1 /  Probing a Planter’s Hidden Life

For much of his adult life, Rice Ballard occupied the highest rung of the Southern social ladder. As a planter, he was an aristocrat, although a curious one.¹ The oft-told tale of the planter depicts a patriarch, settled in one place, presiding over family and workers. Ballard, by contrast, was frequently on the move. “In any one [city] we cannot [e]specially place him,” a newsman wrote in 1848 about his wanderings.² The newsman was not alone in noting Ballard’s unusual ways. Bacon Tait, a domestic slave trader in Ballard’s native Virginia, noticed them as well and even hinted that someone else might be responsible for his movements.³ “Tell me[,] Ballard[,] is there not some bewitching creature about Louisville or Cincinnati … if there is, I congratulate you,” Tait once wrote in a letter.⁴

The social mores of the day dictated that Tait leave it there. Few commented on the improprieties of the powerful.⁵ He had only recently become a slave trader, a lowly position in the Southern social hierarchy. By the late 1830s, he was a powerful planter, although one who evidently made periodic trips to Cincinnati.⁶ There he had established ties with Calvin Fletcher, a merchant and former city councilman who served as a go-between between him and two newly freed black women and their four children.⁷ Fletcher doubtless met Ballard through his dealings with a New Orleans mercantile company briefly owned by Ballard’s brother.⁸ Certainly Fletcher could often be found in his counting room, surveying returns from his New Orleans shippers.⁹ A cousin in Indianapolis, also named Calvin Fletcher, thought well of the conscientious Fletcher, who once returned some books mistakenly mailed to Cincinnati.¹⁰ In such an individual Ballard found someone who might be trusted as he set out to free six enslaved people.

What would make a man who owned hundreds of other slaves consider freeing these six? What do his actions tell us about his and others’ ability to form emotional connections that challenged the prevailing ideologies of the day? How did he enhance in big and small ways the lives of enslaved black women and children?

Though men like him in the opening decades of the nineteenth century often thirsted for power and position, their quests were sometimes accompanied by a sense of duty and moral obligation to others. Financial gifts to them were especially likely if such arrangements were quietly done and did not involve enormous inheritances or the transfer of slaves, although evidence suggests some white men defied convention on both counts.¹¹

Nathaniel Harrison, an unmarried white man living in Amelia County, Virginia, died in 1852, leaving land to three women of color. The land amounted to some twenty-five hundred acres, plus livestock, crops, perishables, and eighty-four bondspeople. One of the women also received an annual $600 annuity for life and the other two, $250 annual annuities. Harrison’s household furniture was also divided between these women. And he made provisions for them should they be required to leave the state. The disposal of the estate took place against the wishes of Harrison’s white kin.¹²

Among other women and children who benefited from white men’s emotional and financial investments was Julia Chinn, a black “housekeeper” who had two daughters with the Kentucky statesman Richard Johnson, a leading personality in the Democratic Party and an agricultural reformer during the 1820s and 1830s. Johnson faced public scorn for his open acknowledgment of his children with Julia. We may also consider Mary Lumpkin, the fair-skinned “widow” of Robert Lumpkin, a Richmond domestic slave trader who owned a jail for enslaved African Americans destined for the Deep South. Lumpkin sent the children he had with Mary to Philadelphia to be schooled. Two of their daughters attended finishing school, and both learned French as a second language. Following his death, Mary decided to rent the half-acre complex on which Lumpkin’s jail stood to a white antislavery activist, who built a Christian school for freed African Americans. There are also the cases of Bess, a slave owned by a widowed French Huguenot who, upon his death, left her some of his property; and Doll, a black woman who dined with a white family while sitting beside Shoe Boots, a great Cherokee warrior who was her husband. Finally, Fanny, “a mulatto woman of considerable wealth,” left Cincinnati in 1845 successfully to reclaim a house in Mississippi that was illegally snatched from her, and did so with the assistance of a white man who was in all likelihood her lover.¹³

Of those just listed, Fanny points to a particular phenomenon. She was among the black women whose proximity to white men resulted in her migration to Cincinnati, a city where such men were hidden actors in the lives of many freed women and children. The interactions between them must be understood in the context of larger patterns of change. The first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed white men taking full advantage of their predecessors’ successful fight for independence from the British crown. In doing so, revolutionary leaders claimed the right to live as they wished, free from governmental interference. Though the most intellectual among them spoke of granting this right to everyone, entangled in their ideas was the plan to tell others what and what not to do.

Their ideas held back blacks, women, and even poor white men until Andrew Jacksons appeals on their behalf.¹⁴ Yet some nonwhites quietly enjoyed certain liberties. One such group was people of African descent, namely, enslaved women and the children they produced with white men. Their special position had long been in view, leaving many troubled.

