2 /  The Wife and the “Old Lady” Speak

Having married a planter, Louise Cabois Berthe probably envisioned that she would have a particular life. She would live principally on a plantation, in Mississippi, the state in which she was born.¹ In order to escape the monotony of her rural life, she might take trips to New Orleans or travel to Europe.² She would acquire a worldly outlook or, barring that, a securer one because she had seen her husband’s growing wealth. She had seen similar wealth accruing to her birth family.

The Berthes had been among Mississippi’s earliest settlers. Her father resided in Natchez as early as 1818, a year after Mississippi formally became a state.³ Within three years, he married her mother, Catherine Blanton. One of six siblings, four from her mother’s previous marriage, Louise was born in 1822.⁴ The family lived comfortably. Her father, James, managed the sale of local estates and owned a Natchez mercantile company that sold fresh tea, brandy, and “Negro hats, shoes and caps.”⁵ He also oversaw local estates and was a partner in a firm that shipped cotton from Natchez to New Orleans.⁶ For someone seeking to establish himself as a planter, the man she married doubtless realized it would be beneficial to have her father in his circle. By 1860 James owned property in Chicot County, Arkansas, where her husband also owned a plantation.⁷ The marriage doubtless solidified a bond between two men.

Louise quickly discovered after her marriage that she would spend most of her time in Kentucky, not Mississippi or Louisiana. Further, she was in Louisville, a city, not a rural community.⁸ Louise had been placed in such circumstances because of her husband’s personal ties to two black women and their children whom he had recently freed in nearby Cincinnati and his familial ties to one of the area’s earliest settlers.⁹ Seeing the benefits of its position by the Ohio River, a group of settlers under the protection of Virginia militiamen, among them her husband’s late uncle, were drawn to this part of Kentucky and by 1780 had obtained the privilege of settling there.¹⁰ The river was a boon for these early residents even as Louisville’s location on the river’s fall line posed problems for those traveling between Pittsburgh and New Orleans.¹¹ Before the first locks were constructed in 1825, anyone traveling by water had to come ashore to get beyond the rapids.

Although it did not enjoy the success of Cincinnati, which was not plagued by a fall line, or Lexington, which had a railroad by the 1830s, Louisville had become an urban center by the 1830s.¹² In fact, in 1832 a city councilman complained that the city was “greatly infested … with robbers, felons, pick pockets, and swindlers and vagrants” who were “resorting to houses of prostitution, grog shops, and gambling houses.”¹³ Visitors also grumbled about the way Kentuckians “attacked” their meals.¹⁴ They complained, too, of those who spit in public after chewing tobacco and rolling their tongue around snuff.¹⁵

This chapter explores the hardships endured by Louise and the black women and children Ballard freed in Ohio. Ultimately, it demonstrates how some of the restlessness evident in a still-young nation was due in part to Southern white men who quietly invested themselves in black women and children. That they did so permits us to learn more about the contradictory nature of the human spirit in American society. Though white men were never in danger of losing their authority, their weaknesses were clearly in view. Some dared to be concerned about certain enslaved people, often causing distress to their white relatives.

In the early days of their marriage, Rice Ballard seems to have given Louise nearly everything a newly married woman would desire. She acquired the material things that accompanied the life of the elite. There was the brand-new dinnerware set of twenty-four plates, twelve dessert plates, two water pitchers, and a dozen fluted tumblers. She also had a fifty-one-piece set of cutlery and four yellow baking pans.¹⁶ She received two bottles of cologne and twelve yards of hand-woven fabric, doubtless to be sewn into a new garment.¹⁷ And Ballard purchased a two-horse wagon.¹⁸

Before the year ended, however, Ballard made a purchase that served as confirmation that Natchez would not be Louise’s home or that of the three children to whom she would give birth. On October 1, 1841, he paid for a year’s worth of toll travel in Kentucky.¹⁹ The pass was designed for the Ballards to travel extensively on toll roads in the interior of the state, away from navigable waterways. Such trips likely included occasional visits to his distant relatives. For longer distances, the Ballards traveled by river.

FIGURE 4. Receipt permitting Rice Ballard’s family turnpike access on certain Kentucky roads. Folder 352, Rice Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ballard’s solo travel to and from his family’s Louisville home was tied to the seasons. He journeyed north to Kentucky during the spring as the rivers rose with the ice and snow melt. If he waited too long, the heat of summer could create drought conditions that slowed or stopped river traffic. Illustrative of how steamboat owners marketed to the public was an advertisement in a New Orleans newspaper announcing that the George Washington, a speedy vessel, left at 10 a.m. on Wednesdays for Louisville and Cincinnati and all landings in between.²⁰ This steamship offered the passengers who met it at the foot of Poydras Street “superior accommodations.” Ballard often traveled on vessels between the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.

Early in their marriage, Louise, who was twenty-three years her husband’s junior, was tolerant of his travels. If she wanted, she could boast that they owned homes in many places, even if she only saw some of them occasionally.²¹ Before his death in 1860, in addition to several properties in Mississippi, her husband had two plantations in Louisiana and one in Arkansas.²² None was her principal residence.²³ That Louisville was her home is evident in the recording of her name and those of their three children beneath her husband’s at this residence in the 1860 Census. Suggestive of the relatively modest life she and the children led in Louisville, their home was valued at $30,000 and the family’s cash holdings at $35,000. Neither was a trivial amount. However, both reflected a different lifestyle from that possible farther south. For example, Ballard’s Arkansas plantation, enslaved people included, was valued at $400,000.²⁴

To understand the stress that existed in the Ballard’s Louisville home, it is helpful to examine letters that he received from Louise between late 1847 and 1848, shortly after she gave birth to their two youngest children, twins. This was an event that Ballard did not stay around long to celebrate. Further suggesting his indifference is that the twins, both girls, were not immediately given names. The extent of Louise’s suffering because of this departure and other absences was shared with him.

