ON June 20, 1820, April Ellison appeared on the steps of the Sumter District courthouse in Sumterville, South Carolina. He had left his home and traveled twelve miles east over dusty, rutted roads to present a petition to Judge William Henry DeSaussure. April had a simple request—he wanted a new name. April Ellison, his lawyer explained at the hearing, was a “freed yellow man of about twenty nine years of age.” Emancipated four years earlier, he had moved to Stateburg in Sumter District, where he was “endeavoring to preserve a good character and gain a livelihood by honest industry in the trade of Gin making.” His name hampered these ambitions because “April” was recognizable to all as a slave name. A change of names, his lawyer argued, “altho’ apparently unimportant[,] would yet greatly advance his interest as a tradesman.” A new name would also “save him and his children from degradation and contempt which the minds of some do and will attach to the name of April.” Because of the “kindness” of his former master, William Ellison, and as a “mark of gratitude and respect for him,” April asked to change his name to William.1
April Ellison had managed to put behind him the status of slavery but not slavery’s stigma. Since April’s name accurately evoked his origins, a white judge might consider it perfectly appropriate. It was highly unusual for a free person of color to petition for a new name, but April believed that his slave name would impede his progress as a gin maker and stain his children’s future. In the little upcountry courthouse in Sumterville, April was seeking to strip away the last vestige of his former slave status that he could do anything about. Freed from the name April, he would try to let his skill as a craftsman, his good character, and his ambition speak for themselves. When Judge DeSaussure granted his request, he now had a free man’s name, a name consistent with his status. Yet the new William Ellison’s color made the stain of slavery indelible.
When he presented his petition April Ellison lived on the western edge of Sumter District in or near Stateburg, a tiny village perched in the High Hills of the Santee, a narrow ridge of rolling hills along the east bank of the Wateree River. Renowned for beauty, a healthy climate, and fertile soils, the High Hills attracted some of the earliest settlers of the Carolina back country. By the first decades of the nineteenth century the Hills were dense with cotton plantations, planters, and their slaves. In 1820 Afro-Americans made up nearly two-thirds of Sumter District’s total population of 25,369, but slaves numbered 16,343 while free Negroes like Ellison numbered only 382.2 Why did this “freed yellow man” live in the aristocratic High Hills, surrounded by wealthy white planters and their gangs of slaves? Who was April Ellison, and where did he come from?
AS with the vast majority of individuals born into slavery, a nearly impenetrable curtain shrouds April’s origins and early life. His tombstone records that he was born in 1790.3 His birthplace was probably his owner’s plantation about forty miles northwest of the High Hills in Fairfield District, a fertile upcountry region lying between the Wateree and Broad rivers.4 Self-described as a “yellow man,” a contemporary term for a light-skinned mulatto, April was of mixed racial origins. Since he was a slave, we can be certain his mother was a slave; since he belonged to a white man named Ellison, she probably did too. White slaveowners named Ellison lived in Fairfield District in 1790, but all that is known of their slaves is their number, making it impossible to determine if a slave woman who could have been April’s mother was among them.5 Of her ancestry or even her name, we know nothing at all.
The identity of April’s father is also obscure. Either a mulatto father or mother could account for April’s light complexion. But more likely April’s father was a white man, either William Ellison, the planter who eventually freed him, or William Ellison’s father, Robert Ellison. When April was born in 1790 Robert Ellison owned fifteen slaves on a plantation situated two miles from Winnsboro, the largest town in Fairfield District, a settlement of fifty or sixty houses.6 April’s mother may have been one of the slaves. Robert Ellison was forty-eight years old in 1790, and his youngest child was not yet five.7 His eldest child, William, was about seventeen. Both men lived on the plantation and had the biological capability to father a slave son. Mulatto children fathered by white planters with their slave women were not uncommon on the Carolina frontier. James Chesnut, an upcountry acquaintance of William Ellison who lived in nearby Camden, was the father of several mulatto children, according to his daughter-in-law Mary Boykin Chesnut.8 The few slaves masters emancipated tended to be mulattoes, often children of the master.9
April Ellison’s 1820 petition for a new name declared that William Ellison had owned him “for many years” and had freed him. Just when William Ellison acquired April is not recorded, but it was evidently between 1800 and 1806. In 1800, according to the census, William Ellison owned no slaves; ten years later, he owned nineteen.10 Upon his father’s death in 1806, William received a bequest of a substantial amount of property, but no slaves. William’s younger brothers and sisters inherited the slaves their father owned at the time of his death, and, because the will named each slave, we can be certain that April was not among them.11 William’s generous inheritance of land suggests that he was in good standing with his father and thus may have been given some of his father’s slaves before 1806, probably April and possibly his mother. In 1800 Robert Ellison owned nine slaves.12 April could have been one of the nineteen slaves the census enumerator recorded for William Ellison in 1810. Or, more likely, he was the free person of color listed as living on William Ellison’s plantation.13 If so, April still had the legal status of a slave, since he was not formally manumitted until 1816. But by 1810 he may already have begun the transition from slavery to freedom, living de facto as a free man.
More direct evidence that April’s father was either Robert or William Ellison is the exceptional treatment he received while still a slave. Rather than sending the mulatto boy out to the fields with the other slaves, his master apprenticed him to a trade. The apprenticeship probably began about 1802 when April was twelve, which makes it impossible to surmise whether the decision was made by William or his father. But the most telling evidence for the paternity of one of the white Ellisons is that William Ellison eventually freed April. There is no indication that Ellison ever manumitted any other slave, while there is good evidence that something more than April’s craft, color, and talent made him special in his master’s eyes. William Ellison owned another artisan, a cabinetmaker named Julius, whom he sold in Charleston in 1813 for $800.14 The handsome price Julius commanded suggests he was a man of considerable talent and makes clear Ellison did not free all his skilled slaves. Nor, since Julius was a mulatto, did Ellison free all of his mulatto slaves. Instead, for some reason Ellison singled out April for manumission. He may well have had several motives for freeing April, but probably an important one was that April was his half-brother or his son.
