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 First edition | |
| Author | Edward Ball |
|---|---|
| Original title | Slaves in the Family |
| Language | English |
| Published | Ballantine Books |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 505 |
| Awards | National Book Award Ambassador Book Award for American Studies |
| ISBN | 0345431057 |
Slaves in the Family (1998) is a biographical historical account written by Edward Ball, whose family historically owned large plantations and numerous slaves in South Carolina.
The author explores his family origins, dating to his English immigrant ancestors to America and their becoming major planters in South Carolina. Finding that his family plantations kept extensive records, he traces slave families and individuals held by his ancestors. Ball follows the stories of these people over many years as the families dispersed. Over time, his family earned the reputation as "the most prominent of South Carolina plantation owners."[ citation needed ]
The author explores genealogy and history, via interviewing descendants from both groups. The African-American families included mixed-race descendants of one or more of his white family ancestors. Stories from the black families are intense and varied, practically lacking in any kind of bitterness. The book depicts his family as being not the cruelest of slave owners.
Melungeons are an ethnicity from the Southeastern United States who descend from Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as slaves and indentured servants. This was in the mid-17th century before slavery and an example of early race-mixing. Historically, the Melungeons were associated with settlements in the Cumberland Gap area of central Appalachia, which includes portions of East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. Tri-racial describes populations who claim to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry. Although there is no consensus on how many such groups exist, estimates range as high as 200.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during early colonial days, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
"Children of the plantation" was a euphemism used during the time of slavery in the United States, to identify the offspring born to black female slaves and white men, usually the slave's owner, one of the owner's relatives, or the plantation overseer. Rape of female slaves occurred on many plantations. These children were born into slavery, through a legal doctrine known as partus sequitur ventrem. They were classified as mulattoes, a former term for a multiracial person. The one drop rule meant that they could never be part of white society. Some of the fathers treated these children well, sometimes providing educational or career opportunities, or manumitting (freeing) them. Examples are Archibald and Francis Grimké, and Thomas Jefferson's children by Sally Hemings. Others treated their multiracial children as property; Alexander Scott Withers, for instance, sold two of his children to slave traders, where they were sold again.
The one-drop rule is a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the 20th-century United States. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry is considered black. It is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status, regardless of proportion of ancestry in different groups.
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily Black African with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free.
The Saponi or Sappony are a Native American tribe historically based in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia. They spoke a Siouan language, related to the languages of the Tutelo, Biloxi, and Ofo.
Black Indians are Native American people – defined as Native American due to being affiliated with Native American communities and being culturally Native American – who also have significant African American heritage.
Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, born Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye, also known as Anta Majigeen Njaay or Anna Madgigine Jai, was a West African from present-day Senegal, who was enslaved and sold in Cuba, probably via the slave pens on Gorée Island. In Cuba she was purchased, as wife, by plantation owner and slave trader Zephaniah Kingsley. After his death, she became a planter and slave owner in her own right, as a free black woman in early 19th-century Florida.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that all children would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels).
Kingsley Plantation is the site of a former estate in Jacksonville, Florida, that was named for an early owner, Zephaniah Kingsley, who spent 25 years there. It is located at the northern tip of Fort George Island at Fort George Inlet, and is part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve managed by the U.S. National Park Service.
Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. was a Quaker, born in England, who moved as a child with his family to South Carolina, and became a planter, slave trader, and merchant. He built several plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida in what is now Jacksonville, Florida. He served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821. Kingsley Plantation, which he owned and where he lived for 25 years, has been preserved as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, run by the United States National Park Service.
The Choctaw freedmen are former enslaved African Americans who were emancipated and granted citizenship in the Choctaw Nation after the Civil War, according to the tribe's new peace treaty with the United States. The term also applies to their contemporary descendants.
Edward Ball is an American author who has written multiple works on topics such as history and biography. He is best known for works that explore the complex past of his family, these family members were major rice planters and slaveholders in South Carolina for nearly 300 years. One of his more well known works is based around an African-American family, descended from one member of this family and an enslaved woman, whose members became successful artists and musicians in the Jazz Age.
Multiracial Americans are Americans who have mixed ancestry of two or more races. The term may also include Americans of mixed race ancestry who self-identify with just one group culturally and socially. In the 2010 United States census, approximately 9 million individuals or 3.2% of the population, self-identified as multiracial. There is evidence that an accounting by genetic ancestry would produce a higher number. Historical reasons are said to have created a racial caste such as the European-American suppression of Native Americans, often led people to identify or be classified by only one ethnicity, generally that of the culture in which they were raised. Prior to the mid-20th century, many people hid their multiracial heritage because of racial discrimination against minorities. While many Americans may be considered multiracial, they often do not know it or do not identify so culturally, any more than they maintain all the differing traditions of a variety of national ancestries.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of enslaved people to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
John Punch was an enslaved African who lived in the colony of Virginia. Thought to have been an indentured servant, Punch attempted to escape to Maryland and was sentenced in July 1640 by the Virginia Governor's Council to serve as a slave for the remainder of his life. Two European men who ran away with him received a lighter sentence of extended indentured servitude. For this reason, some historians consider John Punch the "first official slave in the English colonies," and his case as the "first legal sanctioning of lifelong slavery in the Chesapeake." Some historians also consider this to be one of the first legal distinctions between Europeans and Africans made in the colony, and a key milestone in the development of the institution of slavery in the United States.
The history of slavery in Florida predates the period of European colonization and was practiced by various indigenous peoples. Florida had some of the first African slaves in what is now the United States in 1526-1565, as well as the first emancipation of escaping slaves in 1687 and the first settlement of free blacks in 1735.
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