“Dearest Husband,” began a letter to Ballard in mid-November 1847.²⁵ “It is several days or three weeks since you left and we have not heard from you yet. Are you sick or have you so much to attend to that you have not had time to write?” Louise added that she had already sent three letters to him because she had promised to write weekly, but she had not received a reply. Her anxiousness arose because of this and because one of the twins was colicky. “[She] was perfectly lifeless three times.… I do not think I have ever seen trouble until I seen my dear little child so near dieing [sic],” Louise reported of her baby.²⁶

Reflecting her interest in her children’s well-being, in the same letter Louise described the reading ability of their eldest. Ella, now six, was reciting passages from Little Lessons for Little Learners. Ballard had earlier presented the book as a gift to Ella, suggesting that he was not wholly indifferent to his children’s lives. Overjoyed by this, Louise wrote, “Ella says tell Farther [sic] she can read in the book he gave her,” adding, “I am much [pleased] with her improvement and think she learns fast.”²⁷

But Ella’s progress did not allay Louise’s suffering. She reiterated her concern about Ballard’s absences and his failure to write: “My patience is most worn out about not getting a letter sooner but I must make many allowances.”²⁸ Her words exposed the ways in which white wives in her day contended with lives that were far different from the ones that they had led as unmarried belles. Susan Middletown, a South Carolina mistress, summed up the woes of such women:

Though permitted some measure of independence in the private sphere of the home, many unmarried white women were distressed by their narrow lives. Even the most educated were expected to spend more of their time in the private sphere of the home, not in public spaces.³⁰ In 1851 Gertrude Clanton, a young Georgia woman, postponed a visit to a friend and explained away her delay by saying it was her father, not her, who said she was “too unwell” to travel.³¹ Maria Bryan, another woman in Georgia, similarly was prevented from a longed-for trip, but in this instance it was because her brother refused to accompany her. He told her he could not do so because he was tending to “pressing business.”³² Ballard’s frequent and prolonged absences generated similar anxiety in Louise, who was relieved to discover that his delay in replying in late 1847 was legitimate. A mule on an unnamed plantation had kicked him. “I was sorry to hear of your being lame …,” Louise hurried to write in reply. “You must be careful.”³³ In his letter, Ballard also told her that he was lonesome. She confessed that she felt the same, adding, “It will be very tryeing [sic] to be separated until next spring.” She asked him to try to come home sooner.

Louise shared next that she had had a disturbing dream, one that Delia, a servant in their house, had too. Louise surmised that the dream was an omen that someone was “very ill.” She did not tie the dream to Ballard’s farm accident but instead changed the subject, informing him that she had received letters from relatives in the lower South. She encouraged Ballard to visit her half sister Catherine to ease his loneliness, for letters from Catherine had eased hers. Louise closed by sharing news about the twins. “They are noticing very much for such young children,” she wrote. She disclosed, too, that, Ella, was also well. “She hopes to read to you in the book you gave her when you come.” Louise ended with a conventional closing: “Your wife Louise C. Ballard.”

Louise revealed herself as being as lonesome as her husband claimed to be. At the time of their exchange, he was actually in possibly intimate contact, at least at a distance, with an enslaved woman he owned. During summer 1847, Lucile Tucker, the woman in question, sent Ballard a letter from Bainbridge, Georgia.³⁴ In it, Tucker stated that she was earning good money in an unstated profession. Instead of seeking financial assistance, Tucker requested her freedom. With beautiful penmanship and perfectly spelled words in a letter that was possibly dictated, Tucker wrote, “I wish you could have emancipated me when you was last in New Orleans for that is a matter I deserve to have arranged as early as possible and if you could do it without putting me to the expense of returning to New Orleans, I should much prefer it for life you know is very uncertain and you might die before I can see you.”³⁵ She closed by writing, “Remember me to Miss Louisa.”

The level of intimacy between Tucker and Ballard and possibly Louise revealed in this letter is hard to miss. Her mention of New Orleans indicates Ballard had purchased or spent time with her there. She seemed to know his wife as well, who is listed as “Louisa,” a diminutive of her first name, in the 1870 Census.³⁶ Tucker had doubtless met Louise on one of Ballard’s plantations during one of the latter’s infrequent visits. While the injunction “Remember me to Miss Louisa” was a pleasantry, it also allows us to see how her lowly state was not absolute. There was evidently enough closeness between them that this bondswoman had asked to be remembered by his wife. Such closeness had also given her the courage to demand her freedom.

Tucker’s livelihood in Bainbridge was tied to waterborne commerce. In the southwestern corner of Georgia, Bainbridge sits beside the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers, which flow into the Apalachicola River, which in turn empties into the Gulf of Mexico. These waterways were important thoroughfares for travelers seeking to avoid the mountains when heading west to and beyond New Orleans. Sitting astride them, Bainbridge, a former Indian trading post, seems to have reaped the economic benefits. Tucker likely prospered from the incoming traffic. She was one the numerous female entrepreneurs who capitalized on the many “unattached” male travelers. One such entrepreneur was “Old Rachel,” a black woman who owned a cake shop in Bainbridge. She also operated a dance house on Saturdays for the “Kulud ladies,” probably a prime spot for prostitution.³⁷

Whether Ballard prostituted Tucker or allowed her to earn money in another line of work, she had established a cordial enough relationship with him to earn the privilege of keeping some of her earnings. Judging by the tone of her letter, Ballard and Tucker seem to have had an understanding. By allowing her to work and live independently in Bainbridge, he had positioned her to earn more than enough money to live on her own. Such an existence emboldened her to request something more critical: her freedom. In fact, in this letter, she bluntly stated that being freed was “a matter I deserve to have arranged as soon as possible.” Her words suggest that Tucker regarded her manumission not as a privilege but as a right. One can also infer from her words that she was reminding him of a commitment made earlier.

FIGURE 5. The June 25, 1847, letter that Bainbridge, Georgia-based enslaved woman Lucile Tucker sent her master Rice Ballard, requesting her freedom and that he “remember” her to “Miss Louisa,” in all likelihood his wife, Louise. Folder 113, Rice Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Tuckers confidence was likely related to her ability to enhance her life, perhaps through shady means. Other women of color, especially those working on their own, often entered local economies through prostitution in the United States and Caribbean, disrupting the social order.³⁸ Whether free or enslaved, these women’s worldviews changed according to their economic and legal autonomy. Laws that had made African Americans mere chattel were now exposed for their flimsiness and evidently contributed to these women’s resistance. Seeing white men’s inconsistencies, some bondswomen became braver. Though Ballard could be ruthless (“We had better loose [sic] them all and begin again than loose ourselves,” he had stated to Isaac Franklin regarding the abandonment of slaves during a cholera epidemic in Natchez), Tucker saw something unorthodox in him and asked for her freedom. Virginia, the bondswoman in the Texas jail, had seen something similar in him and asked for his help, if not her freedom, once calling him “an [honorable] and high minded man” although her words may have been mere flattery given her desperate situation.³⁹ Still, her use of such words and other words in her letter demonstrates empathy between people no matter the power imbalance between them.⁴⁰ Like literate white Americans, African Americans turned to certain phrases to reveal their awareness of the rank and ordered way of modern life.⁴¹ That enslaved women did both is significant, as they revealed the limits of laws and customs intended to subjugate blacks and women alike. They revealed, too, their ability to elicit positive responses from powerful white men owing to their earlier dealings, coerced or not, with such individuals. Virginia, Lucile, and other women, among them Delia, the Ballards’ Louisville servant, made appeals because he had done more than have coercive sex with some of them. He had displayed more than indifference. He had displayed concern.

