Gilchrist was also seemingly bolder than many slave traders in openly advertising individual children for sale, separate from their families of origin, potentially setting himself up for abolitionist opprobrium.

[1] Gilchrist may have been trading as early as 1830, when he would have been about 20 years old, as he placed a newspaper ad in 1840 asserting that he had "for the last ten year had an extensive and large business in trading transactions generally viz: Selling and negociating [sic] sales of Slaves, Real Estate, Bonds and Mortgages and all kinds of negotiable Paper, the sale of Cotton or any other article..."[2] Gilchrist was certainly in the slave business by 1838, when he placed a "Negroes Wanted" classified ad in a Camden, South Carolina newspaper.

)[6] The record of an 1839 South Carolina court case with ties to Alabama mentions Gilchrist as party to an agreement to "speculate on negroes" with several business partners.

[2] Records of coastwise slave ships arriving in Savannah, Georgia and New Orleans, Louisiana offer some evidence of Gilchrist's business.

[12][13] The letter writer said it was thought to be the work of "northern fanatics" and that former Governor George McDuffie, now in the U.S. Senate, would want to see the culprits hanged.

He also seeks an injunction to prevent Gilchrist from 'removing eloigning or in any way putting away'" John, Lewis, Lucy, Mary Jane, Nancy, Sally, Sarah, Washington, or William without the express permission of the court.

As historian Jeff Strickland put it in his 2021 book All for Liberty, "Gilchrist had torn hundreds of slave families apart, and, on this day, he threatened to do it again.

"[16] The rebellion was suppressed, Kelley was hanged, no one living knows what became of the woman, and Gilchrist went back to the job the abolitionists called soul driver.

[18] Gilchrist & King listed a group of 80 plantation-trained workers for sale in March 1850, along with "eight single BOYS and GIRLS, age 14 to 17".