When April Ellison was born the South Carolina back country was barely a generation removed from the frontier. Not until the 1750s did settlers begin to flood the interior, many migrating south from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina, and others trekking inland from the Carolina coast. Growth was so rapid that by 1765 the hinterland contained nearly three-quarters of the white population of the colony, but still only a tiny fraction of South Carolina’s slaves, who were concentrated on the rice and indigo plantations in the low country. Most men in the back country were hard-scrabble yeoman farmers clearing land, running some livestock, and producing for their families’ needs. But a few ambitious, aggressive, and lucky men soon began to emerge from the yeomanry. Eager to make fortunes and found dynasties and not overly fastidious about how, they plunged into any enterprise that promised to turn a shilling. These barons of the back country acquired and sold vast tracts of land, founded towns at the fall line, opened stores, and, above all, began to buy slaves. Slaveholders developed commercial agriculture in the interior and, despite poor means of transportation, began to ship indigo, tobacco, hemp, tar, pitch, turpentine, provisions, cattle, and hogs to the Charleston market.15 These frontier aristocrats—Wade Hampton I, Thomas Sumter, John Chesnut, John Winn, Joseph Kershaw, and others—rose quickly, and they often retained those qualities that had helped them climb from the pack. They were, contemporaries said, equally tough on horses, slaves, and women. Rustic swashbucklers, they were more at home in the saddle than the drawing room. Their ethos is reflected in the name of the stallion owned by Thomas Sumter and trained by Wade Hampton that beat all comers in the Charleston races in 1791: Ugly.16 Crude in comparison with the coastal nabobs, these back-country men represented the South’s new planter class—wealthy, proud, and increasingly powerful.
Robert Ellison hardly ranked in the upper echelons of the frontier aristocracy, but with fifteen slaves in 1790 he was one of the prospering back-country planters. Three out of four inland families owned no slaves in 1790, and two-thirds of the slaveowning minority owned fewer than five.17 When Robert Ellison first arrived in South Carolina twenty-nine years earlier, he was a member of that slaveless white majority. The Ellison family came to the Carolina upcountry by way of Ireland and Pennsylvania. Originally English, the Ellisons moved across the Irish Sea in the seventeenth century, settling in the northernmost county of Ireland, County Antrim. There in 1742 Robert Ellison had been born. Two years later his father, his mother, his sister, and his four brothers moved to Pennsylvania, where Robert grew up. After the death of his parents in 1761, Robert and the other Ellison children moved to Fairfield District, South Carolina.18
According to family tradition, Robert inherited little from his father, a man of “moderate means.” But because the young man had a “good English education,” he secured the position of surveyor in Fairfield and soon began to buy land.19 In 1772 he married Elizabeth Potts of Charleston and settled on his farm two miles from what would become in 1785 the town of Winnsboro. During the American Revolution he served as a captain with General William Moultrie. After the war Robert Ellison became an active citizen and respected planter in Fairfield.20 Several of his sons, including William, followed in his footsteps and became planters in the neighborhood. Another son, John, moved to Charleston, where he became a dry goods merchant on King Street. His daughter Sarah Elizabeth married a young immigrant from northern Ireland named James Adger, whom she met while riding near her father’s plantation in 1802.
Adger had spent five or six years in the hardware business in New York City before coming to Charleston in 1802 to supervise a cargo. Once he disposed of the shipment, Adger decided to visit his brother who lived in Fairfield. He traveled upcountry with a white cotton gin maker from Winnsboro named William McCreight.21 After his marriage to Sarah Ellison, Adger settled in Charleston and became a leading hardware merchant, cotton factor, and wharf owner. In years to come the kinship between the Charleston Adgers and the Fairfield Ellisons would influence one of the young slave boys who belonged to the Ellisons in 1802. But Adger’s traveling companion had a far more decisive impact on April Ellison’s life.
