, using those oral traditions to make a flesh and blood Family History. If its okay, id like to ask another question. Of course. So through my reading, i kept referencing back to earlier in the story whenever you mentioned a little about [inaudible] i was wondering if, like, you could remember, like, just had anything off the top of your head significant that happened or was, like, out stood out to you. Like, just about [inaudible] yeah. Well, monks corner was a cross roads, and it was a place where mr. Monk had a general store at the corner ofs what is now corner of what is now, what, 51 and highway 52 and the [inaudible] yeah. Theres thats where it was, yeah. [laughter] 250 years ago. A lot of black folks leaving the plantation on cooper river to the east of monks corner settled along and around what is now 52 and, by sweat and tears, you know, were able to acquire tiny homesteads sometimes from the former slave owners on the west branch of the cooper. You mow the geography as well know the geography as well as anybody, so you can picture what im talking about. One of the things that is exceptional about this history along the cooper river is the fact that it survives at all. You know that when the raiding parties from the union army came in from charleston and went up the ashley river and burned most of the plantations along the ashley river, whereas they went up the cooper river, and they did not burn. They only burned one, which was the one i described in this little reading, buck hall. And almost all the others survive ised. And is as a consequence survived. And as a consequence, i think that the outcome was actually somewhat more stable on the cooper river than it was on the ashley river after the civil war. So i dont have a, you know, a hairraising anecdote that i can toss to you, taylor. And i, im not inclined to make one up. [laughter] so, but its interesting that, you know, monks corner was one thing 150 years ago, and it is now something else. But is monks corner predominantly africanamerican or half and half africanamerican, half white . Id probably say, like, probably about 5050. It has, like, larger sections of the city now that are predominantly africanamerican. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And i think that a fact dates from, you know, right after, right after the civil war when africanamericans left the plantations and established new lives. Some of the white folks who owned the plantations on the west branch bordering monks corner were not eager to sell little parcels of land to africanamericans and some were. And that was, again request, a matter of chance, a matter of family disposition, how this white family experienced their loss of status is and how the next white family experienced their loss of status, whether they wanted to help some of the africanamerican families that they had enslaved or not. So, yeah, those are just some, some thoughts here and there about monks corner. Thank you. Yeah, i was whenever i was reading it, i was reading about all the plantations that didnt get burned. And i dont know if you know gideon plantation . Its a huge one right there are on the corner. I didnt know if anything had affected them just because its so large. I would have assumed they would have had some kind of backlash this a sense. Yeah, yeah. I dont know the specifics on that plantation, what how many were there, you know . There were 50 plantations, you know, up and and down the cooper river and on the other side of it. So each one was a community, and each one had a different experience. Yes, sir. Well, thank you, i really appreciate it. Sure, sure. Pleasure. Hello, mr. Ball. Hey, how are you . Pretty good. My question is when i was reading your book, i noticed you mentioned how a lot of the slaves they were often raped by their masters, and then when they were inpresentation nateed impregnated, the masters put down the birth date of their illegitimate child, they would just leave it blank. Was it tough trying to trace the history of the family, especially for those, some of the black descendants of the ball family . Was it tough, like, tracing them . Oh, sure, yeah. Very tough. I will there were perhaps dozens of africanamerican families with whom our white families shared blood because of forced sex on the plantations. Now, we all hoe that this all know that this for white folks is, is a difficult subject, and is theres a lot of denial or unwillingness to sort of look it in the face. But when i started to work on this book, i began to meet africanamerican family after africanamerican family who had oral tradition that said, you know, my great, great grandfather was matthew ball, and he came from this particular plantation. I wanted to and yet, for reasons that you described, there are few paper trails that you can follow the that lead to, you know, the coupling of a white enslaver and an enslaved woman. I knew that i wanted to write about some of the families that had this experience, this oral traditions of their collaboration, participation and yet i knew that i could only write about those families if i had enough Persuasive Evidence that would convince a reader that our family was in fact related to them. I was able in the case of two things, compile of circumstantial evidence and oral tradition and odd bits of paper evidence that confirmed and remain consistent in such things as this, specifics of the research are almost so obscure. There would be a plantation master named james ballin record so hes unmarried and living in a place called quentiny plantation and there is a woman on a place named harriet and harriet has a son, then james ball, the unmarried james ball sells the plantation, buys another place and moves to it and the only person according to the paper record the goes with ms. Harriet and her son and they resettle their and furthermore james ball dies in the record shows he leaves 500 to harriet and to no other africanamericans so things like that, sort of circumstantial evidence but persuasive, in the case of a couple families i would find photograph of james ball and family in berkeley county, photograph of their great grandfather who was purported to be the son of james ball and compare these photographs and there was a Strong Family resemblance so that is a long answer to your question but it is very difficult to excavate the details of this very painful history but i think the in the end it does help both black folks and white folks to come to terms with the real deal, the real story of our history by talking about the stories honestly. What was it like finding out information about th