Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina

5. Enforced Separations

5 Enforced Separations This man came up to me, and, seizing me by the collar, shook me violently, saying I was his property, and must go with him to Georgia. At the sound of these words, the thoughts of my wife and children rushed across my mind, and my heart beat away within me. I saw and knew that my case was hopeless, and that resistance was vain, as there were near twenty persons present, all of whom were ready to assist the man by whom I was kidnapped. . . . I asked if I could not be allowed to go to see my wife and children, or if this could not be permitted, if they might not have leave to come to see me, but I was told I would be able to get another wife in Georgia. —Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains In this extract from his autobiography, Charles Ball poignantly describes being forcibly separated from his wife and children in a chain gang that was headed for South Carolina and Georgia before being sold in Columbia, South Carolina. The impact of forced separations upon slaves was undoubtedly immense, since they had to live under the constant threat and sometimes the reality of being taken from their loved ones.This chapter assesses the consequences of this threat upon the relationships between couples. Exploring the domestic slave trade and the structures of families offers new insights into some of the implications of forced separations within slave communities. This chapter initially focuses on the pressures that masters arbitrarily imposed on slaves through the various ways in which they enforced the separation of families. Firstly, owners could sell their slaves to long-distance traders, who would carry family members out of South Carolina. A labor force was needed to grow cotton in the new states of the emerging Southwest, including Alabama, Missis141 sippi, and Louisiana, and it has been estimated that two-thirds of a million people were moved through the interstate trade.1 Secondly, slaves could be wrenched away from their families through local sales within South Carolina .2 Finally, separations could result from family members being transferred as gifts or through nonsale divisions of slaveholdings between the heirs of an estate.This chapter also assesses the historiography of slave separations and offers some original quantitative information on separations based upon evidence obtained from WPA narratives. Theoretically, this combination of pressures could have been devastating to any sense of family. However, through their cross-plantation family and community ties, many slaves managed to resist the potential threats to family and marriage viability. Local sales, gifts, and divisions of estates between heirs did mean, though, that family patterns were often multidimensional, with some family members belonging to the same owner, while others might belong to more or less distant neighbors . Evidence from slave autobiographies and white source materials are also utilized to assess owners’ attitudes toward forced separations. However , it is slave (rather than white) evidence that is most important in revealing aspects of the complexity of family experience—aspects that have previously been little explored by historians. A pattern emerges of essentially nuclear families that often saw all members living on the same slaveholding, but which sometimes showed spouses, siblings, children , and other relatives dispersed across a more complex residential network that could span several miles.3 The Scale and Nature of Separations Slaves had to contend not only with forced separations through local or long-distance sales but also through being the subjects of gift between whites or of the division of estates between the heirs of a deceased owner. For example, it was relatively common for young boys and girls to be given to family members upon the marriage of an owner’s son or daughter or upon the death of a slaveholder. Cheryll Ann Cody has noted how the dispersal of slave property came at two “transitions” in the life cycle of planter families, arguing that planters commonly presented large gifts of slaves and land at a child’s marriage and additional legacies at death.4 Similarly, Jane Turner Censer, in her study of North Carolina planters, has shown how they often made presents of slaves to newly married sons and daughters , which could considerably disrupt slave family and community ties, especially when the newlyweds lived some distance from their parents or 142 Chains of Love outside the state. Although some planters would recognize the unwillingness...