John Rucker White was born in approximately 1799 in Kentucky. In 1830, White was a resident of
Howard County, Missouri, as head of a household of 17 people, including five slaves. In 1840, White lived in Richmond Township, Howard County, in a household of 20, including 13 slaves. White's place may have been located near
Salt Creek. In 1847, a resident of
Lafayette, Louisiana placed an ad in a New Orleans newspaper in hopes of finding a 20-year-old "
quateroon girl" named Anna or Hanna Johnson, who was "purchased from Col. J. R. White of this city in December, 1845, who brought her to this city from
St. Louis, in the state of Missouri." White may have been trading in New Orleans in partnership with a man named William S. Green sometime before 1848. Circa 1848, White may have been part of a firm called White & Tooly. The nature of Selby and White's professional or personal relationship is unclear, but year prior, according to the 20th-century history
Bench and Bar of Boone County, "In 1848, 'Lewis, a
free person of color', was prosecuted for 'aiding and assisting in decoying Caroline, a slave, the property of Thomas Selby...Selby was proprietor of Selby's Hotel in Columbia, and Caroline waited on the hotel table. Lewis, who had been liberated by his former master, visited Caroline and told her of the benefits of freedom. So Lewis had to go to jail." There was also a slave trader named William Selby working in the area. and "J. R. White, Mo." was at the Verandah again in April 1852. In between, he placed a runaway slave ad seeking to find a six-foot-tall man called Bob who "had a great impediment in his speech." White may have operated a
slave depot in New Orleans in 1854 in partnership with
Thomas Foster. In 1855 the papers reported that there had been a
cholera outbreak in the vicinity of Columbia, Missouri, and that there were "upwards of thirty cases on the farm of Mr. John R. White four miles east of New Franklin, Howard county — one death, a little negro boy. The disease was brought to the farm by a family from St. Louis in which city quite a number of cases have occurred." A month later a doctor visiting White's plantation claimed to have detected
arsenic in the coffee and other food and concluded that there was a plot to poison the family, a crime laid to a missing slave. At the time of the 1860 U.S. census, White legally enslaved 76 people. At some point in his trading career, in an example of
family separation in American slavery, "John R. White sold a small child to William Quisenberry of Boone County, but sold the mother in Louisiana..." == Negro-Trader White ==