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CHAPTER 1
A CHILD IN THE CHESAPEAKE
Mary ball was the only child of Mary Johnson Ball and Colonel Joseph Ball of Lancaster County, Virginia. She was born around 1708 or 1709. Lancaster is the southernmost county in Virginia's Northern Neck, which runs along the northern bank of the Rappahannock River, south of the Potomac. Surrounded and penetrated by rivers, its southeastern tip reaches out into the Chesapeake Bay.
Of Mary's mother's family, nothing is known for certain, although tenacious local historians now believe with strong evidence that she was born Mary Bennett and was brought over to Maryland from England as an indentured servant and made her way to Virginia. Eighty percent of the immigrant women to Virginia came over as indentured workers. That percentage was a very small portion of the immigrants altogether — the great majority of whom were male. By and large, women did not choose to come to Virginia; some were kidnapped, or "trapanned." An eighteenth-century indentured servant woman in Maryland described life to her father as "toiling almost Day and Night, and very often in the Horses druggery, with only this comfort that you Bitch you do not halfe enough, and then tied up and whipp'd to that degree that you'd not serve an animal ... nay many Negroes are better used." There is no way of knowing how Mary fared in her years of service in Maryland, but it was a very hard life, and she was a strong and resourceful young woman.
The Mary who gave birth to Mary Ball first married a man named Johnson. She had two children with him, Elizabeth and John, and after his death met and married the wealthy planter and widower Joseph Ball. Joseph Ball's father, William Ball, had immigrated to the New World from England during the English Civil War. Like the Washingtons, the family little Mary would marry into, the Balls became prosperous tobacco planters. They aggressively acquired land, slaves, and church, military, and government offices, securing themselves places in the coalescing ruling class shaping Virginia life in the late seventeenth century. Mary's father, Joseph, William's youngest child, owned, at various times, between nine and fourteen slaves. This made him among the wealthiest men in their community, although he was not among the colony's grandees, like his neighbor on the Corotoman Creek, Robert "King" Carter, who was tithed on over a hundred slaves in these same years.
Joseph was probably born in England in 1649, and his family brought him to Virginia by the mid-1650s. Like his father and his brother, his son and his nephews, Joseph became an officer in the militia, a churchwarden, a vestryman, and at times a member of the House of Burgesses, a high sheriff, and a justice of the court. Joseph and his nephew William frequently presided together at the Lancaster Court House, and Joseph's younger nephew, Richard, joined them on the bench in the early eighteenth century, giving the county three Balls weighing in out of a shifting group of more or less eight magistrates.
The governor appointed magistrates from among the communities' wealthiest and best-educated men. They served for life and, as the Balls did, usually petitioned to pass on their positions to their sons, relatives, or friends. The magistrates, including the Ball contingent, made an impressive-looking group, wearing wigs, elegant jackets, knee breeches, and buckled shoes to court, where they sat on a bench raised a foot or more off the floor, under the royal arms. In cold weather, Joseph Ball cut an imposing figure in his broadcloth suit and his "fine broadcloth cloak with gold edging and silver clasps," with his "old sword and belt" and his "new woolen stockings" with his wood-heeled shoes. The Balls had the satisfaction of knowing that the 1701 brick courthouse they served in, across the Corotoman Creek from Joseph Ball's house, was built on land they had sold to the community. The court building was the centerpiece of the waterside village of Queenstown, which the Balls had founded on a brook then known as Madam Ball's Creek. (Queenstown, like many other towns established in this period to centralize the place for ships to pick up and deliver tobacco, failed when residents preferred to ship from their own docks, shifting the inconvenience to the shipmasters.) When the court building was finished, William Ball the elder had built a pillory, stocks, and a whipping post.
Virginia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was building a slave society. Men like William and Joseph Ball, John and Lawrence Washington, William Byrd I, George Eskridge (who would become Mary's mother's friend and oversee young Mary's inheritance), and the Balls' neighbor on the Corotoman Creek, Robert Carter, to name only few, were amassing as much land as they could. Together, these settlers dispossessed the Indians of their territory in northeastern Virginia through arms and through "fraud, petition ... and unceasing encroachment upon reserves." By 1700, English planters had patented and paid taxes on about two million acres of Virginia. In the next seventy years, they would occupy another seven million. With the rapid concentration of land in private hands coupled with the emergence of tobacco as a highly salable export crop in the early seventeenth century, these colonizers developed a voracious appetite for laborers to clear and work their lands. Indentured servants from England and to a lesser extent orphaned children had supplied this need until the middle of the seventeenth century.
