Forrest & Maples was an American slave-trading company based in Memphis, Tennessee, United States during the mid-1850s. The principals, Josiah Maples and Nathan Bedford Forrest, were in business together as Forrest & Maples from July 1854 [1] to December 31, 1855. [2]
In November 1854 Forrest & Maples sold a nine-year-old girl named Page to Lavinia and Lemuel Smith for $600. [3] According to Forrest biographer Jack Hurst:
The profits of the trade during this era, in which the prices of slaves in the burgeoning Southwest were rising quickly, are indicated by the return on a two-week investment Forrest & Maples made on three—'Ellick aged 30, Rhita aged 40 + her child Ellick 6 years'—purchased from Miss S. I. Stailey on October 16, 1854, for $1,450. On November 2 the firm sold what apparently was the same trio—listed this time in the Shelby County Register's records as 'Ellick age 33, Ritter age 38, Ellick Jr. 5 years old'—to Sam Tate for $ 1,600. Such profit (more than 10 percent in seventeen days) was commonplace, made possible by the economic tenor of the time and place.
On July 9, 1855, they sold Adisson, age 22, to V. Beckworth for $1,000. [4] Also in 1855, Forrest & Maples sold Mary, age 15, for $800. [5]
One interesting case of a runaway slave ad placed by the firm is told in Chase C. Mooney's Slavery in Tennessee (1957): "Forrest and Maples offered the largest known reward for one of their escapees. They would pay $500 to the deliverer of Richard—if taken in a free state —a Charleston-reared carpenter about thirty years old who could read and write well". [6]
On New Year's 1856 the Maples and Forrest partnership was dissolved. [2]
Nathan Bedford Forrest was a Confederate States Army general during the American Civil War and later the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan from 1867 to 1869.
George Tucker Stainback was an American classicist and Presbyterian minister; he served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army, and in 1877 presided over the funeral of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Timothy S. Huebner is an American historian who focuses on the history of the American South, the U.S. Constitution, American slavery, the American Civil War, and the Reconstruction Era. Since 2002, he has been director of the Rhodes College Institute of Regional Studies in Tennessee. As of 2023, he chairs the editorial board of the Journal of Supreme Court History.
The history of slavery in Tennessee began when it was the old Southwest Territory and thus the law regulating slavery in Tennessee was broadly derived from North Carolina law, and was initially comparatively "liberal." However, after statehood, as the fear of slave rebellion and the threat to slavery posed by abolitionism increased, the laws became increasingly punitive: after 1831, "punishments were increased and privileges and immunities were lessened and circumvented." Tennessee was one of five states that allowed slaves the right of a jury trial, and one of three states that never passed anti-literacy laws, although the punishment for forging a slave pass was up to 39 lashes.
Bolton, Dickens & Co. was a slave-trading business of the antebellum United States, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. Several principals of the firm eventually shot and killed one another as part of a long-running dispute over money, events known as the Bolton–Dickens feud. A Bolton & Dickens account ledger survived the American Civil War and is a valuable primary source on the interstate slave trade.
Byrd Hill was a slave trader of Tennessee and Mississippi prior to the American Civil War. Byrd Hill has been described as one of the "big four" slave traders in the centrally located city of Memphis on the Mississippi River. Hill was partners for a time with Nathan Bedford Forrest and is believed to have resold six of the Africans illegally trafficked to the United States on the Wanderer in 1859. Hill also made a fleeting appearance in Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.
William L. Boyd Jr. was a slave trader, real estate broker, and steamboat captain of Nashville, Tennessee in the United States. In 1883 he was charged with murder in the shooting death of his girlfriend Birdie Patterson.
Capt. Montgomery Little, CSA was an American slave trader and a Confederate Army cavalry officer who served in Nathan Bedford Forrest's Escort Company. Little was killed in action during the American Civil War at the Battle of Thompson's Station.
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part.
James McMillin was an American tavern keeper and slave trader of Kentucky. He was implicated in more than one case of attempted kidnapping into slavery. In 1857 Memphis slave trader Isaac Bolton shot McMillin several times over an unprofitable trade. McMillin died hours later in the home of Memphis slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest. His last name is very often spelled McMillan or McMillen; this article uses the spelling that appears on his grave marker and hometown newspaper.
Isaac Neville, also known as Ike Neville, sometimes spelled Nevil or Nevill, was an American slave trader based in Memphis, Tennessee in the United States.
Forrest's jail was the slave pen owned and operated by Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. Forrest bought 87 Adams Street, located between Second and Third, in 1854. It was located next to a tavern that operated under various names, opposite Hardwick House, and behind the still-extant Episcopal church. Forrest later traded, for fewer than six months, from 89 Adams. Byrd Hill bought 87 Adams in 1859. An estimated 3,800 people were trafficked through Forrest's jail during his five years of ownership.
Catharine was an enslaved woman of Tennessee in the United States who may have been associated with slave trader and Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest. Her life is poorly documented, and she could be a propagandistic fiction. She is known primarily from one unsigned anti-Forrest newspaper article that appeared in the wake of the Battle of Fort Pillow, but there are two, possibly three, other sources that may at least confirm her existence.
Jeffrey Edward Forrest, commonly called Jeff Forrest, was a Confederate States Army military officer who was killed in action. He was the youngest of the six Forrest brothers who engaged in the interregional slave trade in the United States prior to the American Civil War.
Aaron H. Forrest was one of the six Forrest brothers who engaged in the interregional slave trade in the United States prior to the American Civil War. He may have also owned or managed cotton plantations in Mississippi. He led a Confederate cavalry unit composed of volunteers from the Yazoo River region of Mississippi during the American Civil War. He died in 1864, apparently from illness.
John N. Forrest was one of the six Forrest brothers who engaged in the interregional slave trade in the United States prior to the American Civil War. A disabled veteran of the Mexican–American War, he worked in family businesses, including as the jailor at Nathan Bedford Forrest's slave pen in downtown Memphis.
This is a bibliography of works about Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–1877), an American slave trader, cotton plantation owner, Confederate cavalry leader, railroad executive, and Grand Wizard of the First Klan.
William Hezekiah Forrest, called Bill Forrest, was one of the six Forrest brothers who engaged in the interregional slave trade in the United States prior to the American Civil War. During the war he served under his brother Nathan Bedford Forrest's command as leader of a group of Confederate-aligned raiders called the Forty Thieves. After the war Forrest was involved in several shooting incidents and was implicated in the assassination of a Freedmen's Bureau sub-commissioner in 1866. Multiple accounts describe Forrest as an unstable and lethal "desperado." Forrest died in 1875 of either "dissipation" or "stomach congestion."
Jesse Anderson Forrest was an American slave trader, Confederate cavalry colonel, livery stable owner, and cotton plantation owner of Tennessee and Arkansas, United States.
Josiah Maples was a 19th-century cotton plantation owner, bank director, and slave trader of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas in the United States. Maples is notable as a slave-trading business partner of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
