Kendig was sued a number of times under Louisiana's redhibition (warranty) laws and accused of having willfully misrepresented the health or character of slaves he sold.

"[4] Kendig was somewhat unusual relative to his peers in that he primarily bought slaves from in and around Louisiana, rather than importing them from the Upper South.

[3] Similarly, Kendig was somewhat unusual relative to his peers in that the majority of his customers were probably from New Orleans rather than from more rural regions of the Mississippi River valley occupied by sugar and cotton plantation owners and their enslaved work forces.

[8] Along with Thomas Foster, Kendig was one "of the largest and the wealthiest of the slave traders doing business with Touro in its antebellum phase.

[3] An example of the kind of lawsuits brought against Kendig is the 1860 petition of Thomas Gatlin to the Fourth District Court of New Orleans, as summarized by the Digital Library on American Slavery Race and Slavery Petitions database and published under a Creative Commons license:[10] Major Thomas Gatlin, a resident of Arkansas, asks the court to nullify the sale of a slave.

In the fall of 1859, Jim was apprehended in Henderson, Texas, and when Gatlin went to collect him, he found him "in jail, suffering from a severe gun-shot wound which he had received in being taken."

[14] In 1873, the Sadsbury farm of Benjamin Kendig, deceased, consisting of 211 acres of land and improvements, was listed for sale.