John Anthony Quitman was an American lawyer, politician, and soldier. As President of the Mississippi Senate, he served one month as Acting Governor of Mississippi as a Whig. He was elected governor in 1849 as a Democrat, and served from January 10, 1850, until his resignation on February 3, 1851, shortly after his arrest for violating U.S. neutrality laws. He was strongly pro-slavery and a leading Fire-Eater.
Henry Baldwin was an American judge who was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from January 6, 1830, to April 21, 1844.
Hiram George Runnels was a U.S. politician from the states of Mississippi and Texas.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Isaac Franklin was an American slave trader and plantation owner. Born to wealthy planters in what would become Sumner County, Tennessee, he assisted his brothers in trading slaves and agricultural surplus along the Mississippi River in his youth, before briefly serving in the Tennessee militia during the War of 1812. He returned to slave trading soon after the war, buying enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland, before marching them in coffles to sale at Natchez, Mississippi. He introduced John Armfield to the slave trade, and with him founded the Franklin & Armfield partnership in 1828, which would go on to become one of the largest slave trading firms in the United States. With a base of operations in Alexandria, D.C., the company shipped massive numbers of the enslaved by land and sea to markets at Natchez and New Orleans.
Charles F. Hatcher, typically advertising as C. F. Hatcher, was a 19th-century American slaver dealing out of Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. He also worked as a trader of financial instruments, specie, and stocks, and as a land agent, with a special interest in selling Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas real estate to speculators and settlers.
Haller Nutt (1816–1864) was an American Southern planter. He was a successful cotton planter and plantation owner in Mississippi. He developed a strain of cotton that became important commercially for the Deep South.
Bruinsburg is an extinct settlement in Claiborne County, Mississippi, United States. Founded when the Natchez District was part of West Florida, the settlement was one of the end points of the Natchez Trace land route from Nashville to the lower Mississippi River valley.
Cotesworth Pinckney Smith was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi from 1832 to 1838, and again in 1840, and was chief justice from 1849 to 1861, returning to Associate Justice status from then until his death in 1862.
John Preston Hampton was the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi from 1818 until his death in 1829.
John Taylor was a justice of the Supreme Court of Mississippi, which was then called the High Court of Errors and Appeals, from 1818 to 1820.
The Forks of the Road was a slave market in Natchez, Mississippi in the United States. The Forks of the Road market was located about a mile from downtown Natchez at the intersection of Liberty Road and Washington Road, which has since been renamed to D'Evereux Drive in one direction and St. Catherine Street in the other. The market differed from many other slave sellers of the day by offering individuals on a first-come first-serve basis rather than selling them at auction, either singly or in lots. At one time the Forks of the Road was the second-largest slave market in the United States, trailing only New Orleans.
Theophilus Freeman was a 19th-century American slave trader of Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He was known in his own time as wealthy and problematic. Freeman's business practices were described in two antebellum American slave narratives—that of John Brown and that of Solomon Northup—and he appears as a character in both filmed dramatizations of Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave.
William A. Pullum was a 19th-century American slave trader, and a principal of Griffin & Pullum. He was based in Lexington, Kentucky, and for many years purchased, imprisoned, and shipped enslaved people from Virginia and Kentucky south to the Forks-of-the-Road slave market in Natchez, Mississippi.
Thomas McCargo, also styled Thos. M'Cargo, was a 19th-century American slave trader who worked in Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Louisiana. He is best remembered today for being one of the slave traders aboard the Creole, which was a coastwise slave ship that was commandeered by the enslaved men aboard and sailed to freedom in the British Caribbean. The takeover of the Creole is considered the most successful slave revolt in antebellum American history.
Robert H. Elam, usually advertising as R. H. Elam, was an American interstate slave trader who worked in Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Calvin Morgan Rutherford, generally known as C. M. Rutherford, was a 19th-century American interstate slave trader. Rutherford had a wide geographic reach, trading nationwide from the Old Dominion of Virginia to as far west as Texas. Rutherford had ties to former Franklin & Armfield associates, worked in Kentucky for several years, advertised to markets throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, and was a major figure in the New Orleans slave trade for at least 20 years. Rutherford also invested his money in steamboats and hotels.
John W. Anderson was an American interstate slave trader and farmer based near Maysville, Mason County, Kentucky. Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court John Marshall was an investor who funded Anderson's slave speculations. Anderson was involved in the establishment of the Forks of the Road slave market in 1833. Anderson was elected to the Kentucky General Assembly in 1836 but died before he could take office. A log-built slave jail established on Anderson's property is now on exhibit in the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center and is believed to be the only surviving rural American slave jail in existence.
Sowell Woolfolk was a 19th-century American businessman and politician known for serving as a Georgia state legislator and U.S. state militia officer, working as a slave trader, and dying in a duel at Fort Mitchell, Alabama in 1832.