Wealthy men who were also officeholders, like the men of the Ball family, began accumulating slaves as soon as they could. Mid-seventeenth-century Virginians wanted more slaves than the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the trade to the colonies, was providing. The hunger of white planters for slaves eventually ended the Royal African Company's monopoly on the trade, and smaller merchant shippers from Great Britain and the colonies began capturing and filling their ships with West Africans, bringing more and more to the coasts of Virginia. Slaves cost more than indentured servants, who would serve from five to seven years, but African workers were enslaved for life. Planters could work them from daylight to nightfall, six days a week, unlike English subjects, who had customary and legal protections and could negotiate, within limits, over food and shelter. The "middling sort" of English people prized industriousness, but in the colonies the coercive conditions of indenture and the much more coercive conditions of slavery stigmatized labor and accelerated the market in laborers.
Anglicanism in the Chesapeake gave settlers a moral patina to the emerging class structure and the development of slavery. The Virginia Anglican church had no colonial bishop or ecclesiastical courts to direct it and adjudicate for it, so prominent laymen like William and Joseph Ball became vestrymen and occupied this office for life. They provided the strong local, secular leadership that characterized the southern colonial Church of England and that made Virginia the "most thoroughgoing religious establishment in colonial British America." They had significant power over the church and the community, especially because the Anglican church tithed every settler regardless of his or her religious affiliation. Among other things, vestrymen appointed the tobacco inspectors who checked to see that farmers weren't growing too much so as not to flood the market and lower prices. Vestrymen also "processioned" or went around all parish dwellers' property every four years to check on boundaries and update landmarks. After three such visits, if the property lines were uncontested, the settler became rightful owner of the land so bounded. They probated wills and granted marriage licenses. As slave owners, vestrymen were important in preventing the church from advocating strongly for conversion and religious education for slaves. (In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, most slave owners resisted the church's efforts even when several pieces of legislation assured them that conversion would not affect slaves' status.) The vestrymen selected and hired ministers; they distributed alms and controlled the charity work of the church, the source of help for the white poor in the colony. They established regulations like setting minimum standards for church attendance.
Vestrymen also assigned the pews in their churches, creating a seating pattern that reproduced the parishioners' social standing. The prominent families sat in the great pews on the ground floor in Christ Church in Lancaster County. Damask curtains on brass rods hung about Robert Carter's pew. (A cedar-lined road extended over the three miles between his plantation, Corotoman, and Christ Church.) He, his tenants, and his servants filled the whole northern end of the church. The less affluent sat in the more cramped single and double pews on the ground floor, and the poorest whites and sometimes a few blacks occupied the least comfortable benches upstairs in the gallery. The grandee William Byrd II, in December 1710, crowed in his diary that his vestryman gave him "the best pew in church."
Before Mary Johnson married Joseph Ball, he and his first wife, Elizabeth Romney, had four daughters — Elizabeth, Hannah, Ann, and Easter (or Esther) — and one son, Joseph junior. Elizabeth Romney Ball probably died in 1703. As early as 1702, Mary Johnson was witnessing legal transactions at the Lancaster Court House. In 1703/1704, she witnessed a transfer of land that Joseph Ball made to his son-in-law Rawleigh Chinn, married approximately three years to Ball's daughter Easter.
It is a sign of their times that the couple's first appearance to historians is on a legal document about property. It was a bit unusual but hardly unheard of for women to witness legal transactions in Virginia, where the high death rate made adults scarce. It would become less common as the white settler population stabilized and grew. Both gender and class would proliferate behavioral definitions and requirements that would limit women's activities. Over the eighteenth century, colonial rulers excluded most women from legal and economic life. Mary Johnson made her mark with an X. While she could not write, writing and reading were taught separately, so it is possible that she could read. Anglicans valued Bible reading, and Anglican indentured children sometimes learned to read without learning to write.
In June 1706 and February 1708, Ball deeded slaves to his four daughters and land to his son, Joseph junior. Young Joseph received 450 acres and another land grant as well as a "negroe man going by the name of Dukey," two "negroe" boys, and a Negro woman "going by the name of Lucy." In a subsequent deed, young Joseph received three more male slaves and a woman named Murrcah and her children. He also received a silver chalice and important items of furniture including a feather bed and bed furniture, Russian leather chairs, and a costly looking glass. To his daughter Hannah Travers, wife of Raleigh Travers, the elder Joseph gave "a Negro woman named Bab, a Negroe lad named Jacob," a silver tankard, and half a dozen cane chairs. He left his daughter Ann Conway an enslaved boy named Jack, a son of Murrcah, a "negroe woman named Kate," and a silver salt cellar. To Easter Chinn, his daughter, he left a man named "Sam (or in lieu of him a new Negroe man)" and "my biggest to-eared silver cup."(A "new Negroe" meant a new arrival from Africa.) It later turned out that Easter received a boy, James, another of Murrcah's children.
