Ann Simons Ball was near equal to her husband in plantation management and evidently had a military style, which left her with the family nickname “Captain Nancy.”… When John Jr. was out of town, Ann wrote her husband to report that she had personally whipped her laundress, Betty, for not cleaning the bath towels properly.

John Ball and his kin were customers of the Work House, a city-run institution for the imprisonment and torture of Charleston’s slaves… The Work House employed civil servants who whipped black people (in soundproof rooms that muffled screams) at the request of their owners or of the police, at twenty-five cents per flogging… Angelina Grimke […]