Rice C. Ballard
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Rice Carter Ballard (August 31, 1860) was a 19th-century American slave trader, plantation owner, and cotton merchant. His slave trading partners were
Isaac Franklin Isaac Franklin (May 26, 1789 – April 27, 1846) was an American slave trader and plantation owner. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, which became the largest slave trading firm in the United States. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, i ...
and
John Armfield John Armfield (1797–1871) was an American slave trader. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, "the largest slave trading firm" in the United States. He was also the developer of Beersheba Springs, and a co-founder of Sewanee: The Univ ...
. After leaving the slave-trading business, Ballard invested his profits in land and enslaved people. Together Ballard and his investment partner
Samuel S. Boyd Samuel Stillman Boyd (May 27, 1807 – May 21, 1867), often referred to as S. S. Boyd or Judge Boyd, was a prominent attorney in early 19th-century Mississippi and one of the Natchez nabobs who stood at the apex of antebellum Mississippi societ ...
owned about 500 people in 1860. The University of North Carolina holds an archive of Ballard's correspondence and business that has been uploaded to FromthePage.com, a crowdsourced transcription platform.


Trading

According to historian Calvin Schermerhorn, "Rice Ballard's paid agents included James G. Blakey, Andrew Grimm, Silas Omohundro, and
Benjamin Parks Benjamin ( he, ''Bīnyāmīn''; "Son of (the) right") blue letter bible: https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/h3225/kjv/wlc/0-1/ H3225 - yāmîn - Strong's Hebrew Lexicon (kjv) was the last of the two sons of Jacob and Rachel (Jacob's th ...
. They scoured the backcountry for young, fit, able, and salable enslaved people."


Legacy

An obituary in the Louisville (Ky.) ''Courier-Journal'' praised him effusively, describing him as "emphatically a man of the strictest integrity, of the most generous, confiding, and reliable friendships, and of the most liberal and judicious benevolence. Distress and want never appealed to him in vain. Unassuming in manner, unostentatious in habit, with few and simple wants, the chief gratification his large wealth gave him was that it enabled him to serve friends, relieve the poor, and solace the wretched. By these he can never be forgotten. In their hearts his memory will be kept green forever." Joshua C. Rothman presented a different perspective in his 2021 history ''The Ledger and the Chain'': "Few slave traders were more successful, and none were more influential, than Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard...their company was among the most formidable businesses in the South...from Alexandria and Richmond to Natchez and New Orleans, Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard controlled the fates of thousands of enslaved people...Their America incentivized entrepreneurialism, financial risk, and racial slavery, and no one made more of the junction among those things than they did...Their professional dominance came in part from their command of the intimate daily savageries of the slave trade. Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard immersed themselves without hesitation in the routine brutalities and coldhearted violence of their work."


See also

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List of American slave traders This is a list of American slave traders, people whose occupation or business was the slave trade in the United States, i.e. the buying and selling of human chattel as commodities, primarily African-American people in the Southern United States, ...
*
List of white American slave traders who had mixed-race children with enslaved black women This is a list of white American slave traders who had mixed-raced children by black women they had at one time legally enslaved. Historian Alexander J. Finley asserts that sex trafficking inherent in American slavery sometimes resulted in long ...
*
Bibliography of the slave trade in the United States This is a bibliography of works regarding the internal or domestic slave trade in the United States (1776–1865, with a measurable increase in activity after 1808, following the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves). General * * * * * Ca ...


References

1790s births 1860 deaths Year of birth uncertain People from Virginia 19th-century American slave traders Franklin & Armfield American cotton plantation owners 19th-century American planters American slave owners People%20using%20the%20U.S.%20civilian%20title%20colonel {{US-bio-stub