BY 1790 a tiny planter class made up of small fry like Robert Ellison and great slaveholders like Wade Hampton had emerged in the Carolina back country. But before cotton transformed the region into a plantation society, driving the bears and panthers from the thickets and making fancy plantation balls as common as eye-gouging and ear-biting, someone had to solve a problem. Cotton had been grown in the interior almost from the moment the first white settlers arrived, but commercial production was impossible because cleaning cotton was slow and clumsy. The variety of cotton that grew best in the upcountry—green seed, or short staple—was filled with seeds that clung to the fiber like ticks to the skin. Many a pioneer family spent the long winter evenings seated around the fire tediously plucking the fluff from each seed. The few pounds of clean cotton produced by hour upon hour of hand-picking got made up into homespun on family spinning wheels and hand looms.22
In 1792 a young New Englander accepted a position as tutor to the children of a Georgia planter. The teaching post did not work out, but Eli Whitney stayed on at Mrs. Catherine Greene’s plantation along the Savannah River, where he heard talk about the difficulty of separating those damnable seeds from cotton fibers. Whitney was a practical man, the problem interested him, and he turned his attention to it. He also recognized an opportunity when he saw one. In a world clothed in material made from wool and flax, a machine that would quickly and efficiently remove the seeds from cotton fiber would have immediate economic repercussions on an international scale. The English had already succeeded in mechanizing the manufacture of cotton cloth, but they were unble to get sufficient raw cotton. The South—with its vast acreage, its favorable climate, and its expanding slave labor force—could grow cotton in unimaginable quantities, but cotton stuck to seeds was useless in English textile mills. Early in 1793 Whitney built a simple little device, just wire teeth set in a wooden cylinder that, when rotated, reached through narrow slats to pull cotton fibers away from the seeds, while a brush swept the fibers from the revolving teeth. It was crude, but Whitney knew what he had, and he rushed back north to take out a patent and to begin manufacturing cotton gins.23
News of Whitney’s invention spread throughout the South like a canebrake fire. In September 1793 the South Carolina planter Pierce Butler wrote a friend, “There is a young Man at Mrs Greene’s in Georgia, who has made a Cotton Ginn that with two Boys cleans of the green seed cotton 64 pds of clean cotton in about 9 hours.” Butler reported that he “saw the Hand Ginn work. It is much superior to the Ginns we make use of….”24 Whitney’s gin could clean up to 600 pounds of cotton a day when powered by two horses, Butler learned. He calculated that two such gins could clean far more than all thirty-six of the machines he currently used and free the labor of more than thirty slave operatives for use elsewhere on his plantation. Butler itched to replace his gins with Whitney’s model. “I am very desirous of getting some other than hand gins for cleaning my Cotton,” he wrote in the spring of 1794. “I go more largely on Cotton than any planter in America.”25
Planters everywhere clamored for the machines, and local craftsmen could sniff out a market as well as Whitney. No mere patent could stop clever backwoods mechanics from building gins of their own. Illegal, locally made gins appeared rapidly in the interior. “The people of the back country almost uniformly prefer making their own gins to using ours,” complained Phineas Miller, Whitney’s partner, in May 1797.26 To end the constant litigation caused by the poaching of local entrepreneurs, the South Carolina legislature in 1801 allocated $50,000 to buy from Whitney and Miller “their patent right to the making, using and vending the saw machine within the limits of the State.”27
Widespread use of the gin broke the bottleneck in commercial production, and cotton quickly pushed out indigo, then tobacco, as the upcountry’s major cash crop. Between 1790 and 1800, cotton exports from South Carolina skyrocketed from 9,840 pounds to more than 6,000,000 pounds. Soaring cotton production was made possible by an enormous increase in slaves in the interior. In the twenty years after 1790, the number of slaves beyond the tidewater increased from 29,094 to 85,654.28 Fairfield and surrounding districts participated in the cotton boom. In 1795 Captain James Kincaid began one of the ripples of change when he set up in his grist mill in Fairfield what is said to be the first operating saw gin in South Carolina.29 Just a few miles from Kincaid’s mill lived a young slave boy named April. Whitney’s invention would profoundly alter April Ellison’s life. While the commercial production of cotton bound millions of Afro-Americans to perpetual slavery, it would give April an opportunity for education, freedom, and—in time—a fortune.
About 1802 April’s master apprenticed him to William McCreight, the young white Winnsboro gin maker who traveled upcountry with James Adger. The McCreight family settled in Fairfield about the same time as the Ellisons, and David McCreight served in Robert Ellison’s company during the revolutionary war. While the Ellisons moved into planting, the McCreights gravitated toward the skilled trades. Young William McCreight began his career as a carpenter, building several of the fine houses in early Winnsboro. Sometime after 1795 he began to employ his woodworking skills to build cotton gins, joining the wildcat gin makers throughout the South who seized the new opportunity. McCreight soon gained recognition in Fairfield and surrounding districts as a master craftsman, and his business thrived. McCreight was about twenty-five years old when young April arrived at his shop. The ginwright had no slaves of his own, and he badly needed additional labor to meet the planters’ demands for his machines. McCreight had several white apprentices working for him, and his new slave apprentice gave him another useful pair of hands.30
April worked in McCreight’s gin shop until 1816, growing to manhood between the carpenter’s bench and the blacksmith’s forge. He was fortunate to have an apprenticeship, and he was doubly fortunate to be apprenticed to McCreight. Training in any trade set him apart from most slaves, who were consigned to grub their lives away with thick-handled hoes. Few slaves had the chance to work with well-wrought tools in an artisan’s shop. Even those lucky enough to be trained in a craft usually received only rudimentary apprenticeships, relatively brief periods of instruction designed to prepare them as rough plantation carpenters, blacksmiths, or masons.31 April, in contrast, spent as many as fourteen years under the tutelage of a master craftman, learning year by year the ways of a complex trade. Gin making required expertise as a carpenter, a blacksmith, and a machinist, plus the rarer ability to integrate the three crafts. April’s apprenticeship began his development into a master gin maker.
The craft of gin making was only about ten years old when April arrived at McCreight’s shop. As a consequence, his apprenticeship could not have resembled those of ancient craft guilds, where the master was the keeper of an old and highly specialized skill that he passed on to successive generations of apprentices by demonstration and example. With little that could be called tradition, the essence of the craft consisted of an idea, Whitney’s. Within the ambit of that original conception almost every feature of the craft was in flux. Gin makers did not manufacture a standardized product, especially in the early years. Each gin was built to the specifications of an individual planter, its size and construction dependent on the planter’s needs. Pushed by the planters’ insistence on ever bigger and better machines, successful gin makers continually tinkered and fiddled with various combinations of materials, gears, saws, belts, assemblies, brushes, and more, designing and redesigning as they built new gins and repaired old ones.32 During April’s apprenticeship McCreight devised a variant on the Whitney gin, an innovation that gained local renown as the “McCreight plan.” The timing of April’s apprenticeship could not have been better. He collaborated in the exciting first stages of the evolution of cotton gin technology, as McCreight and his coworkers searched for improvements. Learning the craft at a time when demand greatly outstripped supply also probably meant that April was brought along quickly, pushed into every facet of the trade.