Another such woman was Kate, who, along with another black female slave, informed a South Carolina community about a planned slave revolt in 1749. The announcement of course upset colonial authorities. The white man who subsequently tried to ensure Kate’s personal safety was alleged to have cared for her more than “his own Wife and Children.”¹⁵ Perhaps outraged by such behavior, or because he had not been wise enough to avoid it becoming public knowledge, the authorities took action. Kate appears to have been banished from the community for she does not appear in subsequent Carolina slave inventories. While we are able to see the ways in which Kate both resisted and accommodated the expectations of those around her, whether black or white, her account invites a deeper examination of black women’s emotional exchanges with white men, a phenomenon that one historian regards as “unusual.”¹⁶ They may indeed have been unusual. But more likely they were simply hushed.

Such intimacy has a long history. When chattel slavery replaced indentured servitude as a source of labor in the late seventeenth century, leading to whites and blacks working side by side, laws forbidding interracial unions were quickly enacted.¹⁷ Still, interracial relationships and intimacies continued to occur and, equally worrying to lawmakers and moral policemen, sometimes allowed African American women to obtain a publicly visible level of privilege or favor, usually in the form of being manumitted and inheriting property from their former owners. The political repercussions of their relationships were seen.

That such transactions were hushed should be unsurprising given the long history of stigmatization of “irregular” sexual unions, prostitution, and interracial liaisons, coupled with the increasing surveillance of all such activities in the early modern era but also the growing awareness of one’s self-image. During the seventeenth century, scrutiny of individual behavior in England and its American colonies increased, driven often by puritanical concerns about the morality and stability of the family.¹⁸ The policing of personal behavior, especially that of women and girls, was also a consequence of traditionalist, patriarchal concerns over controlling sexual activity in the face of a rapidly growing commercial sector, especially in the maritime realm, which almost inevitably fostered “irregular” liaisons, above all, prostitution.¹⁹ Worse still for the moral guardians of English society was the persistence of interracial sex, or miscegenation, as they preferred to call it, in the American colonies. In the earliest days of English settlement in North America and the Caribbean, interracial liaisons, whether between white men and Amerindians or Africans, was a predictable consequence of the scarcity of European women.²⁰ Yet even after the redressing of that imbalance everywhere north of South Carolina by the end of the seventeenth century, women of color continued to be valued both as white men’s companions and for their reproductive abilities, and interracial unions remained common. As long as such relationships were not flaunted, they were usually tolerated in late colonial and early national America.

The development of “race” as a governing tool in the late Enlightenment period complicated such unions and, and in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, pushed them into the purely private realm. As “whiteness” became a way for an individual to enhance his or her social and economic position, those who were deemed not “white” suffered, and “whites” who persisted in publicly consorting with “non-whites” paid the price in social stigmatization.²¹ White men’s growing criticism of interracial relationships figured into strained attempts to build a sense of white Herrenvolk.²² It was claimed that white “race,” or family, could never be pure if black and white unions continued. If they did, they were hushed as the consolidation of white male power was made more visible by the 1830s following the Nat Turner rebellion and the removal of indigenous people to the West in that decade. During this period, one could see white men’s frenzied bid for power and wealth in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, states in America’s then-southwestern frontier.²³ The wealth accruing there was of the sort white men were unwilling to lose because of a favored enslaved woman, one often regarded more as a sexual partner than a mother, which ran counter to accepted notions of white womanhood. A thriving domestic slave market points to, among other things, growing demand for fairskinned women who were believed to have been “unfit for labor” and even “incapable of mothering.”²⁴ They were perceived as being the counterparts to the often larger and darker-skinned female slaves. Though they were purchased for pleasure, and not breeding, some men quietly developed emotional attachments for such mixed-race women and, if they became mothers, their children. Such attachments were sometimes welcomed by families of African descent in and outside the American South. In 1814, an American visiting Barbados remarked that upon seeing the obvious benefits of being tied to white men’s capital, some black parents raised their female children expressly to be white men’s “kept mistresses” rather than lawfully wedded to men of African descent.²⁵ In Southern port cities such as New Orleans and Charleston that had large Caribbean, continental European, and free people of color populations, many parents of African ancestry welcomed white men’s solicitation of young women of color as a means of ensuring their daughters’ future financial security. Such mixed-race free women of color became placees, or common-law wives, of white and Creole men.²⁶

Interracial relationships between white men and mixed-race women were so pervasive in New Orleans in the early 1800s that visitors frequently commented on them. Among them was a traveler who saw a white man and a “bright quadroon woman” riding through town together.²⁷ That this couple was seen together was not as remarkable as where they were seen. In cities one could find women who were not only sex partners, but sex workers. The presence of either kind of woman, especially when of African descent, disrupted the social order in distinct ways. Goods and certain services were supposed to be for sale but not sex. White women were supposed to exchange sex for financial security and subsistence under the terms of marriage but not unmarried women, especially enslaved or free blacks.

