Samuel S. Boyd

Boyd was born in Portland, in what was then Massachusetts' District of Maine, as the fourth-born child of future Maine State Treasurer Joseph Coffin Boyd and Isabella Southgate.[1][2] Isabella Southgate was educated at Leicester Academy in the 1790s and was remembered decades later for both her beauty and her "extraordinary mind".[3] Through his mother, Boyd was a cousin to Eliza Southgate Bowne and a grandnephew of Founding Father Rufus King. Boyd graduated valedictorian of his Bowdoin College class of 1826.[4][5] He gave an address upon graduation on the topic of The Nature of Revolutions, and Their Influence on the Condition of Man.[5] He was two years behind future U.S. President Franklin Pierce at Bowdoin,[6] and was also a classmate of future U.S. Representative S. S. Prentiss. Both Boyd and Prentiss settled in Mississippi and occasionally faced each other in court.[7]

Photograph of Arlington's entrance and porch, taken 1934 during the New Deal's Historical American Building Survey; Arlington still stands but is now a derelict ruin[8]

Boyd began practicing law in 1828 in Wilkinson County, and in 1836 moved to Natchez, Mississippi, in Adams County, where he settled and remained for the rest of his life.[9] In his Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians (1889), former U.S. Representative Reuben Davis called Boyd one of the "great men of Natchez".[10] In 1836 the Rodney, Mississippi Telegraph newspaper reported that Boyd was a candidate for criminal court judge for a five-county area.[11] Once settled in Natchez, he opened a law firm in partnership with Alexander Montgomery. One history described Montgomery & Boyd as "a firm of high rank. S. S. Boyd was...highly educated, and retained through life the habit of a student. He was a logical and demonstrative speaker, and deeply read in the learning of his profession. He never coveted office or sought popularity, yet no man commanded more confidence and respect throughout the State".[12] According to Dunbar Rowland's Encyclopedia of Mississippi History (1907), "His firm defended the will of Isaac Ross in the famous suit brought by the heirs in 1834, and in 1837, as special judge , he delivered the opinion of the High court in the famous case of Vick vs. Vicksburg, reversed, however, by the United States Supreme Court".[13] He is also credited in some sources as having been a judge of the Mississippi High Court of Errors and Appeals (since 1869 known as the Mississippi State Supreme Court) in the year 1837.[14] It is possible he was just a judge in this one case, or for some other brief period of time, in which case "Judge Boyd" may be used in an honorific sense, similar to how his business partner of later years, Ballard, was often addressed "as Colonel Ballard, but it is not clear how he got this rank".[15] In 1839 Boyd was a Whig Party candidate for the Mississippi State Senate.[16]

In 1838, Boyd was married to Catherine Charlotte Wilkins, daughter of James Wilkins.[17] James Wilkins had been a member of the Mississippi Territorial Legislature and was an important early banker in Mississippi.[18] It was through Catherine's inheritance that Boyd came into possession of a grand home just outside Natchez called Arlington. Over time, Boyd used his fortune to build a "fine old library" and decorate the home with art and furnishings from Italy.[19][20] In 1843, Boyd's younger sister Augusta Murray Boyd married future Confederate general Lloyd Tilghman.[21]

Detail of Norman's chart of the lower Mississippi River (1858) showing a cotton plantation owned by S. S. Boyd near Glasscock Island on the riverfront in Concordia Parish, Louisiana

In 1839, Boyd was one of the directors of Planters Bank of Natchez.[22] Somewhere around 1840, Boyd got to know Rice C. Ballard, who had previously been a major slave trader with the Franklin & Armfield company. Together Boyd and Ballard created a network of slave-labor camps devoted to the production of cotton for the lucrative overseas market.[23] The exact structure of who owned what is not fully understood but researchers believe that together they invested in between 10 and 16 plantations. According to historian Tomoko Yagyu, "These plantations were usually jointly owned by Ballard and Boyd, but Boyd was the sole owner for some of them, and Ballard owned some with a different partner". Ballard was based in Kentucky, so Boyd and his brother James Boyd were closely involved in the management and operation of the dozen or so Cotton Kingdom work camps: Bushy Bayou, Elcho, Elk, Golden Plains, Karnac, Laurell Hill, Lepine, Magnolia, Outpost plantation (aka Pecan Grove), Providence, Quattlebum, Wagram, and Woodland plantations, as well as, possibly, plantations named Forest Hill, Myrtle Grove, and Pine Mount.[23]

The places owned by Ballard and Boyd had no stately homes or ornamental gardens. They were not showcases for wealthy white families. The only steady white presences on them at all were managers and overseers, few of whom stayed on for more than a few years. The Ballard and Boyd partnership owned places whose sole purpose was to make Black people live and labor under the threat of violence to produce cotton until they were considered useless, deemed dispensable, or died.

— Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America (2021)[24]

All told, Boyd and Ballard together held approximately a thousand people in bondage in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.[25] Attempted escapes by individuals or groups are mentioned in letters of 1844, 1846, 1849, and 1852.[26] In 1852 a 38-year-old man named Prince was detained in Wilkinson County, Mississippi.[27] He told the authorities there that he was the legal property of "S.S. Boyd, near Natchez".[27]

In 1857 Boyd bought over 2,000 acres of "wild land" in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, for about US$16,000 (equivalent to $502,514 in 2022).[28] Per Yagyu, "Boyd was an acute land speculator, always on alert, and sought for best lands in which to invest. He would often send Ballard newspaper clippings of a plantation sale in the area and ask his opinion of it. Although Boyd was interested in any profitable land, he sought eagerly in particular affordable sugar plantations".[29]

As a landed literate native-born adult white male, Boyd was legally permitted to participate in the American democratic processes of his time. His allegiances somewhat track the political history that preceded the American Civil War and the South's decline into disunionism.

At an 1848 Whig Party political meeting, Boyd argued, per the Natchez Mississippi Free Trader, that "Slavery...was neither an institution nor strictly speaking property. It was a domestic relation; and seemed to infer, as a deduction, from this proposition that no man was safe who did not assume this to be the definition of the term. Of course General Cass was unsafe, as he was not a slave-holder".[30] After the election, Boyd went 1848-viral when his report of a conversational chat with fellow Mississippi planter Zachary Taylor was picked up nationwide. The gist of the report was that Boyd firmly believed Taylor would protect slavery in the existing slave states, recounting that Taylor believed the correct response to any attempts by free states to abolish slavery nationwide would be "drawing the sword and throwing away the scabbard".[31] The news item said Boyd said Taylor "will go with the free States on the tariff and internal improvement questions, and with the slave States on the free soil question".[31] There was then intense quibbling in the press about how this applied, if at all, to the expansion of slavery in newly colonized and settled territories to the west.[31][32] (In one news analysis, Boyd was described as "radical on the slavery question", the precise meaning of which is unclear, although it was probably not meant to suggest that he was a radical abolitionist.)[32]

In 1851, Montgomery and Boyd dissolved their law partnership although Boyd would "continue in thr practice of his profession as before".[33] Also that year Boyd was one of several financial supporters of Narciso López's freelance military invasion of Cuba, where American pro-slavery activists quite literally hoped to plant a flag for the expansion of their peculiar institution.[34] According to a history of Boyd's mother's family that was published in 1907, Millard Fillmore considered Boyd for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1852 (upon the death of Associate Justice John McKinley).[35] Boyd remained active in the Whig Party at the regional level.[36][37][38] In 1854 Boyd was selected to help revise the Mississippi criminal code but resigned and was replaced before making a contribution.[39][40]

Boyd defended the Compromise of 1850 and argued that there was no constitutionally protected right to seccession

Boyd's most substantial political action of the decade may have been a learned and wide-ranging speech in which he defended the Compromise of 1850 as constitutionally correct and strategically sound for supporters of slavery. He further argued that slavery in the United States was Britain's fault but also that abolitionism was a British conspiracy against the U.S.[41] Most importantly, he opposed secession (which increasingly—or perhaps continuously since the nullification crisis—was being advocated by the South Carolinian political contingent led by "Mr. Rhett"). Boyd argued persuasively that there was no constitutionally protected right of people or states to secede (and very intentionally so on the part of the founders), and commended Andrew Jackson for his role in disrupting past attempts at disunion.[42][43]

Marriage, legitimacy, bond-service and every species of contract, come under the same principle. A citizen of America may go to the territories acquired from Mexico, with his wife and children, his servants, whether bound for a term of years by contract, or held for life to service and labor under the laws of a State, without fear that he will be divorced, his offspring bastardized, and his relation of master destroyed by any fancied rule of national law...we considered we had a full right above as well as below 36° 30', and the concession was, in being willing to divide the property and take half in absolute ownership, instead of an undivided interest in the whole, liable to be interfered with by anti-slavery restrictions.