Whether Ballard freed Tucker is unanswerable. Nonetheless, her letter uncovers a measure of intimacy between him and her that is missing in the conventionally worded letters from his wife, Louise. The closeness between them was so great it had given her the courage to ask for much more than the privilege of working on her own. She did so because, despite the power imbalance between him and her, men like him were sometimes capable of responding compassionately to the less powerful. Even Louise, his wife, discerned as much.

Ballard’s absence had provided her with a bit of power, as it had for the enslaved Lucile, demonstrating again the limits of laws intended to render marriage and slavery in absolute ways. Illustrative of Louise’s authority is her announcement in a December 1847 letter that she allowed a nursemaid to attend church while she looked after the twins whose names she had recently registered in an official birth record.⁴² She had named one of them Ann Carter Ballard, the other Charlotte Berthe Ballard. Regarding the latter, she stated, “I had wishfed] to have one of them called for my family.” But Louise was still curious about his comings and goings: “[Where] are you …? Have you commenced your new gin on your Louisiana place and Negro quarter[s]? I often feel as if I should like to know what you were doing on each place. When you write give me all the news.”⁴³

Here Louise was speaking more directly than she had previously. Her appeals for greater candor suggest that she sought a more intimate bond with her husband, of the sort that he shared with other women, black ones among them. In fact, she was stating outright her wish to know more about his life. She invited him to be open with her, stating emphatically: “[D]on’t be scarse [sic] in what you have to say.… My letters are written just as I think and talk. Write me soon and don’t write so seldome [sic].”⁴⁴

But Ballard continued to write infrequently. His reticence may have owed in part to his efforts to liquidate the domestic slave trading firm he owned with the Franklins and Armfield. The elder Franklin’s death in 1846 necessitated doing so.⁴⁵ Ballard also had other worries related to his financial dealings. His constant travel delayed his responses, leaving some of those with whom he did business as frustrated as his wife. Upon learning from the newspapers that Ballard was in New Orleans, one creditor wrote him, “Write … and make me happy in knowing that you are still in the land of the living.’”⁴⁶

Meanwhile, Louise’s concern for him never waned. For example, she chastised him in an 1848 letter for not taking better care of himself. “You are so often imprudent and [make] your self [sic] very sick,” she wrote.⁴⁷ Hoping mention of the children would make him more responsive, she told him that Ella, their eldest, repeatedly spoke of him, once stating, “Ma lets go down on the Plantation to see Father.” In the same letter, demonstrating her autonomy, she asked him to send a female slave to work as her nursemaid because of evident troubles with a white one:

Feeling empowered, Louise did not use a sentimental closing such as “Your wife” but instead curtly signed this letter, “Louise C. Ballard.” Her request made plain that no matter their suffering, mistresses helped maintain the racial hierarchy of antebellum America, both inside and outside slave society.⁴⁹ Because she was white and a woman, Louise believed she was entitled to some comfort at the expense of an enslaved woman, one who would probably be separated from her own child or children. Illustrative of such separations is the report by a black abolitionist of an enslaved man who fled to free territory with an eight-month-old child after seeing his wife presented as a “waiting-maid” to a young white mistress who did not want the “incumbrance” of her husband and baby.⁵⁰ The enslaved man was told to select another wife. Instead, he ran away, taking his child with him.

Many Southern white women indeed had some say over enslaved people’s lives, some acting angrily when African American women they suspected of being the bedmates of their male relatives, coerced or not, were concerned. One man left instructions that his bondswoman Delphine be set free upon his death.⁵¹ In an 1854 lawsuit initiated by Delphine, his wife refused to carry out this wish because Delphine was rumored to be carrying her owner’s child when he died.

If Louise expressed her suspicions about Ballard’s intimate ties to black women, freed or enslaved, in writing, Ballard failed to preserve them. Even if she did in conversation, she doubtless did not press the issue. As a married woman, she was protected financially, something she dared not risk losing. Also, to desert him would have left her socially stigmatized.⁵²

Not all white mistresses made peace with their husbands’ infidelities and other manifestations of the power imbalance in married life. In her position as a seasonal hairdresser to the wealthy visitors to the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, Eliza Potter observed that many white couples were emotionally distant from each other. She saw one who man “treated his wife … with the greatest attention before the eyes of others, but alone” never exchanged a word with her.⁵³ His wife, Potter said, eventually had an affair with a man in Paris. Others were more assertive. As early as 1687, when the Reverend James Blair asked “several times if she would obey her groom,” “the most powerful man” in Virginia until his death in 1743, Sarah Harrison, a white woman, reportedly said, “No obey.” The minister continued the ceremony without eliciting the expected response.⁵⁴

But most white women felt compelled to remain silent or record their suffering privately. The diary of the childless Mary Chesnut, a Charleston woman, is famously known for making clear the degree to which white plantation mistresses struggled to contain their anger at their husbands’ dalliances with female slaves.⁵⁵ Mixed-race enslaved women may have especially bothered Chesnut, who remarked on one in this bitter diary entry:

The girl Chesnut described may have been marketed as a fancy girl. Like the slave traders who made fancies seem larger than life in their letters and ledgers, Chesnut wrote “Mulatto,” with an uppercase M, indicating her awareness of the allure of a particular type of bondswoman. She was one who “overtopped the crowd” while ogling male buyers. For Chesnut, this enslaved woman was most disturbing because she appeared gratified by the attention to given to her. She was sure the girl was aware of white men’s desires and how to play on them to her advantage. Irritated by this behavior and by the clear evidence of race mixing, she recorded her frustration in her diary.