The arrival of race as a social construction in the modern world made such conflict especially visible in an increasingly urban society. People could generally move with greater anonymity within cities than was possible in rural communities, where individuals knew one another. As the number and size of cities in America increased, the cloak of urban anonymity grew. Still, the scrutiny of the white man and quadroon woman demonstrates the increased monitoring of black and white bodies, a practice that by 1800 dated back more than a century but had now acquired new intensity. At this time the rising cotton planter class also began to craft a unifying ideology that privileged all whites as a means of forming a bond between poor and wealthy whites.²⁸ Poor white women socialized freely with free black women, with whom they competed for jobs. All this occurred as black women, free or enslaved, were increasingly seen as being sexually degraded.²⁹ Such a categorization had more pronounced implications for black women in urban spaces through which men traveled for both business and leisure. There, those who chose to could easily purchase and form relationships or have sex with women and girls of African descent known as fancy girls.

The term fancy girl existed as far back as Renaissance Tuscany, where it was applied to Eastern European women. Its growing usage in the United States during the early nineteenth century occurred amid the growth of the domestic slave trade and was tied to the sexual exploitation of female servants, a practice carried over from the Old World. As early as 1819, “fancy girl” was a vulgarism for a man’s sexual partner.³⁰ The allure of such a bondswoman or bondsgirl, who was often of mixed race, was also a result of the near-universal image of African women as sexual and promiscuous creatures. The latter was ironic, given the association of the color white with purity and virginity.³¹

Such women and even girls were found in most American cities but were common in Southern ones. Though scholars have not made much of it, the growth in the number of male slaveholders who could afford a fancy girl was directly tied to the wealth being amassed in the rising Cotton Kingdom. Men whether divorced, widowed, married, unmarried, or with no plans to marry engaged in sex with prostitutes or women purchased to be their live-in mates. One Louisville slaveholder owned a large plantation where he kept “vigorous young mulatto girls” to breed other girls who would some day become such mates.³² The market for young biracial girls was something of which their nonwhite relatives were aware. The granddaughters of Shoe Boots, a cherished member of the Cherokee Nation, and his enslaved black wife, Doll, were once kidnapped and about to be shipped to New Orleans, possibly to be sold as fancy girls, before being saved by their Cherokee relatives.³³ The demand for such girls was also not lost on the Cincinnati abolitionist Levi Coffin, who once helped rescue two fair-skinned girls “either of whom would soon be worth one thousand dollars” by dressing them in boys’ clothing. Amused at having duped their master, Coffin recalled how they laughed and giggled so much at the fuss they had created for white folks that his wife had to separate them lest they be discovered.³⁴

Enslaved women and girls purchased as mates were recognizable to those around them, even other enslaved people.³⁵ A former slave from Tennessee noted that white men “will buy a sprightly, good-looking girl that they think will suit their fancy, and make use of them.”³⁶ This man noted the oppression such a girl faced. However, his commentary is also a riff on the term fancy girl, which continues to have a poetic timbre. Fancy girls are the quintessential tragic “mulattoes” of fiction.³⁷

However, the contemporaries of women and girls sold as sex workers or sex partners easily recognized the fancy brand even while expressing shock that it existed. Like domestic traders, casual observers often focused on her appearance, her cultivated manner, and her breeding, all of which shaped her as an “other” both in and outside slave society. A Chicago Times correspondent visiting a Memphis slave market, for instance, described “fancies” wearing beautiful dresses made of fashionable light wool.³⁸ Confirming that these were no ordinary slaves, the writer noted that “the merely curious visitor was not allowed to inspect these slaves who were locked up at night.”³⁹

The domestic slave trader Lewis Robards sold such bondswomen and bondsgirls in Lexington, Kentucky. While “ordinary” bondspeople were housed in a Lexington theater, where they were forced to walk across the stage in front of potential purchasers, fancy girls were kept in well-furnished parlors on the second floor of a two-story brick townhouse. When a prospective buyer arrived, Robards first served him a drink before taking him upstairs.⁴⁰ Robards’s fancies were “the talk and toast of steamboat barrooms, tipling houses and taverns,” some as far away as New Orleans. Over the mint julep, planter’s punch, and other “potent beverages,” men exchanged stories about their “inspections” of Robards’s fancies.⁴¹

Illinois senator Orville H. Browning visited Robards’s establishment and reported seeing enslaved women who were kept in rooms that were “not only comfortable, but in many respects luxurious.” During Browning’s visit, Robards made the women get up and turn around to show their “finely developed and graceful forms.” Browning was stunned that these slaves were “fine persons [with] easy genteel manners.” They sat with “their needlework awaiting a purchaser,” which he claimed to have found “shocking,” possibly because he thought people of African origins could not have the comportment of the white elite.⁴² Demonstrating that whites were hardly in agreement concerning women and girls of African descent, some prospective purchasers deliberately sought educated and cultured fancies and sometimes did so without relying on the services of domestic slave traders.⁴³ One prospective slaveholder in Washington, DC, posted advertisements seeking “a handsome, intelligent mulatto; a good plain cook, waitress, seamstress and laundress, about 17 or 18 years old.”⁴⁴ Like slave traders, prospective buyers exaggerated the need for housekeeping abilities in the girl or woman for whom such tasks would become a secondary matter, as the emphasis on appearance and youth made unmistakably clear. Yet no matter how refined and educated some of these girls and women were or appeared to be, they were generally considered vulgar creatures. Desire for women of African descent was so intertwined with slavery as a social institution that sex with black or mixed-race women became an essential part of the trade in human beings.⁴⁵