McCreight’s shop was a world of tangible objects and physical processes, but it was also a place of creative thought. The complexity of the product combined with the constant experimentation meant that gin making took intellectual power as well as manual prowess. During his training in the gin shop April learned to read, write, and cipher. He acquired basic bookkeeping skills. He figured costs, drew up bills, and kept track of debts and credits. He learned to calculate tolerances, reckon the strength and durability of materials, estimate friction and wear, compute gear ratios, assess stress and torque, measure angles, and lay off distances. As he fashioned wood, metal, leather, and bristle into the hundreds of separate parts that made up a cotton gin, he developed the mechanic’s ability to conceptualize the whole, to envision each part meshing with all the others. By the time April left McCreight’s shop he had mastered all the skills, intellectual and mechanical, required for independent success in his trade.33
The shop served as April’s schoolhouse for social as well as mechanical skills. There April met scores of planters who came to negotiate with McCreight for gins. Gins were heavy, cumbersome machines, and once sold and in place on a plantation—usually set up in a specially rigged gin house, sometimes two stories high—they were seldom returned to the shop for maintenance.34 Instead, somebody trained in the gin shop, like April, traveled out to the plantations to service the machines. On such trips, April reinforced the invaluable network of strategic acquaintances and contacts he had made at the shop. These encounters in the gin shop and on plantations exhibited April’s skills before a demanding audience and provided him with valuable experience in how to get along with white planters, not the easiest persons for a young Negro man to please. Self-confidence tempered by tact and deference to white expectations was as important to April as his mechanical ability. Without a flawless education in the ways of white people, April could never hope to prosper as a free colored gin maker in South Carolina.
While William McCreight taught April the craft of gin making, he also gave him lessons in cooperation and trust across racial lines. In the early years when April looked over McCreight’s shoulder and later when they reversed positions, April saw that McCreight was a white man he could count on, a white man who did not need constant reassurance of his superiority, who instead recognized, nurtured, and rewarded April for work that equaled or surpassed his own. McCreight allowed April to grow and develop into a master craftsman whom many lesser white men would have regarded as an unwelcome challenger. Over the years, McCreight earned April’s trust and respect.35 He gave April a powerful reason to be optimistic that some whites would not permit his color to cloud their judgment of his character and skill, that they would look beyond what he appeared to be and see what he was.
We do not know with certainty what William Ellison had in mind for his young mulatto slave during his years of training in McCreight’s shop, but the evidence suggests that he envisioned freedom for April all along. Given the trade he chose for April, it was impossible for Ellison to employ him full time. A large planter could keep a slave carpenter, blacksmith, or mason busy at home, only occasionally hiring him out to neighbors. But not even the largest planter could provide enough work for a gin maker. Gin makers sold their machines to dozens of slaveholders scattered over an extensive territory, and they traveled as widely to maintain and service the gins. If Ellison intended April to remain a slave, then he was willing for his gin maker to be a slave on a very long leash. More likely, Ellison planned to free April.
Certainly April’s extended apprenticeship in gin making prepared him for freedom. He not only obtained specialized training in the craft, but he exercised the discipline and habits necessary to a free man. His education bore similarities to that Robert Ellison designed for his white sons. Like many other self-made upcountry gentry, Ellison hoped to protect his sons from the hazards of a life made too easy by their father’s wealth. When he drew up his will in 1806, he gave special attention to his youngest son, Joseph, who had yet to reach his majority. “And as idleness is the parent of vice and always injurious to youth,” Robert Ellison declared, “I desire that Joseph shall by his own exertions procure himself food and clothing until he has management of his own property.”36 The classic virtues of the early republic—hard work, thrift, independence, and self-sufficiency—were traits the white Ellisons had to learn, and also ones that—under different circumstances—April acquired during his years in McCreight’s shop. If William Ellison did indeed plan to free April, then April probably knew it. While he worked in the shop he probably knew that he was not being trained simply to become a more valuable slave, that all his effort would eventually pay off with freedom. If few slaves had April’s talent and training, fewer still had his incentive.
Almost nothing is known about April’s life outside the gin shop during these early years, except that in January 1811, when April was twenty, he had a daughter by a sixteen-year-old slave woman named Matilda. Despite the lack of legal provision for the marriage of slaves, Matilda was April’s wife. She may have been a slave of William Ellison, but just as likely she was not. By this time April probably lived almost as a free man and could have chosen a wife in town or from one of the plantations he visited as he made his rounds servicing McCreight’s gins. His new child, Eliza Ann, was a slave because her mother was.37 At the time of her birth April was edging toward full freedom. Almost certainly he did not plan for his wife and daughter to remain slaves forever.
ON June 8, 1816, William Ellison appeared with April before a Fairfield District magistrate and five freeholders from the neighborhood. The planter had come to seek permission to emancipate his twenty-six-year-old slave. In 1800 the South Carolina legislature had spelled out in detail the procedure for manumission. To end the practice of freeing slaves of “bad or depraved character” and slaves who “from age or infirmity” were incapacitated, the state required that a master testify under oath to the “good character” of the slave he wished to free and to the slave’s “ability to gain a livelihood in an honest way.”38 The outcome of this particular hearing must have been a foregone conclusion. All those sitting in judgment would have known the Ellison family as pillars of the Winnsboro community. They would also have known William McCreight and thus the quality of April’s training as a gin maker. And they were probably already acquainted with April himself. They may have observed him at work in McCreight’s shop or witnessed his work firsthand on their plantations. Following the brief ceremony April Ellison, master gin maker, had no other master.