Writing about her woes in a diary was Chesnut’s way of resisting the “cult of the southern lady,” which demanded submission and restraint.⁵⁷ Nonetheless, other mistresses took more extreme measures, some selling bondswomen and girls when they threatened their authority.⁵⁸ Lucy Delany, one enslaved individual, was sold by her mistress for “getting too proud and putting on ‘white airs.’”⁵⁹ Another mistress sold an enslaved girl named Celestine specifically because her son liked to “play and fool about her.”⁶⁰ Raising children alone or overseeing the daily details of running one’s household was one thing. Condoning depraved behavior in one’s household or watching an enslaved girl’s haughtiness was something else entirely.

Sensing Louise’s angst, Ballard gave her permission to look for a bigger house in Louisville. But Louise told him that searching for another one would not be an “easy matter.”⁶¹ She did promise to call on a local realtor. Meanwhile, he continued to busy himself with other matters, mostly financial ones related to his planting interests. Characteristic of his business correspondence is a letter from J. T. F. Cox, manager of one of his Mississippi plantations, who in an April 1847 letter sought Ballard’s thoughts on how much he should plant. “I finished planting yesterday.… I planted fast,” Cox stated, not mentioning the obvious, that it was slaves who had done the planting.⁶²

At the time of this letter, Ballard was heading to Louisville. To further placate Louise, he brought china with him.⁶³ The cotton commission merchant who had facilitated the purchase wished Ballard a “safe and pleasant journey home.”⁶⁴ That the merchant referred to Louisville as Ballard’s “home” suggests that some of those around him regarded the place where his wife and children resided as his true residence even though he was frequently elsewhere.

* * *

From the moment they were purchased, Avenia White and Susan Johnson seemed to have had a place in Ballard’s life. White’s name is the very first listed on a schedule of 262 slaves he purchased in 1832. Johnson’s is third.⁶⁵ Ballard did not resell these women like he did other slaves. Their names do not appear among the 212 who were shipped from Virginia to the Deep South in 1832. Nor are they listed on his 1833 or 1834 shipment ledgers. Paternity may have been one of the reasons he was holding on to them.

Sandwiched between White’s and Johnson’s names on the 1832 slave schedule is that of a boy named Preston. This child was probably White’s son because his name appears directly below hers. Slave agents and traders noted relatives of slaves this way.⁶⁶ Preston’s name also appears in other places in Ballard’s records. An entry in his 1833 expense book shows $5.00 dollars were spent to buy “a suit of clothes” for this child. This was no small amount of money to be spending on a single boy, especially an enslaved one. Ballard also paid $1.50 for a pair of shoes for Preston.⁶⁷ While slave traders routinely purchased or had clothing sewn for slaves they planned to sell, these entries for Preston appeared on lists in which Ballard recorded the purchase of household goods, which is curious given that Preston was born before—exactly how long is unclear—Ballard bought him and his mother.

Preston appears to have fit into Ballard’s life in a special way, as did another male child. In Ballard’s book there is a scribble on a blank page that reads, “Susan Johnson was delivered a boy child 21 May 1833 4 o’clock in the morning.” No other births were recorded in this book, which suggests that this one was special, like Ballard’s relationship with his mother and Preston’s mother, who seems to have been the one to whom Ballard was most drawn. The 1840 U.S. Census lists White as being between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-six, which means, if her age was accurately reported, that she could have been born as early as 1804 and as late as 1816. The family of Nathaniel White, an agent who helped Ballard gather slaves in Virginia, was almost certainly Avenia White’s first owners.⁶⁸ Ballard likely met her while out gathering slaves. She may have been the woman for whom a boy was hired to bring her home.⁶⁹

Ballard’s records provide no clues about White’s physical features or those of Johnson. That these two women were possibly of mixed race is a reasonable conclusion in light of a proposal Isaac Franklin once made.⁷⁰ Franklin told Ballard to make “the Old Lady and Susan” earn their keep by running a brothel. He was almost certainly referring to Avenia White and Susan Johnson. Instead, Ballard left Virginia for Natchez in 1836, taking these two women and their children with him, probably on one of the ships Franklin owned.⁷¹ Leaving them with his kin or friends in Virginia would have been unthinkable given the hard times in the area. Few wanted extra mouths to feed, even ones that could cook and clean. With these enslaved people beside him, he made his gradual transition into planting.⁷²

After arriving in Natchez, White and Johnson and their children were not kept inside a “squatty frame building” where three roads met just east of the levee, like the other slaves. They escaped, too, being among the men dressed in navy blue suits with brass buttons and plug hats who “marched beside another … in a circle” for prospective buyers. They also escaped being among the women who were dressed in calico with white aprons, ones who had pink ribbons on their carefully braided hair.⁷³ Instead, they followed Ballard to a long two-story frame building where domestic slave traders stayed temporarily.⁷⁴ Once he had acquired a local residence they bided their time with him on a plantation near or in Natchez.

Sometime in summer 1838, Ballard transported White, Johnson, and the four children to Cincinnati. Black women and children for whom Southern white men had shown some measure of concern arrived in this city during a time when the country’s frontiers were pushing westward. They traveled by boat, first up the Mississippi and next the Ohio, sometimes sitting in a galley where passing scenery could be taken in as long as the weather permitted. Black men, enslaved or free, were also on board to work as waiters or servants who dashed ashore to gather wood for the ship’s boilers.⁷⁵ The women and children would have also spent time in Ballard’s stateroom during the journey. It was not an unusual practice for white men to have women of color in their rooms, though most were traveling with slave traders in the opposite direction, above all, to the market in New Orleans. The former enslaved man and boat worker William Wells Brown once noticed a trader who kept a particular bondsgirl beside him while his other slaves were stowed elsewhere. Brown remembered that the girl was “was not in chains”; she was beautiful and “had been on the boat but a short time before the attention of all the passengers, including the ladies, had been called to her.”⁷⁶ White and Johnson and their children possibly received similar attention and more.

Upon their arrival in Cincinnati, many local whites were doubtless unhappy to see them. From the city’s earliest days, white Cincinnatians, some of whom were from the South, tried to discourage black settlement.⁷⁷ The “black laws” passed as early as 1804 and mob attacks on blacks that began in 1829 confirm the prosperity found here was not intended to be shared with nonwhites, who did not make up even 5 percent of Cincinnati’s population at midcentury.⁷⁸ However, like other border communities in the United States well into the next century, Cincinnati had a different racial history from nonborder communities because of the ways in which black-white interactions unfolded, even with racist attitudes generally in view.⁷⁹

Freedwomen and their children’s ties with white men had been shaped by a bigoted and gendered system. That system sometimes buckled in Cincinnati because it was home to hundreds of mixed-race people, many of whom resembled their masters’ white children. These were the children no one in the antebellum South seemed to want to claim; they were those who seemed to “drop from the clouds,” as Mary Chesnut once lamented.⁸⁰ But following their manumission another drama began, one revealing that the children had not just dropped from the clouds. They and their mothers were people with long-established ties to Southern white America.