— Samuel S. Boyd, October 10, 1851, defending the Compromise of 1850 and other American free state–slave state political compromises

Map of Natchez published on the cover of the New York Times in May 1862

In 1860, Ballard died, and Boyd was made administrator of his estate.[44] Also that year, there was a contingent urging U.S. president James Buchanan to appoint Boyd to the seat made vacant by the death of Associate Justice Peter V. Daniel.[45][46]

In December 1860, various Mississippi counties were nominating delegates at Southern Rights Conventions to attend a larger state convention that ultimately passed the Mississippi Secession Ordinance of January 1861.[47] S. S. Boyd was elected from Adams County.[47] Other proto-Confederate representatives elected around the same time included L. Q. C. Lamar of Lafayette County and A. P. Hill of Madison County.[47] However, Boyd did not ultimately participate in the Mississippi secession convention.[48]

In October 1862 "Boyd, S.S." appears on the muster roll of a Confederate militia, as a member of Company B, "District Composing all North Side of Main Street" in Natchez.[49] Natchez was occupied by the U.S. Army following Ulysses S. Grant's capture of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863.[50] In 1864, Boyd was apparently a featured player in a cycle of hostage-and-ransom-taking between enemies; after the Confederates forcibly relocated a family of eight Unionist civilians, the Union charged the house of Boyd US$5,000 (equivalent to $93,553 in 2022) to keep the patriarch out of a place called Brookhaven.[51]

This story also appears in a footnote in Matilda Gresham's The Life of Walter Q. Gresham, with a comment that the news clipping was provided by Allen T. Bowie, and with a secondary note that, "The claim of Judge Boyd's relatives and friends is that General Brayman appropriated the $5,000 to his own use. [Boyd's son-in-law][1] James Surget states that he paid the money in currency to General Brayman, and that it never went in the poor fund."[53] Nonetheless, Boyd was readmitted to the Union in 1865; according to one history of Natchez, "'Planters who had not yet taken the amnesty oath hastened to do so now to regain control of their property. Past allegiances were quickly forgotten. 'Shields, Boyd, Metcalfs [sic] &c nearly all the other fireeaters have taken [the oath],' sniped the Unionist Frank Surget in June. 'In fact as is always the case the most rabid come forward first'".[54]

Boyd died at his home near Natchez in June 1867.[2] The local bar association passed a motion expressing their regret at his death.[55] His library at Arlington reportedly contained "8,000 books published in twelve languages".[56] An Aubusson carpet from the house was reportedly looted during the Reconstruction era.[19] When probate was filed in December 1867, Boyd's legally acknowledged family was scattered between New Orleans, France and England.[57] (Boyd's daughter Isabella, or Ysobel, married William Offley Forrester, a son of British wine merchant Joseph James Forrester, and lived out her days in the UK.)[1] In 1907 a history reported that "Arlington, on the edge of the town, and approached by a winding avenue of water oaks, was the former home of Judge S. S. Boyd and famed for its paintings and fine old library; it is now owned by his daughter, Mrs. Wm. Benneville Rhodes."[58] Arlington remained in the hands of Boyd's family until around 1913.[19] Among Boyd's surviving children was a man named James Boyd, born to one of the women whom Boyd had enslaved. In later life, James Boyd was a "plantation manager and a well-to-do entrepreneur."[59] According to descendants, as reported in Florence Ridlon's A Black Physician's Struggle for Civil Rights: Edward C. Mazique, M.D.:[60]

The old judge was so fond of James' mother that his wife forced him to send her away to a property he owned up near Vicksburg. Although not treated as an equal to his half-sisters, James was given a favored position in the home. The complicated accommodations made to fit these black/white relationships stagger the imagination. The Boyds all sat in the dining room for meals. The servants had to wait on James too, but he didn’t sit at the main table. Instead, he was at another little table near it. James Boyd lived with the family, after the judge died, until he was twenty-two years old. His half-sister, Catherine Boyd Suzette [sic], was so fond of him that she eventually hired him to manage her husband's estate at Suzette Ashley, a job he held when he met and married Mary Mazique. James Boyd held himself so aloof from everyone that even his wife, Mary, called him Mr. Boyd."[60]

