Authors: Betty DeRamus
Nor could any of the doubters have imagined that in 1864 a runaway slave and civilian
scout named Alfred Wood would crawl through a clump of dead Confederate soldiers,
slip on one of their uniforms, steal a rebel horse and journey to the Union army at
Vicksburg to get help for the besieged 3rd U.S. Colored Cavalry. Or that Octave Johnson,
a runaway who had lived for more than a year in a swamp four miles from his former
Louisiana plantation, would enlist in the 99th U.S. Colored Troops on August 27, 1863.
Or that an exceptional North Carolina slave named George Moses Horton, who earned
money composing letters and poems for college students, would escape to Union lines
after failing to earn enough to move to Liberia. Or that during the two-day battle
at New Market Heights in Virginia, fourteen black soldiers would win Congressional
Medals of Honor for fighting with blown-apart hands and leading their units to victory
after their white officers had been killed or wounded. Or that thousands of fugitive
slaves safely in Canada would ride the Underground Railroad in reverse, returning
to America to fight for the Union. Or that an unknown, unremarkable former slave like
Samuel Ballton would become a cavalry man.
In March 1864, Ballton enlisted in Company H of the 5th Massachusetts Regiment, Colored
Cavalry, in Boston, the only cavalry regiment from Massachusetts composed entirely
of black men. Despite his spunk and sass, Ballton performed no acts of personal heroism
to match the exploits of Alfred Wood, the scout and spy who escaped on a horse with
his wife, Margaret, riding behind him, and who, in the summer of 1864, took home a
fourteen-year-old boy he found wandering through the streets of Vicksburg. Nor did
he achieve the wartime celebrity of Lucy Nichols, whose Indiana unit made her an honorary
member of the Grand Army of the Republic. Yet the war gripped Ballton in its jaws,
and he felt its teeth.
He served in Virginia, the site of 519 battles between Union and Confederate troops,
battles where the woods groaned with the sound of repeating rifles, sawed-off shotguns,
mortar bombs, red-hot shot designed to set fires and artillery battles that could
be heard more than ten miles away. He fought in Washington, Arlington Heights, Fortress
Monroe, Baylor’s Farm. He was at Petersburg, the scene of more fighting than any Virginia
community except Richmond, and the site of a nine-month siege in 1864–1865 that remains
the longest such operation on American soil. He was in City Point, which became a
legend after the Confederacy blew up a huge Union supply depot there, killing 58 and
wounding 126 and nearly killing General Ulysses S. Grant. He also was one of the men
who guarded Confederate troops in Point Lookout, Maryland, a place that Colonel Adams
described as “on a low, sandy, malarious, fever-smitten, wind-blown, God-forsaken
tongue of land dividing Chesapeake Bay from the Potomac River.”
By the war’s end, some two hundred thousand African-American troops had fought for
the Union, and black soldiers had participated in 449 separate fights with Confederates.
The supreme irony came when Union forces marched into Richmond after the surrender
of the South on April 2, 1865. Samuel Ballton’s group, the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry,
entered the city first after the rebels evacuated it. They were followed by troops
of the all-black 25th Army Corps under Major General Godfrey Weitzel.
“I was in the column in advance in Richmond on a Monday morning from Deep Bottom to
Richmond on the 3rd of April 1865,” Ballton pointed out in a letter he wrote to the
Department of the Interior seeking a raise in his pension.
Ballton’s final assignment was on the Rio Grande in Texas, guarding the frontier.
Sleeping on the Texas earth, he, like so many other troops, black and white, contracted
the malaria, chronic diarrhea and rheumatoid arthritis that would plague him in later
years. His conditions would not have been relieved by primitive Civil War medical
practices, which often regarded daily whiskey and porter as cures for everything from
typhoid to mumps. His military career ended with his discharge on August 1. After
mustering out from Clarksville, Texas, on October 31, 1865, Ballton rode the troopship
back to Boston Harbor. In the latter part of November, the men were paid off and discharged.
Samuel Ballton now could call himself a freeman, though not yet a satisfied or whole
one.