FIGURE 1. Jesse L. Berch, Quartermaster Sergeant, and Frank M. Rockwell, two members of the 22nd Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment, with enslaved eighteen-year-old “mulatto” woman rescued from a Lexington, Kentucky, brothel. They took her to Wisconsin but not before stopping to have a daguerreotype made of themselves posing on either side of her. (Photo G98S-CWP, Courtesy of U.S. Army Military Institute)

Understanding the full range of experiences of these women and girls has been hampered by lack of evidence. There was no column on the U.S. Census form to track how many enslaved women and girls were sold as fancies. Because most slaveholders did not want to leave evidence of delicate matters, when the fancy girl turns up in the historical record, she does so principally in domestic slave traders’ records, ledgers, and correspondence.

The papers left behind by Ballard demonstrate as much. Ballard was in the right place at the right time in 1831. The surplus of slave labor in the upper South, the legal closure of the international slave trade in 1808, and the rising Cotton Kingdom created the perfect conditions for a domestic slave trade. By 1833 Ballard had partnered with Isaac Franklin and Franklin’s nephews James Franklin and John Armfield. Isaac and James in New Orleans and Natchez sold slaves gathered in Virginia by Ballard and Armfield. They took in more than $400,000 in the first year of their partnership.⁴⁶ Indicative of their ambitions was the advertisement they placed in one Alexandria newspaper promising to pay higher prices than any other firm.⁴⁷ The elder Franklin eventually revamped the costly and time-consuming system of walking slaves in coffles overland and purchased as many as three brigs, including one he immodestly named Isaac Franklin.⁴⁸ By removing the middleman—a ship’s owner—he, his nephews, and Ballard made bigger profits.⁴⁹

The four men regularly corresponded about their sales. Some of their letters also contained details about their sexual relations with the women they were attempting to unload, among them, ones who would be marketed as fancy girls. James once described his plans for an enslaved woman he called “fancy maid Martha.”⁵⁰ “I shall open my fancy stock of Wool and Ivory early in the morning,” he wrote, describing his desire for sex with Martha. That Martha was a woman of African descent was discernible in his reference to ivory, a term that conjured up a trader’s inspection of a slave’s teeth and the continent itself. Martha’s blackness was also clear in his mention of wool, which referred to the woolly quality of African hair. Her blackness was evident, too, in his use of the word maid, an occupation typically associated with African Americans. Martha’s standing as a first-class slave was nonetheless evident, for James invoked the word fancy and wrote “fancy maid Martha” considerably larger than the other words in his letter.⁵¹

That these bondswomen were regarded as more desirable than the average slave was a widely held belief traders found very useful. Isaac once proudly described the sale of a woman he called “Yellow Girl Charlott.” This slave had been purchased from “some Branch of the Barber [Barbour] family,” he said, adding that “the respectability of that family will have great effect” on her sale.⁵² In mentioning the Barbours, Franklin confirmed that an owner’s social prestige could be mapped onto the body of bondswomen.⁵³

Ballard himself kept records of every man, woman, or child he bought. He also regularly recorded payments for the transport of women to his home. In one case, he paid $6 to a “boy for bringing home woman.”⁵⁴ It is unknown who these women were, although it is not hard to guess their race. Given that proper white women did not travel unaccompanied by a male relative, they were likely enslaved women he had hired to do housekeeping, maybe more, as he was not in a hurry to get married.

The descendant of Englishmen who initially settled in coastal Virginia before relocating to hilly Spotsylvania County, and in some cases, later to Kentucky, Ballard was driven.⁵⁵ The prolonged agricultural slump in Virginia required as much. While the state’s economy had been largely built on tobacco, overcultivation had led to soil depletion and dwindling yields.⁵⁶ By the early nineteenth century, planters and farmers frequently freed their bondspeople because they could no longer feed, house, and clothe them. Others, in keeping with the rise of humanitarianism, did the same on moral grounds.⁵⁷ Still others, like Ballard, saw opportunity and profit in the traffic in human lives.

