According to the
1850 U.S. census, Simmons was probably born around 1815. He began working as a slave trader by 1847, as the E. L. McGlashan Collection of Documents Concerning
Slavery in the United States at the
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale has a receipt for Simmons' purchase of Zena on May 25, 1847, from William Perry at Richmond, and the purchase of an enslaved man named Moses for $500 from D. M. Miller, "commission" salesman, somewhere in one of the
Richmond, Virginia slave markets on June 5, 1847. The McGlashan collection also has a receipt for the sale of 21-year-old Priscilla to Simmons by Benjamin Sumner of
Lincoln County, North Carolina, on October 6, 1849. The special collections department of the
Washington and Lee University libraries holds five slave receipts for purchases made by Simmons: • June 18, 1847: Charity, $87.50 • March 1, 1850: Agnes, 16 years old, $600 • June 8, 1850: Alfred, 13 years old, $500 • April 29, 1852: Billy, 17 years old, $700 • August 7, 1852: Caroline, 19 years old, $890 In 2009, an auction of Americana in Connecticut included a slave sale receipt from Hugh Hogare (sp?) of Richmond, Virginia, for $375 paid by Simmons for an enslaved man named John on June 26, 1849. In 2023, an auction house offered a slave receipt for the sale by G. W. Williams of Richmond of an enslaved man named Ryal to Simmons for $525, on November 19, 1851. In March 2024, the
Swann Galleries auctioned off a set of slave sale receipts, two of which included the name E. H. Simmons: sold Leander to Simmons in 1851—slave trading was illegal within Georgia until 1856, so slave traders like Trowbridge operated at
Hamburg, South Carolina, just across the
Savannah River from
Augusta, Georgia • At the
Hamburg, South Carolina slave market trader
N. C. Trowbridge sold nine people to Simmons on February 3, 1850. These people were identified as "Preston, Lewis, King, Susan, Sarah, Francis, Sally, Jane & child." Another receipt held by Yale shows that Simmons bought "four Negro slaves...Betsy and her three children...Rachel, Clea, and Eliza" from the traders
Bernard M. Campbell and Walter L. Campbell at their
Baltimore slave jail for $1,000, on September 4, 1851. Simmons was enumerated as a resident of
Harris County, Georgia at the time of the 1850 U.S. census. and his slaves had built a landmark plantation house called Ossahatchie at
Waverly Hall in the 1830s. The census enumerator listed Simmons' birthplace as unknown, and his occupation as "negro trader." In December 1852, Lowe sought letters of administration in Harris County for the estate of Elmore H. Simmons, deceased, notice of which was published in a
Columbus, Georgia, newspaper. A second notice, about the planned closure of Simmons' estate, was published in a Columbus newspaper in December 1855. == See also ==