Bolton, Dickens & Co. was a slave-trading business of the antebellum United States, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. Several of principals of the firm eventually shot and killed one another as part of a long-running dispute over money, events known as the Bolton–Dickins feud. A Bolton & Dickens account ledger survived the American Civil War and is a valuable primary source on the interstate slave trade.
Family business
Beginning in 1846, a clan by the name of Bolton began using the Mississippi River and rail lines for slave arbitrage, which is to say buying and selling people as commodities. Wade H. Bolton, Isaac L. Bolton, Jefferson Bolton, Washington Bolton, and Thomas Dickins formed a business partnership, which continued until 1857. According to Chase C. Mooney's history of slavery in Tennessee, "Dickins did much of the scouting around; Washington was at Lexington; Isaac spent most of his time at Vicksburg; and Wade looked after the Memphis office."
Wade and Isaac were brothers, and Wash and Jefferson were brothers, and both sets of brothers were second cousins through descent from a Virginian named Charles Bolton (or Boulton), who lived 1700 to 1767. Also, Isaac L. Bolton married Cinderella Bolton, his second cousin and Washington and Jefferson's sister. Later, Isaac and Cinderella's daughter Josephine Bolton married Thomas Dickins' son Samuel. Jefferson Bolton died early in history of the business (late 1840s), but one of his surviving daughters married a half-first-cousin named John C. Bolton, who was a lawyer and took up for his wife Mary and her sisters, and who later was reportedly involved in shootouts with his second-cousin-once-removed Wade H. Bolton during legal depositions. Also, apropos of nothing, Thomas Dickins' wife was born Martha Bolling Eppes Vaughn, and was first cousins twice removed to Thomas Jefferson's wife Martha Wayles.
Bolton, Dickens & Co. make multiple brief appearances in Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, including a reprint of an advertisement apparently placed by Thomas Dickins: "NEGROES WANTED. I will pay at all times the highest price in cash for all good negroes offered. I am buying for the Memphis and Louisiana markets, and can afford to pay, and will pay, as high as any trading man in this State. All those having negroes to sell will do well to give me a call at No. 210, corner of Sixth and Wash streets, St. Louis, Mo. Thos. Dickins."
Bolton, Dickens & Co. had an "immense slave pen at the foot of Howard Row on the river front" in Memphis. Highly networked and entrepreneurial, the ring expanded rapidly and eventually had Bolton & Dickens branches in a number of American cities, including New Orleans, Vicksburg, Mobile, Lexington, Richmond, Charleston, Natchez, St. Louis, and Jefferson City, Missouri. They also built a strong network of contacts through mentorship and patronage; one of their more enterprising trainees was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who later opened a competing retail storefront in close proximity to where the Bolton operation in Memphis. (Recent research into Forrest's slave-trading business has not been able to verify this apprenticeship, which had been reported in Memphis histories since the 1800s.)
As one history put it, "To summarize the general business plan, Bolton, Dickins and Co. sent agents to places where enslaved people were no longer needed, bought them, and forced them to move to markets where they could be sold for more money...Bolton, Dickens & Co. might buy 20 slaves from someone in St. Louis and sell them to someone in New Orleans; or buy 50 in Memphis and sell them in Vicksburg, Miss.; or buy 100 in Vicksburg and deliver them to Texas."
In 1855 Bolton, Dickens & Co. bought the slave jail that had previously belonged to Lewis C. Robards of Lexington, Ky. At their peak, presumably in 1856, the Bolton family reportedly had a net worth of . Court records include a claim that the firm had annual transactions "amounting in the aggregate to several millions of dollars.
An 1875 newspaper recounting of the family firm's rise and fall retold the history this way:
Family feud
In what amounted to a West Tennessee gangland war, at least half a dozen people were shot or killed in relation to Bolton, Dickens & Co. business dispute beginning in 1856 and ending in 1870. One account claims 19 people were killed, half a dozen of whom were recently emancipated former slaves of the Boltons and the Dickens families who were murdered by family "guards" as the most violent phase of the feud got underway in 1868.