John D. James, Thomas G. James, and David D. James

Born in the 1810s in the Nashville, Tennessee area, they grew wealthy as interstate slave traders and bankers before the American Civil War.

[1] They had a stand at the Forks of the Road slave market in Natchez, Mississippi where they sold people that had been transported from the Upper South.

[2] In 1835, a formerly enslaved woman named Julia sued her daughter Harriet's owner Samuel T. McKenney, and slave traders William Walker and Thomas D. James on the basis that she had been trafficked illegally through a free state (Illinois) so that she could be resold in Missouri and therefore was entitled to her freedom.

"[6] When Egerton died of an abdominal/gastrointestinal illness shortly after being settled on the plantation of Mary Herring, she sued for the purchase price and damages.

According to case record James v. Drake, 35 Tenn. 340 (Tenn. 1855), the intent of the suit was "to recover the value of a slave named Bill" who had died of smallpox after one of the brothers had sent an enslaved woman named Kitty to Thomas D. James' house, shortly after which she exhibited symptoms of highly contagious smallpox, which ultimately infected and killed Bill.

[10] Despite the disdain with which slave traders were purportedly regarded in the South, letters between John D. James and a plantation owner named William Terry demonstrate that the merchant and planter classes socialized.

'"[11] At the time of the 1850 census, John D. James was listed on the slave schedules as the legal owner of 27 people in Davidson County, Tennessee.

[12] Thomas G. James caught the attention of Harriet Beecher Stowe and is mentioned in her 1853 non-fiction polemic A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

[13]Later in the book Stowe used a second Thomas James advertisement as part of her evidence for her point that black families in Virginia were being scoured by slave traders to serve the markets of the lower Mississippi.

"[15] In 1865 a Tennessee court ruled in the case of John D. James vs. Ocoee Bank, that "an acceptor of a Bill of Exchange, upon its non-payment at maturity, is not entitled to notice; his liability being absolute and unconditional.