Ballard had not intended to marry either White or Johnson. Although it seems fairly certain he visited Cincinnati “on business” frequently and may have settled them there in order to remain in contact and to check on their well-being, even to maintain a sexual liaison with one or both of them, he probably hoped that they would start life anew without him even though doing so would be difficult. Before the Civil War, and prior to the formation of ghettoes, African Americans were by and large dispersed among Cincinnati’s white residents, including Irish and German immigrants.⁸¹ However, blacks still congregated in certain areas because of local racism. They could be found in an east end neighborhood or on the waterfront, called “Bucktown” and “Little Africa,” respectively, by their contemporaries.⁸²

The six people initially freed by Ballard lived in neither place but instead near the white-dominated central business district. So did other African American women, suggesting they had arrived under similar circumstances, which is to say, they were freedwomen and children who had earlier benefited from some level of intimacy with Southern white men. Indeed, by midcentury women of color headed a third of black households. Their average age was twenty-four.⁸³ Most of these women lived in the central business district, where one of two avenues of employment for women of color in their day could be found: domestic work. Those who pursued the other, prostitution, tended to live closer to the riverfront, where they could benefit from the presence of transient men.⁸⁴

Planning to pursue the former occupation—as Ballard expected them to earn money to supplement the funds he sent—White and Johnson lived some distance from the waterfront, on Elm between Fifth and Sixth Streets.⁸⁵ Frances Bruster, a black woman, held the mortgage on the house in which they lived.⁸⁶ Ballard had earlier made Bruster’s acquaintance in New Orleans, and he must have decided that her house would be a fitting residence for the six people he planned to free.⁸⁷ She agreed because she could benefit from his patronage.

However, possessing a bit of independence owing to her closeness to Ballard, White almost immediately wanted to leave Bruster’s house. In fact, she found another a house that would soon be vacant. It rented for $13 a month, vastly more affordable than boarding with Bruster, which cost about ten times that amount. There were many obstacles before them, however. All of this news was shared in White’s first letter to her former master. In it, she also shared other woes.

“Mr Ballard, Sir, I write you a few lines,” she began, before reporting that she, Johnson, and the children were in good health but “somewhat depressed in spirits.”⁸⁸ He had moved them to Cincinnati during the summer, an unfortunate time.⁸⁹ Regional droughts created problems for the city at this time of year, causing the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers to fall as low as eleven inches, so low that all but a few steamboats refrained from traveling.⁹⁰ This bottleneck caused serious disruptions to the movement of goods and people and wrought major damage to the city’s economy, which was dependent on waterborne commerce.⁹¹ He also relocated them during a time that was generally difficult across the country. The recession that had begun in 1837 was well under way.

FIGURE 6. Key sites in Cincinnati and environs, 1830-postbellum. Adapted from Map of Cincinnati & environs, J. T. Lewis, topi, engineer. Scale [ca. 1:10,560]. Cincinnati], O[hio]: Middleton, Wallace & Co., Lithrs, [between 1855–1859]; Original map held at Map Collection, University of Chicago Library; Henry Louis Taylor Jr. and Vicky Dula, “Black Residential Experience” in Henry Louis Taylor Jr., ed., in Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and Eliza Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1859 and 1991).

Because of the reduction in waterborne traffic, local businesses were reluctant to hire additional workers. With job prospects dim, White asked Ballard for monetary assistance. She did not state how much money or for how long. Having spent much time with him, she may have wanted to give him leeway to act in the manner in which he felt most comfortable.

If times were hard for a rich white man, they were harder for a poor black woman. As White announced in her letter, Bruster’s boardinghouse was not close to “business.” While she might have been referring to the riverfront where she and Johnson might pick up washing and ironing from hotels, it was an unsavory area. She more likely meant Bucktown, the center of Cincinnati’s black middle class on the city’s east end.⁹² Here, especially on McAlister Street, was a collection of black-owned homes and businesses.⁹³ By the end of the year, a brick house on McAlister near Fourth Street in the area was available and advertised as being “suitable for a small family.”⁹⁴ This house or something like it in this neighborhood would have been ideal. If taking in sewing or laundry from clients in this area, White and Johnson would not have had as much difficulty carrying a bundle of clothing while holding the hands of young children as they would have if walking to and from Bruster’s more distant home.

Ballard did not reply to White’s letter. Being a wealthy white man had made him the more mobile one. He could have been traveling when it arrived. If this was the case, his silence was unintentional. Then again, he may have simply balked at her complaints. He had already been generous in freeing them. Moreover, there was a more urgent matter before him: setting up a home in Louisville.

Undaunted, White sent him another letter, this one dated October 25, 1838: “Mr Ballard I am compelled to write you again.” She wrote that the river was still low. However, there was better news to report. She was now taking in sewing and laundry, presumably in order to be at home with the children while Johnson was working as a live-in domestic by the week. Their earnings were not, however, enough to meet their needs. They needed beds, she said. They also needed money to buy wood for fuel because the nights had grown cooler. Their funds were so limited, according to her, they had to borrow $8 from Bruster, who sent a hello. White, herself, sent “love.” She ended the letter with a postscript: “PS Harvey has been very sick. He is now recovering.”⁹⁵

Mention of Harvey—presumably one of Johnson’s children if we are to rely on the 1840 census, which lists White as having only one child—was done in a clever manner, at the end of her letter. Assuming the last idea mentioned is the one most remembered, putting Harvey’s name here was strategic. White was using the children to get Ballard’s attention.

