James McMillin (July 26, 1806 – May 24, 1857) was an American tavern keeper and slave trader of Kentucky. He was implicated in more than one case of attempted kidnapping into slavery (the abduction of a free family of color with intent to sell them as chattel in a slave state). 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.
Life and work
McMillin was a resident of Maysville, Kentucky. His name is often recorded as James McMillan or James McMillen. In 1903, his hometown newspaper summarized his biography thusly: "Jim McMillin, as he was familiarly known, was, in the parlance of that period, a 'Nigger Trader.' At the time of which we write, he lived in a house in the 'brick row' in West Second street, using the cellar for a "pen," the windows and doors being secured by iron bars, bolts and locks." His widow once testified that McMillin "kept his slaves in the basement of his kitchen." McMillin worked a number of interstate slave tradersincluding Lewis Robards as early as 1850, Bedford Forrest beginning in 1853, and Bolton, Dickens & Co., circa 1855 to 1857as an agent who visited plantations and small towns buying slaves for resale in larger, more profitable markets. 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. As Arian and Martha were being shipped down the river on the steamship Sea Gull, her friends discovered what had happened to her and sued for her return. In 1853, a man named Isaac Hensley, of Sardinia, Ohio, and his four children were taken from their beds in the middle of the night, tied up, rowed south across the Ohio River to Kentucky in a skiff, and deposited in James McMillen's private slave jail. According to the Maysville Eagle by way of the Louisville Daily Courier:
Around 1855, Robards lost his slave jail when investor John H. Morgan, later of the Confederate States Army, sued over an unpaid financial obligation. The premises were purchased by Bolton, Dickens & Co., whose local representative was one of the principals of the firm, Washington Bolton. According to J. Winston Coleman's Slavery Times in Kentucky, in July 1855, Bolton sent McMillin to "lay out in Negroes." According to records from a lawsuit, in autumn 1855 Wash Bolton wrote James McMillin that he was trying to fill out a shipping lot to send south for the already-underway selling season: "We must have negroes if possible. Can't you buy the man and wife in jail? Buy every good negro you can and have them here by Friday. If you believe we can make $150 a head profit on the Peed negroes, buy them; if not, let them runaway, but don't let any of your negroes get away."
In 1856 a woman named Ann Goddard sued over being wrongfully imprisoned in McMillin's slave jail. According to the Louisville Daily Courier, "She brought suit for her freedom, alleging that she had been forcibly arrested by the officers and lodged in the negro jail of the late James McMillan, under the claim of the defendant, Mary Goddard, that she was her slave, when in truth she was a free white woman...An attempt was then made by the defendant to prove her the daughter of a mulatto named Matilda, by whom the plaintiff had been reared from infancy, but in this they did not succeed, as no witness was introduced who was present at the birth of the child."