FIGURE 2. Excerpt from the Virginia domestic slave trader Philip Thomas’s July 1859 letter to fellow trader William Finney discussing “fancy girls.” (Courtesy of William A. J. Finney Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University)

As early as 1832, while still in Virginia, Ballard was exploring the possibility of becoming a planter in the lower South. That year, he received a letter from William Hewes, a New Orleans agent. Hewes mentioned that the relatives of the former owners of an estate were certain that Ballard would “on examination, be pleased” with the property, located in the Louisiana parish of Terrebonne.⁵⁸ The plantation comprised 4,014 acres, of which 800 to 1,000 acres were already cleared. A railroad would soon pass within five miles of the property, and the tracks would cross over a canal on the property, which had a bayou on either side. The advantages of waterways and the railroad were obvious. The buyer was assured of having easy access by land and water that would aid him in getting sugar or his crop of choice to New Orleans, about seventy miles away.

No surviving evidence suggests that Ballard purchased the Terrebonne plantation. But in March 1836, while still residing in Virginia, he began shipping cotton grown in Mississippi to Liverpool and Manchester, and by fall of that year, he was living instead in Natchez.⁵⁹ Those foreign sales, his time in Richmond, and his travel to New Orleans expanded his world and allowed him to move beyond being a mere domestic slave trader, a profession upon which elite Southerners frowned. The open selling of slaves in auction facilities and their long-distance overland trek in coffles contradicted the benevolent image of the South that the elite sought to project.⁶⁰ White aristocrats also generally thought traders were lacking in education and ill bred. The experiences of a British geologist who visited the United States in 1834 illustrate this point. He shared a stagecoach with another man who used the foulest language and appeared to the visitor as “a compound of everything vulgar and revolting.”⁶¹ After the passenger stepped down from the stagecoach, the Englishman asked the driver for his name and was told that he was John Armfield, Isaac Franklin’s nephew.

If birds of a feather flock together, Ballard may have been no different from Armfield. When some of his cotton was once left to rot by the side of a river, Ballard was furious and told a plantation manager—a woman—as much. Catherine Prince apologized but also let Ballard know how much his admonishment had hurt her. “Mr Ballard,” she wrote. “I could not blame your plain language.… [I]t alarmed and distressed me much.”⁶²

Ballard’s directness was applied in his dealings as a planter. The move to Natchez was advantageous. There he could pare down his interests in slave trading while making a go of it as a planter like Isaac Franklin, who had begun his own transition into planting.⁶³ Ballard eventually had an interest in properties in Warren, Claiborne, Adams, and Madison Counties, most of them near the Mississippi River to allow for easier shipment of his cotton.⁶⁴ His widening social circle included John Anthony Quitman, governor of Mississippi, and the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay, whom he doubtless met through Samuel Boyd, a Mississippi judge with whom he entered into a partnership to purchase plantations.⁶⁵

But being a proper planter required a man to have a wife. Prospective brides in his native Virginia knew as much. In spring 1838, Bacon Tait told Ballard about several women in Virginia who were still pining for him, although some had stopped waiting. “Miss Mary Matter was married about ten days ago to Mr. Elijah Baker,” Tait reported.⁶⁶ Seeing his options declining, Ballard sent greetings via Tate to another woman, evidently also named Mary. “You desire that your respects be made,” an amused Tait replied, adding, “Are you ignorant of the fact that on the 10th last month Miss Mary took unto herself a husband named Mr[.] John Priddy? So no more of Miss Mary.”⁶⁷

Isaac Franklin had more success.⁶⁸ Demonstrating how affluence trumped his own seedy past as a domestic slave trader, in spring 1839, at the mature age of fifty, Franklin married Adelicia Hayes. A graduate of the Nashville Female Academy and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Oliver B. Hayes, Hayes was a catch.⁶⁹ Suggesting the social significance of their marriage, the wedding was announced in two Nashville newspapers.⁷⁰

Franklin himself settled into the life of an aristocrat, though one who also traveled frequently, in his case between plantations in Louisiana and his famed Fairvue plantation in Gallatin, Tennessee.⁷¹ Before his death in 1846, he took to a Louisiana dance floor to join his daughter Laura at one of her polka dance lessons. He shared this in a letter to his father-in-law, who longed for a visit from him. But Franklin could not travel at that moment. “Ade[licia],” he said, “will not hear of it.”⁷²

Adelicia obviously had some measure of control over him that contradicts the image of Southern white women as docile. Either that or Franklin was not telling the truth. He had lied about other things. In August 1839, two months after he married Adelicia, a Gallatin slaveholder named Jesse Cage asked William Cotton, a farmer in eastern Kentucky, to keep an enslaved woman owned by Franklin named Lucindy and her child until further notice.⁷³ Cage stated the girl had to be removed from Fairvue because Franklin had just married “a very pretty and highly accomplished young girl.”