FIGURE 7. Excerpt from freedwoman Avenia White’s October 25, 1838, letter to her former master Rice Ballard. Folder 25, Rice Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ballard did not respond to this letter either. She grew desperate. So did Bruster, who within a month of White’s second letter wrote Ballard. It is worth noting her penmanship resembles that of White’s two earlier letters and one White sent the following month, suggesting she had written White’s letter, which might account for their formal tone. In her letter, Bruster announced her own troubles. She said she lacked $300 to make the final payment on her mortgage and would be “under ten thousand obligations to” him and “anything that concerns” him if he would lend her $100. She asked him to send it in care of Calvin Fletcher, the local merchant and former Cincinnati councilman who acted as a liaison between Ballard and the women and Bruster.⁹⁶ If he did not, she said, the “children will be deprived of a home.” She ended her letter, “Avenia and the little boy are well[.] She has written you twice [,] once to Louisville. The last letter she directed to Natchez.”

FIGURE 8. Excerpt from a November 29, 1838, letter written by Frances M. Bruster, a Cincinnati African American woman, to Rice Ballard. Her penmanship resembles that in four letters from Avenia White, who resided for a time with her. Folder 25, Rice Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bruster herself surmised Ballard had missed their earlier letters owing to his travels and that no matter the power he had over black women like themselves, he cared. He had planned to remain in touch with at least White because he made it possible for her to contact him. She and Bruster had the addresses of both his Louisville and Natchez homes. A man who provides such information is a man who wants to be found.

Bruster was now capitalizing on Ballards evident sense of obligation to the women and children, especially White and the “little boy.” Her letter ultimately points to the extent to which some Southern white men were prepared to act on behalf of the women and children they had freed. They found them homes and even created opportunities for them to network with locals. In their case, they had a contact in Fletcher.⁹⁷ With this connection to Fletcher, White and Johnson’s network went beyond Cincinnati’s African American population. They were two degrees away from a white merchant and former politician. That he was all of these things further confirms Ballard’s intentions to secure a better future for the women and children.⁹⁸

There is no surviving evidence of Ballard’s reply to White’s or Bruster’s letters prior to this point. A more anxious letter, this one by White or her and Bruster, was addressed to him on December 30, 1838. In it she or they repeated the news that Harvey had been sick and added that Johnson was now ill. Cold weather was the likely cause. Upset about this and more, White told Ballard, “I am sorry to have to trouble you so much but my present necessities are so great at this time that I am compelled … to get Mr Fletcher to advance me ten dollars to get me some wood.”⁹⁹

Perhaps moved by her pleas, or ashamed of how Fletcher might regard his silence, Ballard finally replied. In a letter dated January 28, 1839, Fletcher acknowledged the receipt of $150 from Ballard, $50 of which was immediately delivered to White. Fletcher assured Ballard that “the wom[e]n and children appear to be getting along very comfortably.”¹⁰⁰ Grateful for his assistance, however much delayed, White sent her former master a letter of thanks on January 20, 1839. She noted that Harvey was “mending slowly” under a doctor’s care.¹⁰¹

White’s letters reveal as much as they hide about the six people on Elm Street for whom Ballard had ambivalent but ongoing feelings. These former bondspeople were obviously people he cared for, though he did so uneasily, as suggested by his asking Fletcher to verify the women’s status and Bruster’s need for $ioo.¹⁰²

White appears to have not written Ballard again for another year and a half, or perhaps there is a gap in his surviving correspondence. It is likely, though, that she did not have to write because Ballard periodically visited Cincinnati, allowing her to communicate with him in person.

On February 2, 1840, she sent him the final letter that he preserved. In it she announced that the house in which she and Johnson had lived, presumably the one Bruster had tried to pay off, had been sold.¹⁰³ This development was distressing, but something else bothered White even more. A local woman named Mary January was trying to destroy her reputation.¹⁰⁴ White maintained that she was “innocent of everything” that this woman had “so maliciously reported.” She went on to claim that January herself was the shameful one: “I never condesend [sic] to associate with a woman like Mary January’s character.”¹⁰⁵

January may have been a sex worker who accused White of being the same. Isaac Franklin had earlier suggested that Ballard employ her and Johnson in a brothel, and poverty may have driven White to desperate measures.¹⁰⁶ She was now in a more difficult situation, for she did not want to lose Ballard’s favor or financial support. She had to make sure he always believed the best about her own character. January threatened to destroy his faith in her.

January’s accusation fit into a longer list of worries for her, some related to Cincinnati’s proximity to Kentucky, a slave state. Such proximity carried the constant threat that catchers might kidnap and reenslave her, Johnson, or their children. Many white Northerners, some aided by black spies situated along the Ohio River, were eager to reenslave free people of color.¹⁰⁷ White’s anxiousness may have been compounded by her separation from Davy White, Carter White, Sally White, and Sam White, four enslaved individuals who were probably her relatives who were also purchased by Ballard in 1832. Ballard’s records show that these slaves and others whose last names were White were shipped south while she was kept behind in Richmond with Ballard.¹⁰⁸

There was also the issue of racial tension.¹⁰⁹ African Americans sensed the significance of Cincinnati’s position on America’s frontier, but perhaps only those like the widely traveled Eliza Potter, who once boasted about her desire to travel and see “the Western world,” truly appreciated the significance of the city’s geographic position, as had white Americans and Europeans.¹¹⁰ Among the other migrants hurrying to the city were Irish and German immigrants, their numbers increasing in the 1840s preceding and following revolutions in the latter and potato famine in the former.¹¹¹ Between 1840 and 1850 Cincinnati’s population increased from 46,338 to 115,434. It was third behind only New York and New Orleans in volume of commerce.¹¹² British visitors of note to the included Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, though the latter once complained that the so-called Queen of the West wanted for “domes, towers, and steeples.”¹¹³ While Trollope was concerned about aesthetics, African Americans like White had other worries. Though the Bucktown and Little Africa communities where local blacks congregated seemed isolated from one another and from black populations across the United States, they were in fact joined because of ongoing racial oppression. Black steamboat workers often brought local blacks news from enslaved relatives. Many such communications took place at the Dumas Hotel, which acted as a sort of black post office where information was exchanged between local African Americans and those in slave states.¹¹⁴

The racial hostility African Americans experienced here and nationally had long been nuanced by ethnic loyalties, a fact borne out by Cincinnati’s 1841 mob attack, which largely involved Irishmen who typically came from rural areas, thus bringing fewer skills to urban economies, unlike Germans, who often came from towns and arrived with marketable skills.¹¹⁵ White’s final surviving letter was written in 1841, just six months before this riot, which lasted for several days. Aside from an 1834 attack in Philadelphia, it was known as the “most violent and disgraceful” before the Civil War.¹¹⁶ Bruster, who now lived in Bucktown, doubtless saw the violence or its impact up close.¹¹⁷