According to the testimony of a white South Carolinian who met April many years after his manumission, William Ellison did not give April his freedom. April purchased it. “During the time of his apprenticeship,” the white acquaintance stated, “he was allowed, by his master, to do extra work; and from his industry and economy he laid up sufficient money to purchase his freedom from his master.”39 The few slaves who obtained freedom often bought themselves, and April’s age of twenty-six suggests that he had spent years working on Sunday and after hours to scrape together his purchase price. Having to buy his own freedom would have been consistent with the stern training for independence that was a tradition in the Ellison family.40
In 1816 April Ellison no longer belonged to another man. For the first time in his life he could decide for himself where he would live and work. A wise choice was crucial, and it could not have been an easy decision. Staying in Winnsboro was one possibility, but one that did not promise much advantage. He might have continued as an employee in McCreight’s shop, but that would have severely limited his income. It would also mean staying in the dependent position he had occupied as a slave, still under the direct supervision of a white man. Moreover, if April had decided to remain in Winnsboro and set up his own shop, he would have been in the untenable position of competing directly with McCreight. Another option was Charleston. Manumitted slaves often made their way to the city, where they had a range of economic opportunities far broader than that available in the countryside. Charleston also offered the advantages of the largest community of free people of color in the state. But April Ellison was a gin maker, and his gins were designed for the short-staple cotton grown in the interior. To survive as a gin maker, he had to live near his market among upcountry cotton plantations.
Shortly after his emancipation April moved from Winnsboro to Stateburg. McCreight may have suggested that Stateburg would be a promising location, or perhaps planters in the area invited April to settle among them, eager as they were for a good local gin maker. In any case, consistent with the other principal decisions in his life, April’s choice of Stateburg was astute. His prospects would not have been better anyplace else in the state. Forty miles from Winnsboro, Stateburg lay near the perimeter of McCreight’s territory, though still within it. In Stateburg April was far enough away to escape daily association with those who had seen him grow up a slave and to avoid direct competition with McCreight in Fairfield District yet near enough to exploit contacts made in McCreight’s shop and to trade on his reputation.
At least as early as 1813 and probably well before, McCreight built gins for High Hills planters. Richard Singleton, for example, whose “Home Place” was just a few miles south of Stateburg, was a good customer for McCreight. A planter with more than 5,600 acres and 240 slaves, Singleton relied on McCreight to service his heavily used machines. In 1814 Singleton paid McCreight $87.64 for “repairs to two old gins.” Two years later, the year April obtained his freedom, Singleton paid McCreight $143.96 ½ for extensive repairs to three gins and ordered another new gin from him.41 Since these repairs were made on site, someone from the shop in Winnsboro, possibly April, traveled to Singleton’s plantation to do this specialized work. As one of the booming plantation districts in the interior, Sumter contained many planters like Singleton who needed the services of a gin maker of proven ability. Most likely, a number of them already knew about April Ellison before 1816, when he came to settle permanently.
Stateburg was located within a few miles of the geographical center of the state, and it stood at a strategic crossroads. One of the state’s oldest and most traveled roads from Charleston to the upcountry—the King’s Highway of colonial days, later called the Charleston-Camden Road—ran north and south along the narrow ridge of hills. At Stateburg it intersected the Sumterville-Columbia Road that cut across the hills from east to west. For an ambitious gin maker Stateburg provided an ideal location. It allowed easy access to the prosperous plantation districts of the midlands, an opening to the developing cotton regions farther north, and a good connection to Charleston to the south. The Wateree River also offered valuable downstream transportation to Charleston and beyond.