With Cage’s assistance, Franklin evidently concocted a story about Lucindy’s past. Cage told Cotton that if he was questioned, he should say that Franklin hired someone to deliver her and the child to Cotton because she had not been sold, presumably in New Orleans or Natchez:

Cages letter illustrates that as the century matured, Southern white men went to great lengths to hide their relations with enslaved women of color. Lucindy was probably one of several bondswomen of mixed race that his Gallatin neighbors reported seeing on his Fairvue property prior to his marriage.⁷⁵ More to the point, Franklin’s eagerness to get her and her child safely out of his wife’s sight strongly suggests that the child’s paternity was so evident that Adelicia would have no difficulty recognizing that it was the result of relations between Isaac and Lucindy.

While being prostituted in Louisville, a port town through which many men traveled, may have been in the cards for Lucindy, it is more likely that another scenario was imminent. Franklin possibly planned to relocate her and the child. Franklin’s mention of a “stage,” or stage-coach, and Louisville suggests she and the child would eventually travel by that means to Louisville, a city from which one could easily continue via steamboat to the lower South or numerous points north and west, including Cincinnati. No matter her destination and that of her child, their experience was unfortunate. Interviews with former bondspeople conducted between 1936 and 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration project contain numerous accounts of others like her who had sex willingly or forcibly with their white masters. Scholars used these interviews cautiously because whites predisposed to racial prejudice often conducted them. However, some interviewees unflinchingly recorded the trauma endured by enslaved women and girls, among them ones of mixed race. One former slave from Kentucky recalled “a light colored gal [who was] tied to the rafters of a barn.… [H]er master whipped her until blood ran down her back and made a large pool on the ground.” Mary A. Bell, a former slave from St. Louis who was of “very light complexion” and had “very long and straight” hair, said the two people to whom she was hired out were not nice to her.⁷⁶

Lucindy, too, had not escaped suffering, but her relocation suggests she may have also received some measure of favor, the sort that owed to earlier intimacy between her and Franklin. Lucindy may have been one of the numerous unmarried women of color named Lucinda residing in Cincinnati from 1860 to the end of the nineteenth century.⁷⁷ That all of them, including those of mixed race, were unmarried domestic workers and not wealthy kept women reveals the limits of white men’s generosity. Some bondswomen could certainly find themselves alone and vulnerable like Cynthia, a woman observed by the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist, author, and former enslaved man, William Wells Brown. While being hired out by his master to work on a riverboat, Brown witnessed a slave trader placing her in his stateroom. The trader promised Cynthia that he would take her back to her St. Louis home if she would give in to his “vile proposals.” She did, and he took her back, only later to sell her.⁷⁸

A pregnant woman named Virginia who once wrote Ballard from a Houston slave “jail” met a similar fate. She appealed to him for help in preventing her sale and that of her two children.⁷⁹ Evidently her proximity to powerful white men had given her considerable courage. Unafraid, she denounced the unnamed man who was trying to sell her and his own children. In fact, revealing her own sense of worth even in this dire situation, she asked Ballard the following:

Her letter uncovers many things, among them, her boldness in announcing the father of her children in the private space of a letter addressed to a man who himself had almost certainly fathered half-black children. She thus uncovers sexual relations that routinely happened, even if they were rarely discussed, between enslaved women and white men in the plantation South. Her letter also reveals that her oppressor was someone Ballard knew, probably Mississippi judge Samuel S. Boyd. “My god[,] is it possible that any free born American would hand his [character] with such a stigma as that … to sell his child that is his image,” Virginia wrote about her tormentor, whom she called “the Old Man.”⁸¹

Virginia blamed a gossipy “rascal” woman, perhaps another slave, who had indeed shared some of Ballard’s potentially damaging secrets, for her plight. Admitting that she herself had willfully participated in this conversation, Virginia asked for Ballard’s pardon. “I hope you will forgive me,” she said, promising to never “let anything be exposed.” But even then, she stated she would indeed continue telling others if “forced from bad treatment.” Evidently concerned about her plight or the potential inconveniences she might cause him and her children’s father, Ballard asked C. M. Rutherford, a Louisville domestic slave trader in Texas, to keep him apprised of her situation.⁸² Rutherford sent a letter to Ballard two months later announcing that Virginia and one of her children had been sold, but the eldest child, a girl, had not.⁸³

Virginia’s ordeal resembled that of Maria, a slave Ballard owned. J. M. Duffield, a Natchez resident, wrote Ballard to inform him about Maria and her child.⁸⁴ Duffield wanted to purchase Maria, who had been beaten severely. In fact, Duffield stated that he feared she would die and asked if he could buy her “only to free her.” Whether or not he was dealing with Ballard by means of flattery, he asked that his request be honored as another “memorial” of some earlier “generosity.” As if anticipating a favorable response, Duffield announced that he had taken it upon himself to make arrangements to send Maria’s daughter, who was evidently his child, “northward” to be “educated, and there forever to reside.”⁸⁵

Duffield serves as further proof that white men of this generation acted inconsistently and deliberately in their efforts to enhance and protect certain enslaved individuals, specifically, women and children in whom they had earlier had sex and along the way invested some measure of emotion. Such investments were made while these men safeguarded their patriarchal and racial dominance. It is certain that Duffield had not planned to protect all enslaved people from abuse or see to it that all enslaved children be freed and educated. But he was concerned about two in particular.