He finally rejoined Rebecca in Alexandria. He could start to forget the thump and
roll of drums and the almost sulfuric smell of gunpowder mingling with the stench
of dead horses. There would be no more soldiers shot while chewing fatback or dipping
hardtack bread into a brownish brew that passed for coffee, no more desperate reunions
under cover of darkness, no more battlefield baptisms. Samuel Ballton had survived
the first war to use trench warfare and dog tags, made from handkerchiefs or pieces
of paper, the first war bent on destroying not only men, but territory, property,
towns, cities and families, the first war in which iron-clad naval vessels were used
and the first war to use repeating arms that fired several rounds without reloading.
Now the life he had run away to find could begin.
The post–Civil War period was a time of rising black hopes. Samuel and Rebecca headed
north, living for a while in Brooklyn, where Ballton joined the William Lloyd Garrison
chapter of the Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. But the former slave and
former soldier was not through trying to discover who he might have been if he hadn’t
started his life as a slave. In 1873, Ballton, then thirty-five, took his beloved
Rebecca to a hamlet on the heavily forested north shore of Long Island, New York.
It was a region of streams, large projecting rocks and stones, hills high enough to
be seen at great distances by approaching seamen and the Long Island Sound, a sea
separating the island from Connecticut’s mainland and connecting with the Atlantic
Ocean at each end of the island. In this, their final Promised Land, a small man named
Samuel Ballton discovered that, with a boost from his wife, he could become a giant.
The roughly two-square-mile hamlet of Greenlawn sits inside the town of Huntington
in Suffolk County, Long Island. It was part of the “First Purchase” of land from the
Matinecock Indians, recorded in 1653. Slavery had begun around the same time in Suffolk
County, with most slaves coming from Africa and the West Indies, but by 1798, the
fifty-three slave owners in Huntington Township had freed their slaves. Located on
fertile upland plains, the area then known as East Fields and later as Oldfields was
pastureland for white settlers’ livestock. The 1783 census shows twelve families living
there. In the early 1800s, other farm families, mostly from Huntington, settled at
Oldfields, farming large stretches of land. However, in 1868, the extension of the
Long Island Rail Road through the sparsely settled farmlands changed the character
of the town, unleashing a tide of tall ambitions and wide hopes. Suddenly, farmers
would have a way to sell surplus cash crops, including pickles and cabbages, to New
York City markets and to purchase soap, cloth, flour and factory-made items. Suddenly,
young and old would get lessons in geography simply from reading the place names printed
on the sides of freight trains.
Greenlawn’s earliest homes and businesses clustered around the railroad depot: the
Greenlawn Hotel went up across the street, a butcher shop opened, a post office began
operating in the general store. At the freight-loading platform, farmers could leave
crates of live chickens or vegetables and cans of milk for railroad workers to transport
to dealers in the city. The depot became Greenlawn-Centerport and then Greenlawn.
However, no settlers believed more in the potential of the little hamlet with one
grocery store, one butcher shop and one hotel than two ex-slaves, Samuel and Rebecca
Ballton.
At first, Samuel farmed with Charles Duryea Smith, one of Greenlawn’s wealthiest men.
Then he sharecropped for Alexander Gardiner on his six-hundred-acre estate west of
the hamlet, no doubt inspired by Gardiner’s success. Gardiner had built a cider mill,
a sawmill that turned out oak and chestnut lumber, mostly for local shipbuilders,
a brickyard, an ice house and a gristmill. He was best known, though, as one of the
area’s first farmers to recognize the potential of pickles as a cash crop. He planted
fields of pickles, a name then given to cucumbers less than four inches long even
before they were processed and flavored with jalapeño, dill and other flavors. The
pickle works that Gardiner built on his property adjacent to the railroad processed
not only pickles from his farm, but pickles grown on many neighboring farms. As a
result, over the years, he became known as Greenlawn’s Pickle Pioneer.
In many ways, though, Ballton matched him, stroke for stroke and crop for crop.
