Robert J. Lyles (1817 – May 18, 1860) was a slave trader who worked in Nashville, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

[3] His grandfather was doctor Richard Lyles, a surgeon's mate at the hospital in Williamsburg during the Revolution.

[4][5][6] This makes Lyles a relative of James Breathed, once leader of Jeb Stuart's horse artillery.

[12][13] He also sometimes partnered with William L. Boyd Jr.[14] Historian Frederic Bancroft in Slave-Trading in the Old South described Lyles & Hitchings as one of Nashville's "resident leaders in the interstate traffic" in 1859–60.

[18] Upon one such voyage, on the steamer B. L. Hodge, while on the Red River near Grand Ecore, he was stabbed to death by hunchback passenger Bazile L.