Abijah Hunt (1762-1811) was an American merchant, planter and banker in the

Natchez District The Natchez District was one of two areas established in the Kingdom of Great Britain's West Florida colony during the 1770sthe other being the Tombigbee District. The first Anglo settlers in the district came primarily from other parts of Britis ...

Early life

Abijah Hunt was born in 1762 in

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delaware ...

.A Guide to the Abijah Hunt Papers, 1800-1821, 1880
The University of Texas at Austin: Briscoe Center for American HistoryD. Clayton James, ''Antebellum Natchez'', Louisiana State University Press, 1993, p. 157, 15

/ref> Two of his brothers were Jeremiah Hunt and Jess Hunt.

Career

Abijah moved from New Jersey to

Cincinnati Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...

Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...

to work as a merchant supplying the

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s stationed at Fort Washington there.Karl Raitz, Nancy O'Malley, ''Kentucky's Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes Along the Maysville Road'', Louisville, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2012, p. 12

/ref> He worked with his brothers (Jeremiah and Jess), buying goods on credit in

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and

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ers hauled the goods to

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where they were loaded onto flatboats and floated down the Ohio River to be sold in Cincinnati. He made a small fortune providing supplies to the soldiers in Cincinnati. In 1795 Abijah helped his cousin, John Wesley Hunt, set up a similar merchant business in nearby Lexington, Kentucky. The Hunts obtained some of their goods by trading with each other. John would send Abijah "bacon, butter, cheese, salt, tobacco, whiskey, and horses" from Lexington, while Abijah would send John "leather, shoes, and nails" from Cincinnati. In 1798, Abijah moved to the

of Mississippi. He invested some of his money in land, developing cotton plantations in Adams,

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and Claiborne counties. With Elijah Smith, he opened general stores and public cotton gins in the market towns of

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, Greenville, Port Gibson, Big Black, and Bayou Pierre. By 1805, Hunt was the largest merchant in Mississippi. Hunt and Smith charged a ten percent commission to planters for processing their cotton at his public cotton gins. Additionally, the Hunt and Smith firm operated a cotton brokerage and transported logs and cotton bales to market. Thus, Abijah created a kind of vertical monopoly, making a profit in every area of the cotton business: growing it on his plantations, processing it at his public cotton gins, and selling it through his brokerage. Hunt was involved in other business enterprises. In 1799, Abijah was appointed as Deputy US Postmaster of the Mississippi Territory. In this capacity, he made sure that all mail from Natchez would reach

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. In 1809, he was a co-founder of the Bank of Mississippi. Abijah sold a couple of his plantations. In 1807,

Winthrop Sargent Winthrop Sargent (May 1, 1753 – June 3, 1820) was a United States patriot, politician, and writer; and a member of the Federalist party. Early life Sargent was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts on May 1, 1753. He was one of eight childre ...

bought Bellevue Plantation in Adams County from Hunt and renamed it

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. In 1808, Hunt sold a plantation on the Bayou Pierre in Claiborne County, complete with 60 or 61 slaves. Abijah lived in Greenville (now defunct) in Jefferson County. Politically, he was a Federalist. He hired his nephew, David Hunt, also from New Jersey, to work in one of his stores.Gary D. Joiner, Cheryl H. White, ''Historic Haunts of Shreveport'', The History Press, 2010, pp. 73-7

/ref>

Death

Hunt died in 1811 at the age of 49, shot during a duel with Democratic Republican opponent

George Poindexter George Poindexter (April 19, 1779 − September 5, 1853) was an American politician, lawyer and judge from Mississippi. Born in Virginia, he moved to the Mississippi Territory in 1802. He served as United States Representative from the newly adm ...

. The latter went on to have a successful political career, serving as Governor of Mississippi. The inventory of Abijah's estate listed his 60 slaves by name. Hunt's nephew, David Hunt, inherited his land and businesses, selling the stores to buy more land. David gradually built this inheritance into his own much larger inventory of plantations.Louisiana State University Libraries: DAVID HUNT LETTERS
/ref> He eventually owned 25 plantations, which included Homewood,

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, and

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. Consequently, David Hunt became one of the twelve millionaires in the Natchez area in the antebellum era.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hunt, Abijah 1762 births 1811 deaths People from New Jersey Businesspeople from Cincinnati People from Natchez, Mississippi American merchants American planters American bankers Cotton American slave owners American duellists