Bolton, Dickens & Co.

Several principals of the firm eventually shot and killed one another as part of a long-running dispute over money, events known as the Bolton–Dickens feud.

A Bolton & Dickens account ledger survived the American Civil War and is a valuable primary source on the interstate slave trade.

"[1] Beginning in 1846, a clan by the name of Bolton began using the Mississippi River and rail lines for slave arbitrage, which is to say, buying and selling people as commodities.

[3][4] According to Chase C. Mooney's history of slavery in Tennessee, "Dickins did much of the scouting around; Washington was at Lexington; Isaac spent most of his time at Vicksburg; and Wade looked after the Memphis office.

"[5] As one history put it, "To summarize the general business plan, Bolton, Dickins and Co. sent agents to places where enslaved people were no longer needed, bought them, and forced them to move to markets where they could be sold for more money...Bolton, Dickens & Co. might buy 20 slaves from someone in St. Louis and sell them to someone in New Orleans; or buy 50 in Memphis and sell them in Vicksburg, Miss.

"[6]Bolton, Dickens & Co. make multiple brief appearances in Harriet Beecher Stowe's A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, including a reprint of an advertisement apparently placed by Thomas Dickins: "NEGROES WANTED.

Tourists on passing steamers—then the only method of traveling—invariably had their attention called to the large painted letters which adorned the riverside wall of their structure and which read "Bolton & Dickens slave dealers".

The sign and the firm both figure in Mrs. Beecher Stowe's story of Uncle Tom and many letter writers of the day referred and often commented severely upon it and Bolton and Dickens had more than a national reputation.

They had branch houses at New Orleans and elsewhere and their agents penetrated every section of the country south of Mason and Dixon's line in search of black people to supply the demands of their customers who embraced planters throughout the entire Southwest.

[14] Court records include a claim that the firm had annual transactions "amounting in the aggregate to several millions of dollars".

[29] In what amounted to a West Tennessee gangland war, at least half a dozen people were shot or killed in relation to Bolton, Dickens & Co. business dispute beginning in 1856 and ending in 1870.