Samuel Stillman Boyd (May 27, 1807May 21, 1867), often called Judge Boyd, was an esteemed attorney of early 19th-century Mississippi, as well as a judge (briefly), political party leader, cotton-agriculture investor, real estate speculator, large-scale enslaver, and pro-slavery activist. Boyd seems to have been politically influential in his community, initially as a Whig Party leader. Boyd's name was floated in both 1852 and 1860 as a candidate to fill an empty seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
After making his name in the law, Boyd became business partners with Rice C. Ballard, a former slave trader. Ballard and Boyd jointly built what has been described as an "empire of plantations". Ballard's business papers, held at the University of North Carolina, are a valuable primary source on American slavery and the slave trade, and through him, researchers have some knowledge of Boyd's personal and professional actions. As such, Boyd is best known in the 21st century for letters that describe his abuse of enslaved African-American women. He likely fathered one or more children by women whom he legally enslaved.
Biography
Early life and legal career
Boyd was born in Portland, in what was then Massachusetts' District of Maine, as the fourth-born child of future Maine State Treasurer Joseph Coffin Boyd and Isabella Southgate. Isabella Southgate was educated at Leicester Academy in the 1790s and was remembered decades later for both her beauty and her "extraordinary mind". Through his mother, Boyd was a cousin to Eliza Southgate Bowne and a grandnephew of Founding Father Rufus King. Boyd graduated valedictorian of his Bowdoin College class of 1826. He gave an address upon graduation on the topic of The Nature of Revolutions, and Their Influence on the Condition of Man. He was two years behind future U.S. President Franklin Pierce at Bowdoin, and was also a classmate of future U.S. Representative S. S. Prentiss. Both Boyd and Prentiss settled in Mississippi and occasionally faced each other in court.
Boyd began practicing law in 1828 in Wilkinson County, and in 1836 moved to Natchez, Mississippi, in Adams County, where he settled and remained for the rest of his life. In his Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians (1889), former U.S. Representative Reuben Davis called Boyd one of the "great men of Natchez". In 1836 the Rodney, Mississippi Telegraph newspaper reported that Boyd was a candidate for criminal court judge for a five-county area. Once settled in Natchez, he opened a law firm in partnership with Alexander Montgomery. One history described Montgomery & Boyd as "a firm of high rank. S. S. Boyd was...highly educated, and retained through life the habit of a student. He was a logical and demonstrative speaker, and deeply read in the learning of his profession. He never coveted office or sought popularity, yet no man commanded more confidence and respect throughout the State". According to Dunbar Rowland's Encyclopedia of Mississippi History (1907), "His firm defended the will of Isaac Ross in the famous suit brought by the heirs in 1834, and in 1837, as special judge , he delivered the opinion of the High court in the famous case of Vick vs. Vicksburg, reversed, however, by the United States Supreme Court". He is also credited in some sources as having been a judge of the Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals (since 1869 known as the Mississippi State Supreme Court) in the year 1837. It is possible he was just a judge in this one case, or for some other brief period of time, in which case "Judge Boyd" may be used in an honorific sense, similar to how his business partner of later years, Ballard, was often addressed "as Colonel Ballard, but it is not clear how he got this rank". In 1839 Boyd was a Whig Party candidate for the Mississippi State Senate.
In 1838, Boyd was married to Catherine Charlotte Wilkins, daughter of James Wilkins. James Wilkins had been a member of the Mississippi Territorial Legislature and was an important early banker in Mississippi. It was through Catherine's inheritance that Boyd came into possession of a grand home just outside Natchez called Arlington. Over time, Boyd used his fortune to build a "fine old library" and decorate the home with art and furnishings from Italy. In 1843, Boyd's younger sister Augusta Murray Boyd married future Confederate general Lloyd Tilghman.