Edward Ball tells the story of southern slavery through tracking the history of the Balls, prominent landowners, rice-planters, one or two of them slave traders, and big slave owners in a southern family in dispersal and decline. In 1698, a planter named Elias Ball arrived in South Carolina from Devon, England, to claim an inheritance to one half of a plantation. By 1865, the Ball family of South Carolina owned over a dozen plantations along the Cooper River near Charleston. The crop was Carolina Gold - rice. The empire was grown with seeds from Madagascar and slave labour purchased on the Charleston Docks. By the time the civil war ended, nearly 4,000 people had been enslaved by the Balls. Descendents of the Ball slaves may number as high as 11,000 today.
- ISBN10 0783886284
- ISBN13 9780783886282
- Publish Date 1 May 1999 (first published 1 February 1998)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 4 August 2016
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Thorndike Press
- Edition Large type / large print edition
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 843
- Language English