There are two letters in the Rice C. Ballard Papers held in the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina that refer to a woman named Maria, "lashed as she is like an ox, until the blood gushes from her".[15] The letters, which date to 1848, were written to Ballard by John Martin Duffield, who was a local attorney who had served mayor of Natchez in 1843,[61] and who was editor of the Natchez Courier newspaper.[62] Duffield had likely had a past sexual relationship with Maria and was the father of Maria's child.[63] He wrote to Ballard asking to buy Maria in order to save her from further abuse by Boyd. Per historian Yagyu, Duffield was "not able to pay cash for her initially, and he had to wait for a pending attorney fee in order to purchase her". Yagyu notes that "no matter how soon" Maria was released from Boyd's custody, she would have already been brutalized, with resulting long-term consequences.[64] Edward E. Baptist surmises that Boyd had Maria "repeatedly flogged until she was maimed and sterile—all, it seems, for refusing his advances".[65]

According to historian Sharony Green, "Duffield serves as further proof that white men of this generation acted inconsistently and deliberately in their efforts to enhance and protect certain enslaved individuals, specifically, women and children in whom they had earlier had sex and along the way invested some measure of emotion. Such investments were made while these men safeguarded their patriarchal and racial dominance. It is certain that Duffield had not planned to protect all enslaved people from abuse or see to it that all enslaved children be freed and educated. But he was concerned about two in particular".[63] Similarly, although Boyd seems to have been the perpetrator of the violence in the case of Maria, in another case he fired an overseer he deemed a "monster of cruelty," who was "going on at such a rate that Steele had to protect the negroes".[66]

Virginia Boyd was probably held near Natchez until the summer 1852, when due to some unknown consequence of her having been raped by Boyd, Ballard determined to move her to the Karnac plantation near Port Gibson. Boyd approved, he wrote Ballard that he did not wish "to be bothered by her, & if she will not behave, put her in the stocks until you send her off". Virginia, pregnant, was then sent to New Orleans and then even further, to Houston. The slave trader Ballard who trusted to handle the sale eventually reported by letter that Virginia and her newborn child has been sold, as Ballard had ordered. Virginia's teenage daughter was also to be sold, somewhere in Mississippi. Historian Baptist writes, "Boyd had created a problem. Ballard had solved it. If Virginia sent any more letters, they did not survive...Most likely, Virginia wilted and died in a Texas field."[67]

Green comments that Virginia Boyd's letter "uncovers sexual relations that routinely happened, even if they were rarely discussed, between enslaved women and white men in the plantation South".[68] Another scholar deems Virginia Boyd's letter "among the most revealing pieces of extant enslaved correspondence".[69] It is notable for its disclosures, its rhetorical and emotional argumentation, and as correspondence from an enslaved person who was formerly a trusted "key slave" now writing "at the point of forced migration via sale, hire, or slaveholder relocation...who had either fallen from favor and were endeavoring to save themselves from the market, or else were writing on behalf of others whose sale or hire they sought to prevent, or at least to shape in some way".[70]

Green elsewhere commended Ballard for his contribution to the historiography of female slavery in the United States:[71]

Though he enslaved hundreds, Ballard was also open to assisting others in ways we may never fully understand. The complexity of his personality is illustrated in how a woman managed a plantation in which he had invested money. Appointing women to management positions ran against the grain of nineteenth-century American gender roles...Why Ballard kept Avenia's five letters and those from other black women we may never know. But we can be certain that, in keeping them, he has accommodated the modern reader and, in the end, himself. For though the work he engaged in was among the most reprehensible in pre–Civil War America and although his transparency in preserving such a detailed record of his life can hardly absolve him of that moral taint, historians owe him a debt of gratitude.[71]

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• Browning, Charles Henry (1891) [1882]. "Pedigree XXXV". Americans of Royal Descent: A Collection of Genealogies of American Families Whose Lineage is Traced to the Legimate Issue of Kings (2nd ed.). Philadelphia: Porter & Costes. 
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