James McMillin (slave trader)

McMillin was a resident of Maysville, Kentucky. His name is often recorded as James McMillan or James McMillen. His widow once testified that McMillin "kept his slaves in the basement of his kitchen." Bedford Forrest beginning in 1853, and Bolton, Dickens & Co., Forrest and McMillin had a profit-sharing agreement in which McMillin received 25 percent of revenue above expenses on enslaved people that were purchased for resale at Forrest's negro marts in Memphis, Tennessee, and Vicksburg, Mississippi. In 1850, notorious Lexington, Kentucky, trader Lewis Robards paid McMillin to kidnap a legally free woman named Arian Belle, and her four-year-old child Martha, from Mason County, Kentucky, in the middle of the night. According to the Maysville Eagle by way of the Louisville Daily Courier: At some point before his murder, McMillin sold a young person named John Burnett, who later, under his current name of John Cook, placed a family reunification ad in the newspaper in 1886, hoping to find his lost mother and sister, or perhaps his mother's other sons: ==Death==

The deal that resulted in James McMillin's murder was supposedly done in December 1856. In Slave-Trading in the Old South, Frederic Bancroft described the circumstances of McMillin's death, writing that he was "a well-known trader, who for years had ranged over Kentucky searching for slaves for Lexington and Memphis dealers. The apprentice was promptly sent to Memphis and sold as a slave. This was a crime against the apprentice and a fraud on the purchaser. By some rare, good fortune the negro obtained the aid of a lawyer of integrity and by suit recovered his freedom; and the Boltons were compelled to refund the money they had received for him." An 1870 Memphis Avalanche article claimed the enslaved man was to be freed under the terms of a Kentucky owner's will if he was ever taken out of state. The 1898 Memphis Commercial Appeal retelling claims the buyer was not Thomas Crenshaw of Morning Sun but Rev. D. K. Crenshaw of Bond Station, Shelby County. According to another account: "On the morning of the 23d Isaac Bolton was alone in the Howard Row slave market. He was under the influence of liquor and was in an ugly mood. McMillan entered. No one ever knew exactly what occurred. There were loud words. McMillan was seen to run across the open court and Isaac Bolton raised a shotgun to his shoulder and emptied two loads of buckshot into McMillan’s back." McMillin died shortly thereafter from his wounds. == Aftermath ==

McMillin's heirs successfully petitioned to have the trial moved out of Shelby County. A clergyman testified at the Bolton trial that although he was a slave trader and a tavern owner, McMillin was considered to be respectable and of good character. His body was moved from Memphis to Maysville by the steamship Northerner. His headstone reads, My Husband James McMillin, b. July 26, 1806, was murdered In the City of Memphis by Isaac L. Bolton, May 23, 1857, age 50 years. == See also ==