Cincinnati was a haven of sorts for African Americans, but living there required resilience. Racism there, as elsewhere, was notorious, as one African American man from Baltimore insinuated in an 1833 letter to The Liberator, an abolitionist weekly:

White also had to contend with Cincinnati simply being very different from the rural environment to which she was accustomed.¹¹⁹ Pigs ran wild, eating waste that residents dumped into the middle of streets. The city had a poor drainage system that was overwhelmed when it rained, washing rubbish downhill from higher streets.¹²⁰ These drainage and debris issues so plagued the city by the late 1830s local leaders introduced proposals to clean it up.¹²¹ Like Louise, Ballard’s wife, White saw firsthand the crude behavior of urban dwellers who were learning to cope with others whose backgrounds were very different from their own.¹²² White men in particular could be so rowdy that a local racecourse built extra seating specifically for local white belles to “check immorality” in this setting.¹²³

African Americans as a whole faced other challenges in Cincinnati. Some had come from cities such as New Orleans that had a three-tiered social order: whites, free people of color, and slaves.¹²⁴ In Cincinnati the social order consisted of whites, people of mixed race, and dark-skinned blacks.¹²⁵ Whereas in the South those of mixed race often made economic inroads, taking some of the better jobs—because they had been given the chance to learn a trade while enslaved—in northern cities they and blacks were generally discriminated against by local whites. And while many blacks were able to unite on the basis of kinship bonds, such bonds, as White learned through her experience with Mary January, could never be assumed.¹²⁶

Her many worries were compounded by her realization that Ballard was getting married and probably needing every cent for his “white” family. Before she signed off in her final surviving letter, she wished him success, “and all the happiness in this world,” adding, “[If] you have forgotten me I hope you have not forgotten the children.” Then she wrote that he should write her in care of “Mr. Dennis Hill.” She ended her letter, “Your most humble [servant] A. White PS Elizabeth is well and going to school.”

This letter is significant for additional reasons. As had Virginia, the pregnant woman in the Houston “slave” jail (and Lucile, the enslaved woman in Bainbridge, Georgia), she used sentimental language to get Ballard’s attention.¹²⁷ She did as much while being both humble and confident. Indeed, as did his wife, White addressed her former master in a commanding way. She seemed to be reclaiming some part of herself that had been denied by men who had denigrated women like her even while demonstrating concern. To convince him that she was in fact an upright woman, she stated that she had conducted herself in a way that garnered the respect of others. In order to lend weight to her claims of respectability, she even invoked the name of someone whose prominence in Cincinnati’s black community marked him as a man of moral stature: Dennis Hill, a local black porter.¹²⁸ Though this was a relatively humble position in the larger society, a porter was among the most prestigious occupations open to African American men in mid-nineteenth-century America and made Hill a member of the city’s black middle class. White hostility had relegated African American men to menial labor and seasonal jobs. Just 10 percent of Cincinnati heads of black households worked in skilled positions by 1836.¹²⁹ Even those arriving from the South with skilled occupations like silversmithing were routinely forced into other work. But men who worked in service and domestic industries, like barbers, waiters, and porters, were often leaders in the African American community.¹³⁰

Hill was not merely a porter. During the 1830s, he was president of the Cincinnati Union Society of Colored Persons and thus part of the local abolitionist movement. That he provided a fixed address for White to receive letters was significant, for doing so put her and Johnson within his circle of association. Moreover, the handwriting in this letter is different from that of White’s earlier letters. Hill not only provided a fixed address, but he may have written it.¹³¹

That men like Ballard placed women like White in a city with political allies like Fletcher and Hill is significant. Though society dictated one behavior publicly, these men often did something else privately. They publicly consolidated their power while privately addressing the entreaties of women and children of color.¹³² Having spent considerable time with White and Johnson and their children, Ballard developed an interest in their future. White signaled as much in the postscript of her final surviving letter when she mentioned that Elizabeth, who was almost certainly one of Johnson’s three children, was in school. White understood, as most of those aspiring to a higher position did, that education was one of the routes to a better and more respectable life.

After this letter, White seems to disappear from surviving historical records. She is not listed in censuses or Cincinnati directories after 1840, suggesting she died, got married and assumed her husband’s surname, or returned to the South. Surviving records suggest all three scenarios are possible. After possibly passing as white, White may have been a once-married Virginia-born woman named Elizabeth A. Ward (who may sometimes have gone by the name Avenia Ward) noted by census takers who resided in Greene County, Ohio, in 1850, which was about fifty miles away.¹³³ Ward had four children who were all born in Ohio. Notably, she had no male head of household, and her marital status was left blank. Further, she had no apparent occupation, raising questions about the source of the $50—about $1,476 in today’s currency—that she possessed.¹³⁴ It is also interesting that Xenia, the city where in 1856 white abolitionists would open Wilberforce University for African Americans, is located in Greene County. Racially tolerant whites were evidently among this county’s residents, something Ward would have appreciated if discovered to be of African descent.¹³⁵

It is also possible that White returned to the South to live near Ballard. On May 19, 1852, R. F. Morgan, manager of a plantation in which Ballard had a financial interest, wrote him a letter announcing the death of a woman.¹³⁶ This news was at the beginning of the letter, suggesting its importance to Ballard, who asked to be kept informed of her condition because she had been ill for a while. Ballard’s plantation managers and overseers tended to begin their letters to him with news about the status of crops and the weather before moving on to information about the health and condition of his slaves. Morgan reported that the deceased had experienced “bloody flux which she was unprepared to stand.” The deceased woman may have been White because the first letter of her name began with a capital A; the next two letters are indistinct.

It is also worth noting that Ballard kept two curious receipts dated within a year of White’s final letter. One showed that he paid $5 for the “passage of Negro girl from N. Orleans” to Natchez.¹³⁷ The second showed that he paid $5 for another black woman to make the same trip five months later. This second receipt also lists $15 paid for himself and a servant. Given that a distinction was made in the second instance between the “Negro girl” and the “servant,” the “girl” was probably not a slave, and moreover, one who traveled regularly with him between New Orleans and Natchez.

