Charles Ball Research Paper

Fifty Years in Chains, a real life story about Charles Ball. At the young age of four, Charles got stripped from his mother’s hands and was sold as a slave never to see her again. Charles went through a great flux of feelings throughout his life in reaction to the horrible struggles of being a slave, but he always seemed to find a way to stay hopeful.

It all started when Charles’s grandfather was brought to the Southern States from Africa and was sold as a slave. Charles was born in Calvert County Maryland in 1785. His parents were both slaves which meant he also had the status of being one. When he was around four years old Charles’s mother’s master passed away and left all of his siblings to be sold to separate purchasers. His first traumatic experience at that age was watching his mother getting beaten and abused when she came running over to hold him in her arms for the last time. As his new master took him further away from his mother, her cries became more distant, “...at length they died away in the distance, and I never again heard the voice of my poor mother.” (pg. 11) Ball’s emotional pain was quickly replaced with contentment of his current master’s temperament which he correlated with “an angel and a saviour.”

He gave Charles new clothing, made him his personal waiter and gave the young boy high hopes of one day becoming overseer which he believed was the “highest points of honor and greatness.”(pg. 16) But, Ball’s high hopes fell short when his master had died and he was to be under the authority of the master’s father. The father immediately put him to work in the fields in which he had spent many years doing. He used the defensive tactic that every other slave was using, obedience. By doing this he had avoided getting whipped by his