Roswell King

Together with his son, Barrington King, he founded Roswell Manufacturing Company in the Georgia Piedmont, establishing a cotton mill and industrial complex.

As a teen, Roswell participated in the American Revolutionary War as part of the naval resistance before moving to Georgia's low country.

[1] When he moved, King transported 36 enslaved African Americans with him from his plantation and bought another 42 slaves in Darien to work on constructing the mill, infrastructure and other buildings at the new complex.

Other people named in the act included John Dunwoody and James Stephens Bulloch, friends who he had invited to participate in the company and community.

King was known as a master of efficiency and jack of all trades having found much success in farming, banking, and finally manufacturing in the mostly agrarian South.

At Roswell Manufacturing Company, King continued to depend on the skills and labor of enslaved African Americans as he built the business.

She identified them as including Renty, the twins Ben and Daphne, and Jem Valiant, whose mothers were the slave women Betty, Minda, and Judy, respectively.

[11][12] The historian Bell documented that the marriage of Kemble and Pierce Butler was fraught with conflict by that time, and was undermined by episodes of spousal infidelity.

[13] But, Kemble's observing that white planters and managers had mixed-race children with slave women was consistent with other reports of the times, such as Mary Chesnut's diary of the Civil War era, and numerous other accounts.

"[16] (Historians of the period have noted such contradictions in many contemporary writings, including those of Thomas Jefferson, who opposed slavery but was prejudiced against blacks.)

David notes that King Jr. published his own account of the "brutal system he deplored" in a long letter to The Southern Agriculturalist on 13 September 1828, in which he said that overseers were responsible for much of the cruelty to slaves.

David notes that if his account is accurate, the diet and treatment of slaves on the Butler plantation seemed to have deteriorated dramatically between 1828 and what Kemble saw and reported in 1838, shortly after King Jr. had left.

[17] Kemble's journal appears to quote King Jr. verbatim: I hate the institution of slavery with all my heart; I consider it an absolute curse wherever it exists.