The village had been laid out in 1783 by General Thomas Sumter, revered “Gamecock” of the American Revolution, who hoped to attract the state capital when the legislature moved it from Charleston to some more central location. Not incidentally, General Sumter also hoped to boost the value of the more than 100,000 acres he owned in the area. But the capital went to Columbia, twenty-five miles to the west, and when April Ellison arrived in Stateburg in 1816 he found a sleepy little settlement, with only a tavern, an academy, a store, and a church. Vast estates surrounded the village in the hills to the east and along the swamps of the Wateree River, which flowed four miles to the west. After the mid-1790s cotton production had increased almost yearly in Sumter District, and the wealth it generated supported a small aristocracy in splendid style.42 In 1808 David Ramsay, the Charleston physician and historian, claimed that around Stateburg “refined society may be enjoyed in great perfection.”43 When South. Carolina’s preeminent architect and mapmaker, Robert Mills, visited in the early 1820s, he announced that there was “not a more desirable place of residence, either for health or society, in any part of the state….” The High Hills were home to scores of great planters “whose affluence and hospitality give to the place a character of ease and dignity.”44
In their rush for accumulation, the back country’s first-generation aristocrats showed little concern for either ease or dignity. Still, they managed to build more than personal empires. In 1786, for example, General Sumter and several other High Hills grandees met in Stateburg to organize the Claremont Society, which quickly founded a local academy and library. Two years later many of these same gentlemen gathered in the long room of the Stateburg tavern to establish the Claremont Episcopal Church, and the following year they erected a building.45 Nevertheless, the sons and daughters of the founders were primarily responsible for the elegance and refinement that so impressed Ramsay, Mills, and others. Resting comfortably on their fathers’ accomplishments, the second generation could afford to be as concerned with consumption as with accumulation. These sons and daughters cultivated expensive tastes, kept up with sophisticated fashions, and set extravagant standards of hospitality. Often they married into the low-country dynasties, and in time they created a plantation culture in the upcountry nearly indistinguishable from that of the tidewater.46
Sounds of the gracious life in the High Hills echoed through the aristocrats’ spacious homes—at Mathew Singleton’s “Melrose,” at John Singleton’s “Midway,” at Richard Singleton’s “Home Place,” at “The Ruins” of the Mayrants, at the Kinlocks’ “Acton,” and at the Watieses’ “Marden.”47 Anna Waties, daughter of Judge Thomas Waties, who had moved from Georgetown to Stateburg in 1803, explained that an attempt to start a local Sunday School failed because “There are no poor people.” Those of the “better class,” she said, “were as well qualified to teach their children at home as those who would go to church to do it—so it was given up.”48 Viewed from the piazza of a stately home nestled in the High Hills, life could indeed seem uniformly elegant. Anna Waties did not rub shoulders with many poor people on her rounds of fancy dress balls, or while learning to ride “lanciers,” or enjoying the medieval pageantry of a tournament at a local plantation. Nor did she or her friends encounter poor folk while strolling under parasols in the exquisite gardens of the Sumters, Kinlocks, or Richardsons, while worshiping in a pew in Stateburg’s Church of the Holy Cross, or while feasting on a late-morning breakfast of eggnog, mint juleps, coffee, buttermilk, chicken, duck, pigeon, sausages, and hot breads, as several servants shooed flies with peacock-tail fans. At home at “Marden” Anna Waties did not even see many slaves. The home places were clustered in the hills where it was cool, breezy, serene, and healthy, and the only slaves in the immediate vicinity were a dozen or two house servants. Plantation fields and gangs of slaves were out of sight several miles away, many of them on the edge of the Wateree’s buzzing swamps, managed by overseers.49
The opulent society of the planter aristocrats did not attract April Ellison to Stateburg. Instead, he came because their huge plantations required well-made gins as much as slave labor to produce the wealth that supported their elegance. Stateburg’s promising market for gins, its excellent location, and its fine road and river transportation would have meant nothing to April Ellison if he, a “freed yellow man,” were unwelcome. Presumably, he knew before he arrived that Sumter District tolerated Negroes who were free. Although slaves outnumbered free Afro-Americans more than forty to one, there were more free people of color in Sumter in 1820 than in any other rural district in South Carolina.50 The free colored population of Sumter was ten times greater than that of Fairfield.51 It included a group called the Sumter Turks. According to a confused tradition, these dark-skinned people were originally Moors from the Mediterranean who came to South Carolina late in the eighteenth century. Some of them served General Thomas Sumter during the American Revolution, and after the war he invited them to settle in Sumter District.52 Although most Sumter whites did not consider Turks Negroes, the census listed them as free people of color. A few Turk families and a large fraction of Sumter’s other free people of color lived in twenty-four households clustered in the western part of the district. The exact location of this small settlement cannot be determined from the census, but it almost certainly lay within a few miles of Stateburg, though not in the village proper. April Ellison and his family appear in the 1820 census squarely in the middle of this free colored community.53
Initially, April chose to live among those who shared his color and his status. Somewhat like a man in a room full of menacing strangers, Ellison positioned himself with his back safely to the wall. While he familiarized himself with the planter barons of Sumter District, his home was nestled among other free people of color. It served to identify him in the white community as a free man and to protect him and his family from being mistaken for slaves. Living in the settlement also insulated him from the thousands of slaves in Sumter whose masters could quickly get the wrong idea from the most innocent association between free Negroes and slaves. Furthermore, April needed free colored friends almost as much as white customers. If he failed to establish good relations with his free Afro-American neighbors, he set himself up as a potential target for damaging rumors spread by a free Negro enemy, rumors that could destroy his chances to establish his business, and worse. As a gin maker, April brought a highly prized skill to the Sumter free Negro community, one that promised to raise the entire community in the estimation of whites. For mat reason April may have been welcomed by other free Afro-Americans in Sumter. Certainly no evidence suggests they shunned him. Their existence in the district for decades indicated that April’s color and status would not prevent him from practicing his trade.
APRIL began work as a gin maker immediately after settling in Sumter District. In the first few years he primarily repaired gins. Manufacturing new gins on any scale had to wait until he had the capital for a shop of his own and additional skilled laborers. As a gin repairman he probably continued to service McCreight’s old customers, taking care of machines he had helped build in Winnsboro. Now he made the same repairs, but he was his own man and every dollar he earned was his.
In 1819 April presented Richard Singleton with a bill of $42.50 for sharpening saws in his cotton gins. Almost certainly Singleton had purchased these gins a few years earlier from McCreight. At Ellison’s rate of 25 cents a saw, he had hand-sharpened 170 saws, representing probably four gins.54 Forty- and forty-five-saw gins were common, although gins could accommodate sixty or more saws by lengthening the arbor or drive shaft along which the saws were arranged at intervals of roughly three-quarters of an inch. Saws had quickly replaced the wire teeth that Whitney originally devised. A typical saw was a circular piece of iron about eight inches in diameter with an irregular hole in the center for the wooden drive shaft. Teeth serrated the outer edge of the saw, filed to razor-sharp points at about a sixty-degree angle to the perimeter. When the shaft rotated, the saws reached through narrow wooden slats to pull the fiber away from the seeds. The points dulled with use, causing the saw to tear fibers rather than strip them away cleanly. Saws that Ellison later made in his own shop had approximately 160 points evenly spaced around the circumference, each cut at the same angle about a quarter-inch deep.55 Since each point was filed by hand, it was tedious, painstaking, and painful work. April’s hands—dirty, callused, and nicked—would have accurately reflected his trade.
