He worked at a number of occupations including federal police officer guarding Native American delegations visiting the city, municipal constable, fishmonger, restauranteur, real estate agent, and slave trader.

Dove would probably have been considered a slave-trading agent, meaning a second-tier trader who primarily concentrated on local, small-scale buying for resale to the larger interstate slave dealers.

[4][a] Dove advertised twice in the Alexandria Gazette in 1816; in February he had for sale some Waterloo-striped calico fabric,[5] and in June he offered newly arrived pickled oysters.

[16] By the end of the decade he operated and advertised an "elegant refectory" adjacent to a coffeehouse,[17] and he also sought to buy and sell quality secondhand furniture.

[18] In June 1833, Benjamin Lundy, a highly influential early abolitionist, mentioned Jilson Dove in his newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation:[19] Last week, a very decent, orderly-looking, colored woman, was coming over the bridge to our city to get employ, it is said.

The woman finding she was about to be taken to the pen or enclosure,—where all kidnapped and others are put, before taken to the south,—got loose, and attempted to run away from the constable—but he followed her so close, she had no way to escape but by jumping into the river, where she was drowned.

[19]The abolitionist poet Sara Jane Lippincott later used this report as the basis for the poem "The Leap from the Long Bridge: An Incident at Washington.

[24] In Slave-Trading in the Old South (1931), historian Frederic Bancroft wrote that: "Jilson Dove, probably a real estate agent, wished 'to purchase from forty to fifty Negroes of both sexes, from the age of twelve to twenty-five', and to give in exchange two two-story brick houses in the business part of Washington.

The trading in District slaves—which was relatively slight, spasmodic and carried on chiefly by agents—also comprised, of course, sales to settle estates, collect debts and pay for fines and jail fees".

Most of Jilson Dove's notices were for purchases in the interregional trade, but during the summer of 1837 he offered 'his services as an agent to the citizens of Washington to furnish them with servants for their own use.

[11] Dove and his wife are both buried at Trinity United Methodist Church Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia under an obelisk-shaped grave marker.