John Hagan (died June 8, 1856) was a well-known American interstate slave trader who operated slave jails in both Charleston and New Orleans, as well as maintaining strong business and personal ties to the Richmond slave markets. He partnered with his brothers Hugh Hagan and Alexander Hagan, as well as with his maternal uncles, Hugh McDonald and Alexander McDonald. John Hagan was also a cotton factor, meaning he ran a cotton brokerage and de facto private bank and business office for cotton plantation owners.
According to historian Walter Johnson, "John Hagan's yearly routine began in Charleston with slave buying during June and July; he continued in Virginia and then was back in Charleston in September, still buying, before traveling to New Orleans in October." Hagan was both a shipper and consignee (intended recipient) of enslaved people who were on the Creole in 1841. Before he died in 1856 he worked assiduously to manumit a young enslaved woman from Virginia named Lucy Ann Cheatam, and her two children, Frederika Bremer "Dolly" Cheatam and William Lowndes Cheatam. He also provided bequests of cash and real estate for her in two versions of his will. Per historian Alexandra J. Finley, these children, and two others who died young, were almost certainly Hagan's biological offspring.
See also
- List of American slave traders
- List of white American slave traders who had mixed-race children with enslaved black women
References
- ^ Johnson, Walter (2009) . Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 47–49, 61. doi:10.4159/9780674039155. ISBN 9780674039155. LCCN 99-046696. OCLC 923120203.
- Bancroft, Frederic (2023) . Slave Trading in the Old South (Original publisher: J. H. Fürst Co., Baltimore). Southern Classics Series. Introduction by Michael Tadman (Reprint ed.). Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. p. 314. ISBN 978-1-64336-427-8. LCCN 95020493. OCLC 1153619151.
- Schermerhorn, Calvin (2015). The business of slavery and the rise of American capitalism, 1815-1860. New Haven: Yale university press. p. 148. ISBN 978-0-300-19200-1.
- ^ Finley, Alexandra J. (2020). "Chapter Four: Housekeeper". An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 96–103. ISBN 9781469655123. JSTOR 10.5149/9781469655130_finley.
- Killick, John R. (1977). "The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown and Sons in the Deep South, 1820–1860". The Journal of Southern History. 43 (2): 169–194. doi:10.2307/2207344. ISSN 0022-4642.
- Kerr-Ritchie, Jeffrey R. (2019). "4. "Engaged in the Business Ever Since She Was Constructed"". Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America's Coastal Slave Trade. Cambridge University Press. pp. 77–98. doi:10.1017/9781108616324.005. ISBN 978-1-108-61632-4. S2CID 241442157.
External links
- "James Hagan family papers, 1833-1901". LSU Libraries. Retrieved 2023-10-01.
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