William A. Pullum
American slave trader (~1809–1876)
William A. Pullum (c. 1809 – March 25, 1876) was a 19th-century American slave trader, and a principal of Griffin & Pullum. He was based in Lexington, Kentucky, and for many years purchased, imprisoned, and shipped enslaved people from Virginia and Kentucky south to the Forks-of-the-Road slave market in Natchez, Mississippi.
Biography
Pullum was born about 1810 in Kentucky. He was said to be one of the "early residents" of Fayette County, Kentucky. According to a news report from 1904, in the 1830s Pullum bought a house in Lexington that had been designed by architect Mathias Shryock as his personal residence in 1809. Pullum married Eliza Jane McCann in Fayette County in December 1835. Eliza Jane McCann's father, Neal McCann, was also a slave trader. It is unknown when Pullum entered the slave trade in the United States but he had letters waiting for him at the Natchez, Mississippi post office in 1833 and 1837. Pullum added on to the former Shryock property, building "in the rear of this residence and fronting on Sycamore street...a large and substantial brick house which he used as a slave prison."
In 1848, Pullum advertised in a Lexington newspaper that he wanted "BLACKS—50 Likely Young Negroes wanted to purchase. Inquire of W. A. Pullum, near the Bruen House." In May 1902, historian Frederic Bancroft interviewed a man named Alfred Wornell, who had been trafficked to Natchez from Lexington by Pullum, likely in the late 1840s.
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This entry incorporates text from “William A. Pullum” 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.