Henry E. Ballou

Member of Neil's Creek Anti-Slavery Society

Very little is known of Henry E. Ballou, who in the early 1800s was a resident of Lancaster Township, Jefferson County, Indiana. Some researchers on Ancestry.com state that his mother’s maiden name was Ellis, which may be what his middle initial may represent. But nothing to document his birth or his family’s names have been found as of yet.

What we do know, thanks to the research done by Meagan Brown Bahlke, is that Henry Ballou Meagan was an active member of the Neil’s Creek Anti-Slavery Society in 1842. That year, she noted, Ballou and Lyman Hoyt were named delegates to an Indiana state convention, which they travelled to and attended together. 

There was a convention called by the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers, that was held during the winter of 1842-43. Details of the event are the topic of a book written by Walter Edgerton, published in 1856, titled A History of the Separation in Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends. Apparently, the Quakers were not immune to disagreement over the idea of slavery and whether to take a stand against it.

The nameplate of Walter Edgerton's 1856 account of Indiana conventions of the Society of Friends.

On February 25, 1843, Ballou was named treasurer of the NCASS; two months later, on April 25, he married Jane K. Mattley, daughter of English immigrants John and Elizabeth “Betsy” Key Mattley. 

What the couple did or where they lived between then and the Civil War is unknown, however it appears that Henry enlisted in the Union Army in Indianapolis, Indiana, on July 10, 1863, and mustered into Company B of the 113th Indiana Infantry. It was a short stint, though, as he mustered out a week later on July 17, 1863, according to that year's Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana.

Even a full-text search at FamilySearch.org, where unindexed names can often be found in wills, deeds, and other records, found nothing more on either Henry or Jane.

The Mattley Family

Jane’s birth and death dates are unknown. But her family history has been documented by descendants, including Susan J. Holcomb, who shared a story about John Mattley in her family tree. She writes that Jane’s father, John, was born in Dorset, England, in 1778 and worked as a weaver making sail cloth before immigrating to the United States in the early 1800s. 

Jane’s oldest brother, William, was born before the family immigrated from England. Another older brother, Aaron Kenneth, was born in 1822  in Orange County, New York, where the family is listed in the 1820 census.

By the 1830 U.S. census, the family had moved to Saddle River, Bergen County, New Jersey; between that and the 1840 U.S. census, the family moved again, this time to Lancaster, Indiana. 

Both the 1830 and 1840 censuses list females in the family between the ages of 15 and 19. Either one of those girls could have been Jane. Holcomb, who does not include Jane in her online tree, describes the female in the 1830 census as ““Unknown Daughter One or servant.”

Another researcher, Karen Kay Morlan Ponder, has Jane in her tree, which includes only her marriage document and an undocumented birth year of “about” 1819. This means Jane may have been the teenage girl in the 1830 census, and would have been between 28 and 33 years old when she married Henry in 1843. While it was unusual for women to marry that late in life, it isn’t unprecedented. In fact, when Aaron married Eliza Jane McCaslund/McCasland in Lancaster in 1851, his bride was 34 years old.

Of course, it also is possible Jane was the teenage girl in the 1840 census, and would have been 18 to 22 years old the year she married Henry. 

Either way, it is unknown if Jane and Henry had any children. A page-by-page scan of the 1850 U.S. census records for both Lancaster and neighboring Graham Townships found no record of Henry Ballou; I suspected there may have been a spelling error, but I found no variation of that surname in those records. 

It may be that, by then, the couple had moved to Indianapolis where Henry enlisted during the Civil War.

After that, the couple may have moved west along with the rest of Jane’s family. Her brother William, who married Phoebe Sprague in Lancaster in 1841 and was living in Graham Township in 1850 with their four children, died in 1879 and is buried in Wilmathsville, Adair County, Missouri. His memorial at FindAGrave states that served in the Union Army during the Civil War. 

Aaron Mattley moved to Scotland County, Missouri, where Elizabeth died in 1874; Aaron died there on October 29, 1888, from injuries he sustained while serving as a captain in Company D of the Missouri Home Guards’ Cavalry Regiment during the Civil War.

Their younger sister, Harriet, born 1831 in New Jersey, married William T. Thomson, born in 1839 in Lewis County, Kentucky. The couple appears to have also gone to Scotland County, Missouri. William died there on November 24, 1900; Harriet died in 1914 in Portland, Oregon, where two of her daughters lived.

Disheartening as it is not to know more about the life events of Henry and Jane Mattley Ballou, especially whether or not they may have worked with other anti-slavery organizations, I am hopeful more research will unearth more information.