In those days, people pickled cucumbers and other vegetables in brine or vinegar,
eating them in winter when fresh vegetables weren’t available. But pickle farming
was stoop work, bent-over work, continual work. A pickle farmer would pluck a handful
of seeds from the cloth bag of cucumber seeds he carried over his shoulders, make
a little hole at an already marked and fertilized spot, drop in about six seeds, kick
in the dirt, stamp on it and move on to the next mark. Because weeds grew faster than
the plants, a farmer had to keep cultivating all the time. The stables and streets
of New York City supplied the manure to fertilize the growing plants. A farmer would
take a whole load of manure home in his wagon, spread it in his fields and return
for another load. Sometimes it took three or four days just to unload a freight car.
Samuel Ballton became a master at both growing and picking pickles. In the summer
of 1899, he was said to have raised 1,500,000 pickles. That’s when people began slapping
him on the back and calling him the Pickle King. However, he wasn’t content. Sharecropping
wasn’t slavery, but it was just a few houses down the road from it, the same kind
of no-end, no-exit toil. Though he had never spent a day of his life in school, Ballton
had picked up what a
Brooklyn Eagle
article called “a much larger share of horse sense and business acumen than usually
falls to the man not trained to business.” Translation: he began buying pickles for
the Boston Pickle Agency, gathering up produce from other people and getting a dime
for every thousand he delivered.
He still had bigger dreams in his pocket, though—dreams of houses that would be monuments
to his hustle and drive and Civil War struggles. After getting personal loans from
wealthy farmers and using the money to buy property, he began building homes for people
such as blacksmith William Hudson Jr. and the Howarth family, the first owners of
the general store, and the touring vaudeville team of Charles Gardner and Marie Stoddard.
In some cases, his white friends had to buy the land for him and then sign it over
to him. He promoted himself, too. The
1896 Lain & Healy’s Brooklyn & Long Island Business Directory
contained an ad for “Samuel Ballton, real estate agent, Greenlawn, L.I., Houses and
lots for sale in different parts of Long Island.” He used former slaves and carpenters
from the South to build the homes. When he built a house at 67 Boulevard, he put a
room upstairs for the bathroom even though there was no running water at the time.
Between 1905 and 1910, he erected a building on Taylor Avenue near the railroad tracks
for use as a store. However, when the depot was built farther west, he converted the
building into a four-room home.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Ballton was also growing, feeding on her husband’s visions. The
only surviving picture of Rebecca shows a sturdy-legged brown woman, her skin as smooth
as apples, her almond eyes squinting slightly in the sun. The picture doesn’t show
her shrewdness, but, like Samuel, she could smell an opportunity while it was still
taking shape. During the war, Samuel had walked her to freedom. In peacetime, she
helped escort him to prosperity. No matter how grand Samuel’s ambitions became, Rebecca
did whatever she could to keep them afloat. Unlike Samuel, she never learned to read
or write, but she cooked well enough to earn extra money selling Sunday dinners. She
and her youngest daughter, Jessie, also laundered clothes to help feed the family’s
eight surviving children. Rebecca was the kind of homemaker who would spend half the
night on family chores after working all day in the homes of wealthy white families
in nearby Northport. Like other women of the period, she sewed, knitted, quilted,
canned fruits and vegetables and preserved meat as well, especially when her husband
annually butchered a pig. Her granddaughter Virginia Jackson could remember only one
time when Rebecca went anywhere except to church or work. That was the day she rode
in a horse-drawn wagon to the Mineola Fair in neighboring Nassau County, an annual
event where farmers purchased and traded produce and livestock and held beautiful
baby contests and other events.
Two of Rebecca’s surviving quilts reveal something else about her and the rest of
her family. Most people sew quilt pieces in straight lines, but the Ballton quilts
contain stitches that run off in a dozen different directions, some straight, some
seemingly random. Neither Rebecca nor her children took the time to make quilts that
told stories or brought to life scenes from the Bible. According to Berenice Easton,
another Ballton granddaughter, several family members most likely worked on the quilts
together, each one infusing the garments with a different style and energy. Samuel
and Rebecca Ballton weren’t the only members of this family who could work without
patterns and create new traditions from scraps of the past.