So great was Duffield’s concern, he went as far as to cautiously identify the man who had abused Maria: Judge Boyd, Ballard’s business partner. But wishing to be careful, Duffield stated he had written “the Old Man,” presumably Boyd, to inquire about Maria, but committed to discretion, he sent the letter in a way that would “fall in [to] his hands and none other.”⁸⁶ That he did reveals his interest in protecting Boyd from any fallout, no matter how close he had come to killing an enslaved woman.

But even Boyd joined this generation of men who acted unpredictably. While he seems to have exploited Virginia and Maria, he treated at least one enslaved person with more regard. Boyd reportedly fathered a child named James with an enslaved woman.⁸⁷ Having a “favored” position in his father’s eyes, James apparently even ate at the dinner table with Boyd and his family rather than with other slaves.⁸⁸ Boyd’s wife was so incensed at the favor shown him that James was sent to live on another plantation Boyd owned.⁸⁹ One of his white half sisters, however, later hired James to manage one of their father’s properties.⁹⁰

Black Americans were property to be sold, put to work, and sexually exploited. Yet some people of African descent—namely, certain women and children—received some favor even as they endured oppression. The degree to which Ballard’s behavior was also unpredictable is unmistakable in his earlier status as a domestic slave trader willing to abandon an entire shipment of bondspeople to the ravages of cholera to that of a slaveholder open to manumitting some enslaved people, even those whose suffering was a consequence of his indifference. He must have allowed Duffield to have access to Maria.

Lucindy’s, Virginia’s, and Maria’s experiences figured into a range of Southern white men’s behavior toward enslaved women with whom they had sexual relations. Some such women and girls found ways to cope psychologically with their enslaved state and sexual exploitation, even flaunting the favor they received. Helene, one such woman, lived so much like a free person in France that she demanded her freedom upon her return to the United States. Upset by her actions, her master called her “a drunken, worthless wench.”⁹¹ But he complied with her wish and freed her. One of the more extreme cases of white men’s bond with such women and girls, however tenuous in the face of societal pressure, involved a white New Orleans bank cashier who reportedly was so in love with a woman of color to whom he was married that he went to a physician and had some of her blood transferred into “his veins and then went to the court and swore he had colored blood in him” in order to circumvent laws banning interracial marriages.⁹²

Some Southern white men’s sense of duty and moral obligation to certain African American women allowed the latter, when freed, to prosper and move into the middle and upper classes outside slave territory. Among the wealthy African American women in Cincinnati were Mary Parris, Kesiah Boyd, Louisa Gaines, May Wilson, and Catherine.⁹³ These individuals had real estate and personal property holdings worth $5,000 to $25,300 without any visible income or occupation.⁹⁴ Many other white men were less circumspect. “In our Queen City of the West, I know of hundreds of mulattoes who are married to white men,” Eliza Potter, the Cincinnati hairdresser, recalled, adding, “and some … are so independent they will be thought nothing but what they are.” In saying this, Potter shed light on the ways in which some women of color’s relations with powerful white men generated confidence in them.⁹⁵ Although some were clearly wealthy, white men’s inconsistent behavior guaranteed that most freedwomen and children of color never fully escaped the anxiety that characterized black life across time, because “a family dependent on a woman’s wages almost always lived in poverty.”⁹⁶

Some Northern whites accepted the responsibility of caring for such enslaved people. As Ballard was settling Avenia White and Susan Johnson and their four children in Cincinnati, he acted one way publicly while often maintaining another position privately. Indeed, in one of the rare instances that he presented himself as a resident of Louisville, Ballard signed a 1845 public petition in which he and other presumably white male slaveholders reminded the state’s elected representatives that their actions regarding the issue of emancipation should reflect the wishes of their constituents.⁹⁷ Even more incongruous, five years later a census taker noted that his Louisville home held six enslaved people, among them a 27-year-old woman, a 6-year-old boy, and a 5-year-old girl, all fugitives of mixed race.⁹⁸ Perhaps their final destination was free territory, possibly Cincinnati. If so, Ballard may have been assisting them in full view of his family.

FIGURE 3. The 1845 Jefferson County, Kentucky, petition signed by the Southern planter Rice Ballard and prominent residents, reminding their state legislature to respect the will of their constituents on the issue of emancipation. Folder 411, Rice Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ballard’s position on slavery was hazy when individual African Americans, not just black women and children, were concerned. In one instance, he was called on to help an enslaved man. In 1854 Delia, an African American servant who later worked in his Louisville home, asked him to buy her still enslaved husband.⁹⁹ How he responded is unknown. Regardless of his response in this instance, his charitable actions sat uneasily beside his reprehensible ones. Discretion was in order when men like him bestowed favor on enslaved women.

