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Charles Ball (real name Charles Gross; c. 1780 – unknown) was an enslaved African-American from Maryland, best known for his account as a fugitive slave, Slavery in the United States (1836).
Charles Ball's memoir is an account of the life of enslaved people and enslavers in the early 19th century. The book includes the stories of other African Americans with whom the author was acquainted. It is one of the few pieces of Western literature of that time giving a voice to the experience of Africans, including a description of religious customs in the part of Africa where Ball's grandfather grew up and an adventure with lions in the Sahara desert related by a young African.
The 1837 edition describes his religion as the older man explained it to his young grandson. This description has some similarities with Islam, but there are also differences, so it is unclear if his grandfather was Muslim or not. Other Africans, whose religion Ball mentions, are explicitly called "Mohamedans".
The precepts of that religion are contained in a book, a copy of which is kept in each house, implying that the grandfather's African society had a high degree of literacy.
By way of inheritance, sale, and even as a result of a lawsuit, he was passed on to various slave-masters. For two years, starting January 1 of an unknown year around 1800, he was hired out to serve as a cook on the frigate USS Congress that was launched in 1799. After that, he married Judah. When his eldest son was four years old, he was sold to a South Carolina cotton planter, thus separated from his wife and children, who had to remain with their legal owner in Maryland.
In September 1806, he was given as a present to the newly married daughter of his owner and had to relocate to Georgia to a new plantation. Shortly afterward, after the sudden death of the new husband, the new plantation, Ball, and the other enslaved people were rented out to yet another slave-master, with whom he built up a relationship of mutual trust. He became the headman of the new plantation but suffered from the hatred of his owner's wife. In 1809, when his dying master was already too weak to interfere, he was cruelly whipped by that woman and her brother. After that, he planned his escape, which he executed after his master's death. Traveling by night to avoid the patrols, using the stars and his excellent memory for orientation, suffering terribly from hunger and cold, and not daring to speak to anybody, he returned to his wife and children in early 1810.
Nothing is known of his later fate nor of that of his wife or children.
In the autobiography, Ball presents himself (or is presented by the writer) as a kind of model enslaved person who is determined to serve his master "obediently and faithfully" and is proud of the "good character, for industry, sobriety, and humility, which I had established in the neighbourhood". But still, he had to suffer horrible cruelties. As a boy of twelve, he fell into the hands of a severe master who made him work hard while exposing him to hunger and cold. He was forcefully separated from his wife and his children without even being allowed to say goodbye to them. He was kept in chains day and night during a march of four weeks and five days, not even being able to wash the clothes, so that the vermin became "extremely tormenting". One day, he was falsely accused of murder, and without any investigation, his legal owner prepared to have him Flaying (skinned) alive. His life was saved only by the coincidental arrival of a white witness of the crime. On another occasion, he was whipped without any reason.
He also related his observations of the life of his fellow enslaved people, e.g., "one very old man, quite crooked with years and labour", being compelled to work although he was no longer able to keep up with the other ones who "had no clothes on him except the remains of an old shirt, which hung in tatters from his neck and arms". On another plantation, in winter, when the frost "was sometimes very heavy and sharp", shoes were distributed only to those forced to pick cotton. "This deprived of shoes, the children, and several old persons, whose eye-sight was not sufficiently clear, to enable them to pick cotton." Enslaved people had to work even while fever-shaken.
Several methods of torture are described in detail. On one occasion, he cites a fellow slave relating the discussion of the slaveholders on how "the greatest degree of pain could be inflicted on me, with the least danger of rendering me unable to work".
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