"Boys" and "lads" like Murrcah's sons went in all directions. Joseph Ball took no note of the relations among the men, women, and young. Ball's gifts sundered Murrcah's little family. Joseph Ball's children might have paid more attention to the fact that the overwhelming bulk of his estate went to his son, the daughters each getting two enslaved workers, a piece of silver, inferior in value to Joseph's chalice, and some furniture. But it was customary, so perhaps it went unremarked upon.
Ball deeded the 720-acre plantation on the Corotoman Creek where he was living to his son but reserved it to himself during his lifetime. He also reserved dower rights to a small part of the land, carefully spelled out for processioning, in case he should marry. In a second deed, in February 1707/1708, he repeated the lifetime stipulation clause, with the phrase "if the said Colonel Joseph Ball shall take a wife that then it shall be lawfull for him to assigne for her dowre the tract of land whereon ... Ball now dwells," adding that the land should be "peaceably enjoyed during her natural life," then to return to Joseph Ball Jr. and his "issue." In a subsequent deed at the same time, he delivered to his son plots for 300 acres, 200 acres, and 80 acres, beyond the 720 acres he'd already deeded over.
As he hinted he would, the colonel did take a wife: his onetime witness Mary Johnson. He was a seasoned litigator trying to provide his wife with a little security from the anticipated predations of his grown son. Maybe it was no coincidence that Joseph Ball the younger was in London at the time the couple married. He, too, married in 1709, shortly after his father's wedding. His wife, Frances Ravenscroft, was born in England and would die there.
Mary Johnson was marrying a litigious man, member of a litigious family, living in a quarrelsome, grasping society. The young cousins William Ball and Richard Ball and their uncle Joseph Ball would all sue one another as well as Joseph's sister Hannah. Joseph Ball's son, Joseph junior, had sued his mother's estate and would sue his uncle as his father's executor as well as his stepmother. All of them, including Mary, would sue their neighbors. The status of the Balls and other white Virginians rested on their ownership of property, land, people, and human futures. The legal system structured their material lives and provided the tools for protecting their possessions and acquiring more. It also shaped their emotional lives by legitimating and making desirable relationships of domination and subordination. The Ball family men wielded the court system enthusiastically, and Mary Johnson Ball, with some help and encouragement, would follow their example.
Mary Johnson married just as the planter elite was tightening up its restrictions on widows' ability to dispose of any property their husbands might have left them. After 1680, it became more common for courts to side with fathers, to invalidate the activities of married women, and to rein in widows' prerogatives. Between 1705 and 1748, the colony reclassified slaves — normally the most valuable bequests made to women, as "realty" not "personalty" — to encourage their owners to tie them to the land on which they worked. Widows could retain use of land and slaves, but if they tried to give them or will them away, the colony might challenge them. Joseph Ball was acutely aware of the popular legal moves denying widows their right to dispose of property inherited from their husbands because he had used them.
Ball's father, William, had died in 1680, leaving his daughter, Hannah (Joseph Ball's sister), only five shillings, writing that these represented an "overpayment both of her portion and deserts." William's widow (Joseph's mother), Hannah Ball, loved her daughter, Hannah, better than her husband had. When she was dying ten years later, she wished to bequeath furniture and two slaves to the child shut out of her husband's legacy. According to testimony in a lengthy lawsuit, Joseph (Hannah's son) and Joseph's nephew William, Hannah's grandson, harassed her in her final illness about leaving their sister, Hannah, an enslaved mulatto girl, Bess, and a boy named James. (As a mixed-race woman, Bess might have been the child of an enslaved woman and an indentured servant, or possibly of William Ball Sr. or one of his sons.) As one witness remembered Hannah Ball's deathbed, Joseph and William wearied the old woman so much that she permitted them to write a codicil to her will renouncing her gift of Bess and James to her daughter. George Eskridge, the lawyer for Hannah Ball Fox (Hannah was married to the Reverend David Fox) against her brother and nephew, lost the case. He appealed to the General Court at Williamsburg, where the ruling went against Eskridge and Hannah Ball Fox again.
Having lost this suit, Hannah, her husband, David Fox, and the lawyer Eskridge sued Joseph and William for some red serge bed hangings and a cabinet. The court ordered Joseph Ball and William Ball to deliver the items to the Foxes.
Back in court again in 1712, a year after Joseph Ball Sr., little Mary's father, had died, Richard Ball took up battle against his cousin William for the slaves, who by now had become three, because Bess had had a child. The magistrates of the court, however, continued to support their fellow magistrates and confirmed William and Joseph's ownership of James, Bess, and her "encrease, a girl named Hannah."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Widow Washington"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Martha Saxton.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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