Edward Ball is an American author who has written multiple works on topics such as history and biography. He is best known for works that explore the complex past of his family, whose members were major rice planters and slaveholders in South Carolina for nearly 300 years. One of his more well known works is based around an African-American family, descended from one member of this family and an enslaved woman, whose members became successful artists and musicians in the Jazz Age.
The Ball Family Slaveholder Index (BFSI) reports that between 1698 and 1865, six generations of the Ball family "owned more than twenty rice plantations in Lowcountry South Carolina and enslaved nearly 4,000 Africans and African Americans." Edward Ball, who completed his MA in 1984, worked as a freelance journalist before he began researching and writing about his family's history of slaveholding.
His books include Slaves in the Family (1998), which won a National Book Award. In Slaves in the Family, he described his great-great grandfather, Isaac Ball (1785-1825), a fifth generation member of the Ball family of slaveholders, who inherited the Comingtee plantation, near Charleston and owned 571 enslaved people.
He was also recognized for his Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy (2020).In the Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy, he wrote about his maternal great-great-grandfather, Constant Lecorgne (1832 -n.d. ). At one time, he was officially classified as "colored," which denoted that he was a mulatto or a mixed race person at the time. Having European ancestors, he changed his name and passed as white. He became an "embittered racist."
Early years and education
Edward Ball was born in 1958 in Savannah, Georgia to parents with deep roots in the South. He is a son of Theodore Ball, an Episcopal priest, and Janet (Rowley) Ball, a bookkeeper. Ball grew up in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, as his family moved following his father's church assignments. His father's ancestors had been major planters and slaveholders for six generations in South Carolina. Ball graduated from St. Martin's Episcopal School in 1976.
Ball received a B.A. from Brown University in 1982 and an M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1984.
During the 1980s, Ball worked as a freelance journalist in New York City, writing about art, books, and film for The Village Voice and Condé Nast, Hearst, and Hachette magazines. He also wrote a column about architecture and design for The Village Voice.
Slaves in the Family
Ball's history Slaves in the Family (1998) was described in a 2020 New York Times review as a "deeply reported National Book Award-winning history". Ball had "tracked down descendants of those who had once been enslaved by his South Carolina ancestors on his father’s side." In it he described how the Ball family had owned slaves in South Carolina for six generations. The well-received book was also reviewed at the time of publication by the Washington Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Edward Ball's great-great grandfather, Isaac Ball (1785-1825)—a fifth generation of the Ball family slaveholders—had inherited the Comingtee plantation, near Charleston, and owned 571 enslaved people. The Ball Family Slaveholder Index reported that between 1698 and 1865, generations of Ball family "owned more than twenty rice plantations in Lowcountry South Carolina and enslaved nearly 4,000 Africans and African Americans."
Edward Ball conducted research that went far beyond this work, as he traced numerous slaves named in records, including some who appeared in photographs held by the family. He has recounted the life of an enslaved African woman named Priscilla by his Ball ancestor. She was captured from the area of present-day Sierra Leone in 1756 and sold in Charleston to Isaac Ball (or his overseer). She died at Comingtee plantation near Charleston in 1820. Ball's account, "Priscilla's homecoming", was published by The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In Ball's telling, a former enslaved African American, P.H. Martin (c. 1853-) had written several letters in the 1920s to his former master, also named Isaac Ball.