This girl may have been White. There were other women whose ties to Southern white men were so strong that they returned to the South after having been freed and resettled. Levi Coffin recounted his dealings with a twenty-one-year-old woman of mixed race who had been freed by a white uncle and sent to Oberlin College in Ohio for schooling. She soon asked to be sent back to Louisiana. It appears she had been the mistress of a white New Orleans merchant who had given her dresses and jewelry. Her beau also sent money to Ohio, which distracted her further.¹³⁸ She eventually left for New Orleans and her benefactor. She was not unusual in pursuing a white man of wealth. Another who did this was Jacqueline Lemelle, who had a de facto marriage with a white man and who found a way to continue living with him in Louisiana even after being manumitted.¹³⁹ Lemelle’s daughter followed in her mother’s footsteps, entering into a relationship with a prominent white New Orleans man that lasted throughout her life. The relationship resulted in several children, one of whom lived as a white woman in Natchez.

If the “girl” in question was White, how long she remained with him in the lower South prior to her death is unknown. She may have returned alone, allowing her son to remain in Ohio where he could be educated. Such an act appears to buttress the Southern defense of slavery as a superior system because slaves seemed to live more securely in the South than wage earners in the North. But this logic is shortsighted because of the fragile nature and highly variable definition of “freedom.” White may have felt more “free” in a place where she could secure financial support for herself and her child. She reveals the ways in which freedom was never a “philosophical absolute” but rather something that was “locally and ideologically conceived,” a position that Harriet Jacobs also took.¹⁴⁰ Though their experiences were vastly different—Jacobs fled from her master who both subjected her to sexual harassment and prevented her from marrying the African American man she loved and hid for several years in her grandmother’s attic before escaping from the South—both women realized that “freedom” can encompass far more than the narrow range of civil liberties generally associated with the word. Jacobs could see her children and look out a window, hoping for a better day.

Even in the face of escalating laws preventing their settlement, numerous freedpeople chose to live in the lower South where enslaved or free relatives and others—including white men—could reside with or near them. As Emily West has written, in the years leading up to the Civil War some women successfully petitioned to reenslave themselves or to live in the South.¹⁴¹ One-fifth of the ninety-eight reenslavement requests that she studied can be linked to single free women who were apparently involved in intimate relations with white men, since other motives for voluntary enslavement, among them, love of spouse or family, poverty or debt, were not mentioned in their petitions. These petitions affirm the degree to which Southern white men were hidden, sometimes not so hidden, actors in the efforts of such women, even those who never left slave territory, to enhance the quality of their lives.¹⁴² In fact, during the 1850s when the passage of residency and enslavement laws intensified in the South, both “black women and white men used complex negotiations under new laws in an effort to achieve their economic and possibly emotional aims.”¹⁴³

While speculating on White’s fate, we should not lose sight of Ballard’s behavior. Whether or not the woman to whom Morgan referred was White, the facts of the matter are (1) Ballard obviously requested that he be kept apprised of her health, and it was of such importance to him that Morgan opened his letter with the news; and (2) even if she was not White, she was a black woman about whom he cared a great deal and not his wife. In short, although “Avenia White” disappears from the record, Ballard does not seem to have altered his behavior, suggesting his ongoing distraction by her or someone else. He never regularly spent time in his Louisville home. As late as 1857, three years before his death, he was still frequently visiting the Deep South. That year W. A. Ellis, a Louisville pork merchant, asked him to return to Louisville because Louise was associating with a questionable crowd. In a letter of March 1, 1857, Ellis wrote, “Your dear children I feel for very much.… [T]he older they get the worse it is for them as they are more liable to be injured by the wickedness of an unnatural Mother.”¹⁴⁴ Two months later, Ellis wrote Ballard again, saying, “I fully believe if you will come up soon … the influences can be broken off and much good done.”¹⁴⁵

Ballard’s absences had an impact on his daughters as well as his wife. Ella, his eldest, once blamed his constant travel for his not receiving her letters in a timely manner. “You think because you don’t receive them I don’t write to you,” Ella stated.¹⁴⁶ Still, like her mother, Ella was concerned about her father and once commented on his health: “Pa, you are getting old and you ought to take more care … of yourself for if you get sick down there, there would not be any person to nurse you.”¹⁴⁷

Ballard at last was himself concerned about his health. At the time of his death he had in his possession an 1857 advertisement for a Tennessee resort owned by John Armfield.¹⁴⁸ This resort sat atop Cumberland Mountain near a spring with alleged health-restoring properties.¹⁴⁹ Ballard explored homeopathic cures, too, for an unnamed illness. He also searched for a physician to work at his Louisiana property where he was apparently residing in mid-1858.¹⁵⁰ Yet he died in Louisville on August 31, 1860, in his early sixties.¹⁵¹ In their study of southern life before the Civil War, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese stress that both faults and virtues figured into what it meant to be southern, particularly the southern gentleman who used classical and Christian concepts like duty, fame, honor, courage and dignity but also frankness and pride to define himself.¹⁵² There is little in Ballard’s papers to suggest that he ever obsessed over such things, although he may have indeed been proud of some of his accomplishments.¹⁵³ His social standing had decidedly improved as he aged, as suggested by a $3,227 financial gift he made in 1848 to a Natchez orphanage.¹⁵⁴ News of this donation was reported in local newspapers.¹⁵⁵ One of the articles described a portrait painted in his honor for the donation. His eyes were said to be “pleasant, intelligent, and mirror[ing] a great force of character.” Unbothered by such attention, he reportedly agreed to sit for the portrait only when he learned the artist was someone he regarded as an “intimate friend.”¹⁵⁶ Although wary of others, he clearly managed to make an impression. When it was erroneously reported that he had died in a river accident, the writer of yet another news article reported that he was “truly pleased” to learn it was only rumor.¹⁵⁷

FIGURE 9. Advertisement for Tennessee resort owned by John Armfield, Rice Ballard’s former domestic slave trading partner. Perhaps owing to health issues, Ballard retreated here shortly before his death in 1860. Folder 411, Rice Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Louise remarried in 1863. Her new husband, James Purdy, a New York lawyer, was twenty-three, twenty years her junior. Doubtless at his instigation, he and Louise sued the federal government for $52,000 for losses incurred by the removal of cotton from one of Ballard’s Louisiana plantations during the Civil War.¹⁵⁸ They must have been successful with this suit and other efforts, as Purdy’s estate was worth $200,000 seven years later.¹⁵⁹ But either Purdy died or the marriage was short-lived, because Louise was listed sixteen years later as Ballard’s widow in a Louisville directory.¹⁶⁰ But some portion, however small, of her husband’s wealth had been shared with at least two black women and four children. And this was not unique, as the next chapter reveals.