description: Edward Ball tells the story of southern slavery through tracking the history of the Balls, prominent landowners, rice-planters, one or two of them slave traders, and big slave owners in a southern family in dispersal and decline. In 1698, a planter named Elias Ball arrived in South Carolina from Devon, England, to claim an inheritance to one half of a plantation. By 1865, the Ball family of South Carolina owned over a dozen plantations along the Cooper River near Charleston. The crop was Carolina Gold - rice. The empire was grown with seeds from Madagascar and slave labour purchased on the Charleston Docks. By the time the civil war ended, nearly 4,000 people had been enslaved by the Balls. Descendents of the Ball slaves may number as high as 11,000 today.
language: English
title: Slaves in the Family
titlecomplete: Slaves in the Family
genres: Civil War, Historical, Biography, Race, American History, African American, Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Biography Memoir
ratings_count: 2818
awards: awardedAt: 883641600000
name: National Book Award
category: Non-Fiction, awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Ambassador Book Award
category: American Studies
publisher: Penguin Books