Marriage and Family
At age 21, April took Matilda, a 16-year-old slave woman (1795- ), as his consort (slaves did not have legally recognized marriages) and had a daughter Aliza/Eliza Ann with her, born in 1811. She married Willis Buckner. The Ellisons had three sons: Henry (b. c. 1816-August 20, 1883), Reuben (d. May 1864), and William, Jr. (Jul 19, 1819-Jul 24, 1904), and daughters Maria and Mary Elizabeth (Jun 11, 1824-Sept 15, 1852). It took Ellison time to buy his family out of slavery and try to secure their freedom, not only to earn the money but to work his ways around laws designed to prevent such manumissions. He likely would have first tried to purchase and free his wife, to prevent more of their children from being born into slavery.
The manumission laws in South Carolina made if difficult for Ellison and others to free their relatives, especially children. Purchasing them from slaveholders was one step but, under the 1800 law, other free men had to certify that the slave could support himself in freedom. This could not be the case for children. The Act of 1820 increased the difficulty, as it prohibited slaveholders from making personal manumissions; they had to seek permission of both houses of the legislature, and the number of manumissions dropped as a result. For many free blacks, being forced to hold their relatives as property put them at risk. In hard times, property, including slaves, could be confiscated or put up for forced sale to settle debts of an individual.
After purchasing his daughter Maria from her owner (as she had been born while her mother was still enslaved), Ellison set up a trust with a friend in 1830 to have legal title transferred to him for one dollar. Col. William McCreighton nominally "owned" Maria, but the trust provided for her to live with her father, who could free her if the laws changed. McCreighton kept his part of the trust; and Maria lived as if she were free. As a young woman, she married Henry Jacobs, a free man of color in another county. In the 1850 census, she was listed as a free woman of color, although no legal document supported that, and Ellison provided for her to receive $500 in his will.
Read more about this topic: William Ellison
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