Matthew Garrison[a] (c. 1809 – July 29, 1863) was an American interstate slave trader who bought in Kentucky and sold in Louisiana and Mississippi from the 1830s into the 1860s.

[2] Garrison was certainly trading 1839, at which time Henry Bibb was captured by a mob while attempting to rescue his wife and daughter from slavery.

Both the whites, who were criminals, and the slaves, being held for 'safe keeping,' wore heavy chains and worked cutting or breaking stones.

The grieved parents believed their child had been sold, but to their surprise, the slave dealer returned Mary Frances after several weeks.

As all were chained together night and day, it was impossible to sleep, being annoyed by the bustle and crowd of the passengers on board; by the terrible thought that we were destined to be sold in market as sheep or oxen.

"[6][b] Garrison initially attempted to sell his captives in Vicksburg but, being unsuccessful, brought them down to New Orleans where they were kept on St. Joseph street (located roughly between Tivoli Circle and the waterfront road called New Levee), where the showroom of slaves was open daily at 10 a.m.[10] The family was kept there for months, until they were eventually purchased by a man named Francis E. Whitfield, who owned a cotton plantation in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, 50 miles (80 km) above the mouth of the Red River.

"[12] In April 1841 Garrison was again selling in New Orleans, offering "valuable house servants and young negro boys" from 152 Camp Street.

[18] In May 1845, Garrison was working in New Orleans,[19] no doubt wrapping up the trading season for the year before planters returned to their lands for the summer.

Its wharves were lined with steamboats from every river point; its streets echoed with the rumble of six-mule team "Conestoga" wagons loaded with the farm products of the up-country "hinterland," and the bugle blasts of the daily mail stage coaches.

[21]At the time of the 1850 U.S. federal census, Garrison lived in Louisville and reported owning real estate valued at $7,500.

[27] In 1855 he advertised a 30-year-old man qualified to work as a "whitewasher and plasterer" who was also "a good gardener and a very superior dining room servant.

[29]In May 1856, a man named Moses Hundley sued for his freedom based on the terms of the will of his former owner John Hundley, and according to a University of North Carolina Greensboro database of slavery-related court petitions, "He further reveals that he is currently being held in a Louisville jail called 'a Pen' by either George S. Miller or Mathew Garrison.

[33] When Reverend Thomas James, a missionary and freedman from New York, was granted permission by the U.S. Army in February 1865 to liberate Louisville's slave jails, he found 260 people imprisoned in Garrison's pen, "many confined in leg irons".

[34] James was essentially impressed into running the contraband camps in Louisville after he was mugged by "Missouri ruffians" on a train; when the conductor contacted the local authorities for help, the U.S. Army instead diverted James from his missionary assignment and put him to work locally:[35] At Louisville the government took me out of the hands of the Missionary Society to take charge of freed and refugee blacks, to visit the prisons of that commonwealth, and to set free all colored persons found confined without charge of crime.

Mr. Garrison, of Louisville, Ky., whose whole life has been spent in making brothels, prostitutes, widows, and orphans, is at last dead and gone to his just reward.

He would often travel through the State of Kentucky to buy up the handsomest mulatto female slaves that he could find, without any regard to separating husbands and wives, and would, take them to New Orleans, and sell them for the basest of purposes.

[37]Matthew Garrison's slave jail was located on the east side of Second Street[38] between Main and Market, in Louisville, Kentucky.

A marker was placed at the site in 1998, commemorating the local slave trade, which is believed to have trafficked between 2,500 and 4,000 enslaved Kentuckians out of the state annually.