While the traders themselves usually remained in town near their jails or Negro depots, their agents traveled extensively over Kentucky, stopping and chatting at the country stores and taverns, loitering, treating, and asking questions at the barrooms and tippling houses, looking in at the slave jails and talking shop.

They were ever cordial to the slaveholding planters or farmer, whether in town on court days, on the highways, or in the fields, as if specially concerned about his welfare, but at all times they were hoping that he would be forced to sell some of his Negroes. Perhaps some of them had become too unruly to keep; perhaps the planter was facing financial ruin. Little did the dealer care, for the planter's necessity was the dealer's opportunity.

The "Negro Trader" was usually described as a coarse, ill-bred person, provincial in speech and manner, with a cross-looking phiz, a whiskey-tinctured nose, cold hard-looking eyes, a dirty tobacco-stained mouth and shabby dress.

Abraham Lincoln, in an 1854 address, graphically described the typical slave merchant. "You have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native tyrants, known as the `slave dealer.' You must utterly despise him. Your children must not play with his children."

There were several methods by which the slave traders obtained their Negroes to make up their coffles for the Southern markets. Their principal means, was through their agents who circulated all over Kentucky and bought privately.

Lewis C. Robards, the well known, "Negro Buyer" of Lexington, was regularly engaged in the slave traffic, buying, and selling slaves and sending them out of the state into the Southern slave states. His jail was a rendezvous for a gang of kidnappers. Robards had agents working for him in all the Bluegrass counties and those bordering on the Ohio River - buying and selling slaves, and sometimes kidnapping free Negroes, among these agents was James McMillen.

During the winter of 1850, James McMillen, trusted "Negro Agent" of Robards, and some of his marauding gang, broke open the little log cabin of Arian Belle, a free woman of color, living in Mason County.

They seized her secretly and clandestinely in the dead of night and made off with her and Melissa, her four-year-old child. They were hurried off by agents to Lexington and lodged in Robard's slave pen; soon he sold them as slaves for life to a sugar planter residing in Louisiana and put them on the river-packet Sea Gull.

Many of the Kentucky slaveholders had their sentiments voiced by the Frankfort Weekly Yeoman, which denounced the practices of a gang of slave dealers, who made their headquarters in Maysville, close to the Ohio shore. This gang of "Negro Stealers" and kidnappers had relations with the slave dealers in the central part of the state and unscrupulous dealers like Robards.

Washington Bolton, of Bolton, Dickens, & Co., once wrote in 1855 that James McMillen was his agent responsible to gather up some Negroes for his shipment from Lexington to the South.  McMillen was ordered to buy every good Negro; those that they could make $150 profit on. On one occasion Bolton sent his agent, McMillen, $11,460 in money and Eastern checks "to lay out in Negroes" for his firm, Bolton-Dickens, in Lexington.

Return to African American Index