The boom-or-bust economy that typified the nineteenth century presented other challenges to everyone, even wealthy men like Ballard. Unlike Britain, which by the mid-nineteenth century had a largely stable economy and banking system in which liquid capital could quickly be raised, such funds were less readily available in the United States. When profits were made on the sale of goods and services, they were usually swiftly reinvested in land, buildings, tools, and other property, including slaves.¹⁰⁰ The anxiety generated in this uncertain economic environment, especially in the years following the 1837 recession, can be seen in a January 1838 letter Ballard received from Joseph Alsop in Virginia, warning him that a mutual acquaintance was trying to “defraud” Ballard out of his portion of a particular investment before he went on to ask for a $500 loan.¹⁰¹

This kind of letter was often before Ballard as he made plans to marry. Eight months following its composition, Ballard received a letter from a Louisville man, Joseph Pierce, who reported that he had found a “very fitting little” buggy and harness for $280.¹⁰² Ballard was apparently in need of such a buggy because he planned to settle the woman he would marry two years later in Louisville. Bacon Tait seemed to be among the few who knew that he had found a bride and was eager for more information. “I wish you would come out and tell me what the gal said to you at last,” Tait wrote in a November 1838 letter. “[If] I guess, will you tell me por favor whether I guess right or wrong?” He also advised Ballard to be careful: “Ladies have hearts as hard as the steel pan.… Their tongues are sweet little lying varmints.”¹⁰³

Tait said this even though he longed for the social stability and status that would have come from marrying into a distinguished family like Isaac Franklin had. In August 1839 Tait informed Ballard that he had seen John Armfield in Alexandria: “Until last Saturday I had not s[a]t at table in a private house with ladies for more than twenty years. [O]n Saturday last I was sitting with Mr Armfield when tea was announced. There was no way of escaping.” Tait added, “Happiness my friend is only to be found in the domestic circle. I beg you sincerely not to become an old bachelor. I speak from experience and declare this is an insipid life.”¹⁰⁴

Tait expressed concern for Ballard even while chatising his friend for his secretiveness. He knew about a prospective bride but not a pending wedding. Someone else knew more. “I am pleased to hear you talk of marrying as you know, I have often advised you to marry and settle your self[.] Rice[,] you feel as near as any child I have,” wrote Samuel Alsop in September 1838. Alsop was a Fredericksburg farmer and the father of Joseph.¹⁰⁵ He must have been a close confidant, maybe even a father figure to Ballard, for even his son did not know of the latter’s pending marriage. That much can be ascertained from the letter Ballard received seven months later from the younger Alsop.¹⁰⁶ “Your letter of the 16th April past containing the first intelligence we had of your marriage.… I take this the first opportunity of tendering to you and your fair lady my congratulations,” wrote Joseph. “We shall be much pleased to become acquainted with her.… You took me somewhat by surprise as I had not had any intimation of any such intention from you recently nor heard it from any one else.”¹⁰⁷

Ballard’s secrecy was not all that sometimes irked his friends and acquaintances. So was his decision to have the wedding not at a plantation in the lower South, where he was amassing his wealth, but in Louisville, a location that was inconvenient for some guests. William Glover, an English commission merchant based in New Orleans, sent his regrets for not being able to make the trip.¹⁰⁸ Wrote Glover, “I find it will be utterly impossible for me to accompany you up.”¹⁰⁹ Glover, however, suggested Ballard might sit beside his cousin Dolley who was leaving on the Vicksburg, a steamer on which Ballard presumably had plans to travel.¹¹⁰

After the wedding, which took place sometime in April 1840—the exact date is unclear—Ballard and his bride traveled for three months. Perhaps so as to not entirely distance himself from his relatives and his Virginia friends, the Ballards traveled to his home state. He spared little expense during the trip. Wanting to put his best foot forward, servants were even hired along the way. In one hotel, he paid $83.33 for food for “self and Lady” and $37.50 for three servants, as well as $6.75 for drink. All of this and more was spent in a hotel where he and his wife lodged for twenty-five days.¹¹¹ They also visited White Sulfur Springs, Virginia, a resort where they made the acquaintance of Henry Turner, a Philadelphia grocer.¹¹² “My Dear Sir,” Turner began a letter sent after he and his wife had met Ballard and his bride at the resort, “I hope Mrs. Ballard had enjoyed herself since we separated. We have missed her agreeable company much.”

A year and a month following the wedding, the Ballards welcomed a daughter into their lives. Ballard shared the news with Joseph Alsop, who wrote back, “Wish you both much happiness with your first born.”¹¹³ Alsop next asked whether the Ballards had plans to visit Virginia that summer. He closed by stating, “Write to me on the receipt of this.… Let me hear from you frequently.” Alsop’s words suggest that Ballard was obviously still wary of sharing too much with others, or when sharing anything, doing so with much thought. His circumspection was something even the woman Ballard had married found troubling.