Henry penned a letter from Charles Town to his wife’s nephew, Elias Ball, Jr. (often called Elias Ball of Wambaw or Wambaw Elias).¹ Ball family biographer, Anne Simons Deas, reported in the early twentieth-century that he was a “man over-bearing, selfish, arrogant, lavish of sneers and criticism, and not over-considerate of other people’s feelings. Modern Ball family biographer, Edward Ball, related a story his father told about Wambaw Elias. “He had about a hundred and fifty slaves,” his dad related, “and he was a mean fella.” The crux of the story is that Wambaw Elias had been a Tory, remaining loyal to Britain. Charles, Lord Cornwallis had given him the rank of colonel and a company of men. He had “fought the patriots and burned their houses until such time as the British lost and his victims called for revenge.”²

Of course, that may have been the rub: Wambaw Elias chose the wrong side, and his character was judged after he crossed the Rubicon, but he also might have been both a Loyalist and a man of poor rectitude.

Henry had been co-owner of a plantation on Wambaw Creek with Elias’s father, John Coming Ball. The letter’s primary purpose was a discussion of the division of “Cattle, Horses, &ca., as we undivided of the joint property of your late Father & me.”

Henry’s irritation with Elias’s actions is palpable, and it is quite clear that he would have never entered into a business relationship with Wambaw Elias, who did not possess his father’s business acumen. Moreover, he likely failed to inherit his father’s amiability.³ Regardless, Henry remained cordial: “Please to present my Love to your partner, to your Mamma, & all the Children.”

1. Henry Laurens to Elias Ball, Jr., Charles Town, February 28, 1766, Papers of Henry Laurens, 5:81-83. ↩︎
2. Anne Simons Deas, Recollections of the Ball Family of South Carolina and The Comingtee Plantation (Charleston, 1909), 100-112, especially page 111 and Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York, 1998), 8-9. For an example of Ball’s fighting, see Ian Sabteron, ed., The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in The Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War (East Sussex, 2010), 26, 64, 66-67, 70, 92, 209, 220, 244, 266, and 359. ↩︎
3. Anne Simons Deas, Recollections of the Ball Family of South Carolina and The Comingtee Plantation (Charleston, 1909), 91-95. ↩︎