April’s repairs involved much more than simply sharpening saws. Two years before repointing Singleton’s saws, for example, April completely rebuilt a gin belonging to Judge Thomas Waties. April’s itemized bill indicates that he supplied seven new saws and “cut deeper in the teeth” thirty-seven others. He constructed a new drive shaft and removed all the ribs, or slats, “making them wider and polishing them.” With use, the ribs became rough, causing the cotton to catch, choking and clogging the gin. April built a new brush assembly, a hollow leather-sheathed cylinder covered by rows of pig-bristle brushes. The cylinder rotated in the opposite direction of the saws to brush the fibers from the saw points. April also made a new brush nut and band nut, probably of metal, and fabricated new brush and cylinder bearings, either from soft metal or hard wood. He mended the frame, built a new hopper board—which fit on top of the gin above the saws, where the seed-cotton was dropped—and he constructed a new bench on which the slave operators stood as they fed cotton into the machine. In other words, April completely disassembled, rebuilt, and reassembled Waties’s gin. The work was complicated and intricate, both delicate and heavy, and it required all the skills of a gin maker. It involved hundreds of parts fitted snugly into a compact, sturdy machine that had to run smoothly from sunup to sundown during the ginning season. For this work, which lasted at least twelve days and possibly more, April submitted a bill for labor and materials of $58.32½.56
April Ellison’s bill for gin repairs, October 6, 1817. Thomas E. Richardson papers, South Caroliniana Library.
With each year in Stateburg, April’s reputation and list of customers grew. So, too, did his family. Sometime between June 8, 1816, and January 1817, April bought and freed his wife Matilda and his daughter Eliza Ann and brought them to Stateburg.57 His son Henry was born in or near Stateburg in January 1817, followed two years later by William Jr. and in another two years by Reuben.58 Unlike their sister Eliza Ann, all the sons were freeborn. Once the boys were old enough, they helped Ellison in his gin business, but until then he occasionally hired the time of skilled slaves who belonged to local planters. When he rebuilt Judge Waties’s gin in 1817, for example, he credited the judge $9 “for hire of Carpenter George for 12 days.”59 Hired labor, however, did not suffice.
By 1820 Ellison had somehow managed to buy two adult male slaves between the ages of twenty-six and forty-five who could be put to work at once.60 April’s transition from slave to master, from slave to slaveholder, was nearly immediate. Almost from the beginning he built the economic foundation of his freedom on slave labor. No more than four years after he achieved his freedom, April demonstrated that he did not blink at perpetuating a status he detested for himself and his family. If he began to purchase the slaves soon after he arrived in Stateburg, buying them on credit and paying off the debt as he prospered, then he bought slaves at the same time he bought his wife and daughter out of slavery. By showing that he did not hesitate to own, use, and exploit slave labor, he demonstrated to local whites that, although he was a Negro, although he had only recently been a slave himself, he was no more antislavery than they were—namely, not at all. And Sumter whites were surely alert, for the same year April moved to Stateburg, inhabitants of Camden twenty miles to the north uncovered extensive plans for a slave insurrection.61 April Ellison lived a wrenching irony. Having struggled to rescue his family from slavery, he was willing to extend that status to other Afro-Americans. At the age of thirty Ellison was a master gin maker, master of himself, and now a slave master.
A nineteenth-century cotton gin, manufactured in Sumter District, perhaps by William Ellison. In the possession of Capt. Richard and Mrs. Mary Anderson.
A gin saw manufactured by William Ellison. In the possession of Capt. Richard and Mrs. Mary Anderson.
In four short years April Ellison, free man of color, had achieved more worldly success than most white people in the South accomplished in a lifetime. He had established himself in the gin trade in the midst of the piedmont cotton boom, and he rode King Cotton just as surely as did the planters. Buoyed by his attainment and ambitious for more, he petitioned the court in 1820 for a new name. Successful, he was now ready to test the outer limits of white toleration as William Ellison. He decided to move from his current status as a mechanic who maintained another man’s gins to that of a full-fledged independent artisan, constructing, selling, and servicing Ellison gins. To make that move required a shop. In 1822 he purchased an acre of land from General Thomas Sumter, the largest landholder in the district. Ellison’s acre provided him with unquestionably the best location in the area. It sat at the hub of business at the northwest corner of the intersection of the Charleston-Camden and Sumterville-Columbia roads, in the heart of Stateburg. Ellison recognized the value of this strategic location, and so did General Sumter. At a time when the general might have charged $3 to $7 an acre for good land, he sold Ellison the prime crossroads site for $375 cash.62 Here William Ellison built his gin shop, and he, his children, and his grandson operated it there for decades.
During the same years that Ellison built the foundation for his business, he just as carefully constructed a reputation for respectability. In his petition to change his name he told the court that while he tried to “gain a livelihood by honest industry in the trade of Gin making,” he was also “endeavoring to preserve a good character.”63 He recognized that as a free man of color his future prospects depended at least as much upon his standing in the eyes of the established white community as upon his skills as a tradesman. Everything hinged on white perceptions. Achieving respectability was no small task when most whites in South Carolina viewed free Negroes as less diligent, less trustworthy, and less self-disciplined than slaves. These preconceptions made respectability all the more necessary for Ellison.
