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Robert J. Lyles
American slave trader (1817–1860) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Robert J. Lyles (1817 – May 18, 1860) was a slave trader who worked in Nashville, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana.[1][2]
Early life and ancestry
Robert J. Lyles was born in 1817 in Maryland or Tennessee to Robert Lyles and Juliet Johnson.[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.[7]
Tennessee
Lyles married Mary Roy Hutchison in Sumner County, Tennessee on February 20, 1843.[8] In 1850, Lyles owned ten slaves.[9]
Lyles was first a scout for slave trader Henry H. Haynes at 33 Cedar St.,[10][11] then partnered with George W. Hitchings in 1859.[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.[15]
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New Orleans
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Lyles bought and sold slaves from the New Orleans market and frequently traveled there.[16] In 1842 he was a passenger on a steamboat that hit a snag while traveling between New Orleans and St. Francisville in Louisiana.[17] In 1847 he was a guest at New Orleans' St. Charles Hotel.[18]
Death
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. Sheath.[19][20][21] Passenger Charles Fort also died and F. G. Jernigan was wounded severely in the neck.[22] Slave trader Montgomery Little applied in New Orleans for curatorship of the Robert J. Lyles estate.[23] Lyles' son-in-law G. L. Pierce was the administrator of his estate.[24] Lyles is buried in Nashville's Spring Hill Cemetery.
In 1888, more than 30 years after the fact, a Chicago Times reporter writing about the old slave markets in Nashville mentioned Lyles' death but erroneously reported his demise as a gun suicide, writing: "Robert F. Lyles, who was connected with the mart as a trader, committed suicide by shooting himself on a Mississippi river steamer in the year 1856 or 1857. He had delivered a number of slaves in Louisiana and was on his way home when the rash act occurred. The cause of his action was never ascertained."[25]
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External links
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