On September 5, 1755, Joseph Ball, a lawyer living in a village outside London, wrote his nephew, George Washington, in Virginia, commending him for his performance as an officer in the French and Indian War: “It is a Sensible Pleasure to me to hear that you have behaved yourself with such a Martial Spirit in all your Engagements with the French Nigh Ohio. Go on as you have begun; and God prosper you.”

Ball’s letter to his nephew is in a letterbook – a blank book used by correspondents to keep copies of their letters – filled with almost two hundred pages of his letters sent to family, business associates, and legal clients between 1743 and 1759. After Ball’s death in 1760, his son-in-law Rawleigh Downman used the book’s remaining blank pages for his own correspondence.
The letterbook is fragile, but a microfilm copy has long been available to researchers. Now digital images scanned from the originals may be accessed from the Joseph Ball Correspondence catalog record. Pages of the letterbook will be included in a Library of Congress exhibition about George Washington and Britain’s King George III: “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” scheduled to open in March 2025.
Joseph Ball II was the older half-brother of Mary Ball Washington (1708/1709-1789), George Washington’s mother. Born in Virginia in 1689, Ball went to England as a young man to study law, returned to Virginia in the late 1720s, and then went back to England with his family, where he remained until his death.
The letterbook contains two more letters from Ball to the Washingtons. In one he counsels his sister to put an end to a proposed plan to send “your son George to sea.” The naval career he projects for the future president is dire: “a common sailor before the mast, has by no means the common liberty of the subject; for they will press him from a ship where he has 50 shillings a month and make him take three and twenty; and cut him and slash him and use him like a negro, or rather, like a dog. And as for any considerable preferment in the navy, it is not to be expected, there are so many grasping for it here, who have interest and he has none.”
Another letter, to Elizabeth (Betty) Washington, George’s sister, accompanied a gift of a tea chest, six silver spoons, a tea strainer, and sugar.
Ball’s letters from England to the Washingtons and other Virginia correspondents contain news and information that kept these Anglo-Virginians, who were still British subjects, informed about Britain and its empire. Ball wrote them about the Battle of Culloden, Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Seven Years War, British market for American tobacco, and the British royal family. In 1751, for example, he wrote another nephew, Joseph Chinn, about the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of the future King George III.
While he lived in England, Ball delegated the direction of Morattico, his Virginia plantation near the Rappahannock River, and the enslaved people who lived and worked there, to Joseph Chinn. Many of the letters in the volume are to this nephew. These contain his instructions for the management of his farm and enslaved people whom Ball referred to as “my family” or “my people.” Ball instructs Chinn how to care for his house and farm, and what to do about the housing, clothing, food, medical care, childcare, labor, and sale of Morattico’s enslaved population. In a long letter from 1743, written over several weeks, Ball asks Chinn to “register all the negro children that shall be born and after keep an accounting of their ages among my papers.” When he describes the contents of a box of medicines he sent, he suggests Chinn consult with “Old Poll,” who knows how to use them.

Poll is one of several enslaved people Ball mentions by name in the letters. Two more, whose stories he tells in greater detail, are a young man named Aron, whom Ball gave the surname Jameson, and a girl or young woman named Martha or Pat. (Pat or Patsy was a common nickname for Martha; Martha Washington’s daughter Martha Parke Custis was called Patsy.) Both were in England with Ball, and the letters are mainly about his plans to send them back to Virginia—including his effort to escape paying duty on them. That Ball was required to pay duty on Aron and Martha is an indication of their legal status as possessions rather than people.
Ball described Martha as “a Negro wench” that he brought with him from Virginia when she was “a small girl.” He specified that when she returned to Virginia, she should have a cabin with a lock and key where she could live with her mother, and advised Chinn to “use her tenderly.”
Aron owned a violin and “some spare strings.” He also knew how to read and write. In 1749, for example, Ball asked Chinn to “send for Bess and give her Aron’s letter.” Ball instructed Chinn to treat Aron “kindly especially the first year” since he was not used to “hard labor.” But the following year “he must be put in for a full share.” He was to be given “his own little house,” axe, chickens, and a horse “to ride to church,” but Ball didn’t want him “to strole about much on nights either on foot or horseback.”

Another letter contains threats of punishment amounting to what can only be called torture: “Aron I believe will be too saucy. If he offers to be unruly or strike his overseer he must be tyed up and slashed severly, and pickled.” (“Pickling” was the painful practice of putting salt or an acid, such as vinegar, into a wound made by whipping or “slashing.”) If Aron ran away, Ball directed, he must have a “pothook about his neck.” Ball signed off with a direct exhortation to Aron: “If you shall be good I shall be yr loving master.” Ball asked his nephew to show this letter, with its threats, to Aron so he could read it for himself.
Ball’s letters to his Virginia connections show how news, information, goods, and people—Afro-Virginians as well as Anglo-Virginians—traveled between Britain and the American colonies, linking them together in the years before the American Revolution. They also raise questions about the mix of violence, cold accounting, and seeming concern in Joseph Ball’s letters to Joseph Chinn about the management of the enslaved people of Morattico, and the world in which George Washington, who was born in 1732, was raised.
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“Joseph Ball II…” For these and other details of Joseph Ball’s life, see Martha Saxton, The Widow Washington: The Life of Mary Washington (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
“counsels his sister…” Joseph Ball to Mary Washington, May 19, 1747, Joseph Ball Correspondence, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. All letters cited are from this collection.
“Another letter…” Joseph Ball to Elizabeth Washington, November 2, 1749.
“In 1751…” Joseph Ball to Joseph Chinn, February 6, 1750, postscript March 21, 1750. In this letter Ball wrote: “last night the Prince of Wales dyd.” Prince Frederick died on March 20, 1751. Ball is using the Julian or “old style” calendar. For the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, see: https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/julian-gregorian-switch.html.
“whom Ball referred to…” Joseph Ball to Joseph Chinn: (“my family”) January 13, [1760]; (“my people”) July [17], 1745; February 18 – March 20, 1743); July 18, 1745.
“When he describes the contents…” Morattico Timeline,” Virginia Commonwealth University, https://www.people.vcu.edu/~bmangum/timeline.htm.
“Ball described Martha…” Joseph Ball to William Ball, February 5, 1754.
“He specified…” Joseph Ball to Joseph Chinn, February 19, April 23, August 31, 1754.
“But the following year…” Joseph Ball to Joseph Chinn, April 23, 1754; [February] 25, 1748; April 23, 1754.
“Ball asked his nephew…” Joseph Ball to Joseph Chinn, August 31, 1754.
Comments (2)
Thank you for posting this. I am a descendent of Joseph’s through his son J.A. Zopher Ball and have been trying to verify as thoroughly as possible that this is truly my line. As long as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch are somewhat accurate then this should be correct.
thanks.
Hello. I left a message with the Library of Congress manuscripts department. I’m hoping to contact Julie Miller to see if she came across any letters in this collection to Ball’s sister, Esther. (She was the mother of his nephew, Joseph Chinn.) I am a descendant of Esther through another son. Thank you for any information you can share with me.