One path to respectability led just a few hundred yards south of Ellison’s gin shop, across the old King’s Highway to the Church of the Holy Cross, the Episcopal church founded thirty years earlier. The Stateburg gentry worshiped there and allowed the Ellisons, a handful of other free people of color, and a few slaves to sit in the gallery upstairs. But on August 6, 1824, the vestry and wardens of Holy Cross resolved “that the free colored man—Wm Ellison, be permitted to place a Bench under the Organ Loft, for the use of himself and Family.”64 It hardly seems an auspicious location—under a wheezing organ at the back of the sanctuary, seated on a bench they carried into the church—but it was. The vestry granted the Ellison family the privilege of worshiping on the main floor. Henceforth the Ellisons uttered their prayers and sang their praises on the same level, though behind, the Singletons, the Friersons, the Mayrants, the Watieses, and the other families of the white chivalry.65
No evidence exists that the Holy Cross vestry accorded any other free colored person such a place. Since Ellison evidently initiated the request that the vestry approved, it appears that he actively sought confirmation of his status by asking to set himself apart, literally, from the slaves and free people of color in the gallery. Aristocratic whites were his customers, his neighbors, and by the summer of 1824 his parishioners. After the service the Ellisons probably did not linger to mingle with the white members who gathered under the shade trees discussing weather, crops, families, sicknesses, and blooded horses. Nor did the Ellisons receive invitations to join the white families for a grand Sunday supper.66 Nonetheless, they had their place on the main floor, their symbol of respectability and acceptance.
Ellison probably began attending Holy Cross soon after he arrived in Stateburg. His alternative was the High Hills Baptist Church, about two miles north of the village. It counted among its flock some of Sumter District’s most substantial planters as well as a sizable number of free Negroes and Turks.67 Perhaps Ellison chose the Episcopal church because of proximity or because he had done business with some of its communicants from his earliest days in Stateburg. It may have been Dr. William Wallace Anderson who smoothed his way into Holy Cross.
Holy Cross Episcopal Church, Stateburg. The South Carolina Historical Society.
Dr. Anderson was master of “Borough House,” a magnificent eighteenth-century mansion located on the west side of the Charleston Road, between Ellison’s gin shop and the church. Dr. Anderson’s father, Richard Anderson, had seen service in South Carolina during the American Revolution and while in Stateburg was befriended by Thomas and Mary MacKenzie Hooper, owners of “Borough House.” The elder Anderson returned home to Maryland after the war, but he carried with him memories of the good people of Stateburg. Years later, when his son William Wallace graduated from medical school, Anderson suggested the village as a fine place for a young doctor to hang out his shingle. In 1810 Dr. Anderson did just that and soon afterward married Mary Jane MacKenzie, the Hoopers’ niece and adopted daughter. Mary Jane eventually inherited “Borough House,” and it remains in the Anderson family to this day.68 Dr. Anderson’s medical records show that he treated members of the Ellison family as early as 1824, when, for the fee of one dollar, he pulled one of William’s teeth.69 Dr. Anderson also operated a plantation, and he may have been one of Ellison’s customers in the early 1820s as he was later. The acquaintance of the white Anderson and the mulatto Ellison grew into a durable and trusted relationship.
EIGHT years after he arrived in Stateburg, four years after he changed his name, and two years after he bought his crossroads acre, Ellison received confirmation that the High Hills gentry found him acceptable. Behind the decision of the Holy Cross vestry lay their careful evaluation of his character, his conduct, and his work. In 1816 Ellison had undergone a similar scrutiny by another body of white men—the magistrate and freeholders in Fairfield. The first investigation approved his freedom, the second his move down from the demeaning gallery. In eight years as a free man he had established that he was honest, sober, pious, able, respectful, and respectable. His success required unimpeachable behavior, but that alone would not have won him acceptance. The key was his trade. As a gin maker Ellison provided an indispensable service to the planters. He was not the only gin maker in Sumter District, but he was the only one in Stateburg. He was handy, he was good, and local planters wanted him to stay. That he built his business with slave labor helped him prove his reliability among slaveholders. By conceding to him very little—decent treatment, the chance to practice his craft, permission to distinguish himself from other Negroes—the Stateburg gentry gained a great deal.
Because the ground Ellison walked was never more treacherous than in his early years as a free man, the action he took in 1821 had special significance. In March he went to the Court of Common Pleas in Sumterville to sue a white man for failure to pay a debt. In the case of William Ellison v. George McSwain, Ellison charged that McSwain had bought a horse from him and still owed him $8o.70 Although South Carolina law allowed free people of color to make contracts and go to court, if necessary, to enforce them, Ellison would have weighed carefully the consequences of appearing in court against a white man. He could not afford to overstep his bounds. To appear uppity could mean disaster. But how could he afford not to go to court? The respect of whites meant nothing if he could not protect his property. Moreover, how long would white respect last if he did not stand up for what was legally his? To seek redress in court was risky, but to avoid court when it was the last resort was riskier still. His lawsuit against McSwain was bold but not reckless. His decision to bring suit probably reflected his growing confidence in his standing in the eyes of whites. And it probably added to his stature, since the jurors in the case found for Ellison.
Ellison met the test of the jury in 1821 and the vestry in 1824, but he knew that for him the testing would never end. His reputation was only as good as yesterday’s behavior On any day an error in a bill could blemish his name, a botched gin repair could raise questions about his skills, a disrespectful word or a careless gesture could be taken as evidence that he had gotten too big for his britches. Any mistake, no matter how small, could erode white patronage and acceptance and undermine all he had constructed.