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Bolton, Dickens & Co.

American slave-trading business

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ120962447 ↗
Source-derived summary

Bolton, Dickens & Co. was a slave-trading business of the antebellum United States, headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee. 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.

Family business

"NEGROES FOR SALE. — I have again returned to this market, with 18 or 20 likely negroes. I have located on the corner of Main and Adams-streets. I have plough-boys, men, women, and girls, and some very fancy ones. I intend to keep a constant supply through the season, and will not be undersold by any in market. My motto is, 'the swift penny; the slow shilling' I never get.

"I will also pay the highest cash price for young negroes.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Bolton, Dickens & Co.” as american slave-trading business. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bolton, Dickens and American.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current 147-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Bolton, Dickens and American providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Bolton, Dickens & Co.”, the useful work is to connect “american slave-trading business” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q120962447. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Bolton, Dickens & Co.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.