| N. C. Trowbridge | |
| Birth Date: | 8 July 1815 |
| Birth Place: | Cambridge, Vermont, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Canton, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Slave trader, plantation owner, racehorse breeder |
Nelson Clement Trowbridge (July 8, 1815April 23, 1879), usually doing business as N. C. Trowbridge, was an American businessman who worked as both a merchant and farmer in Poughkeepsie, New York, and a slave trader in the Deep South for approximately 25 years prior to the American Civil War. Trowbridge trafficked in slaves in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Louisiana. He also became a plantation owner in Mississippi. He was party to the illegal importation of slaves from Africa on the Wanderer in 1857. Many of the letters written by C. A. L. Lamar about his illegal transatlantic slave trade enterprise of the late 1850s were addressed to Trowbridge ("Trow") in New Orleans. Lamar and Trowbridge, who had had several businesses together, from breeding racehorses to mining for gold, were responsible for at least one blockade-runner, the Ceres, during the American Civil War. Trowbridge was arrested on treason charges twice during the war, and convicted in 1864 of treason and blockade running. The New York Herald and other newspapers deemed him a New York-based Confederate spy and business agent. He seems to have lived in New York City and Mississippi after the war. He died in Mississippi in 1879 and is buried in Augusta, Georgia.
Trowbridge was born in Vermont.[1] According to a Trowbridge surname study, "Nelson C. Trowbridge received his early instruction in business in his father's store in Medina, N.Y. In 1835 he went to the South and engaged in mercantile business for himself in Augusta, Ga. Subsequently he was engaged in planting and in operating in real estate in the South and in New York City." In what might well have been a case of wartime sour grapes or might have been a statement of facts, in 1864, a Burlington, Vermont newspaper printed the following assessment of Trowbridge's character based on local recollections of his youth in Vermont:[2]
In 1846, newspaper reports show that Trowbridge was engaged in breeding and betting on horses with Charles Augustus Lamar of Georgia.[3] [4] In 1848 his partner was named John M. Cureton,[5] and he worked out of the Hamburg, South Carolina slave market.[6]
Letters written by Trowbridge were amongst the cache looted from the office of Richmond slave trader R. H. Dickinson by Lucy and Sarah Chase. From these letters, scholars of American slavery have evidence that traders would sometimes let potential buyers "test out" slaves on a trial basis. Slave traders would also do "swaps," with Trowbridge writing Dickinson, "I exchanged your boy Patrick today and got a No. one boy 18 and 50 dolls. A fust rate SWOP." He made at least two slaves sales another Georgia slave trader named to E. H. Simmons.[7] [8] Trowbridge seems to have traveled frequently, visiting New Orleans,[9] Charleston,[10] New York City,[11] and Macon, Georgia.[12]
At the time of the 1850 U.S. census Trowbridge lived in Richmond County, Georgia, and reported that his occupation as "speculator." On the slave schedules he was listed as the legal owner of 29 people, two of whom were categorized as "fugitives from the state."[13] In 1851 Trowbridge advertised the products of the American Railroad Chair Manufacturing Company, of which he was secretary, in railroad industry magazines.[14] In 1856, Trowbridge, Lamar and others were investors in the Park Mine in Columbus County, Georgia that yielded at least two gold nuggets.[15] In 1857 Trowbridge owned stock in the Commercial Bank of Racine, Wisconsin.[16]
The "letter book" of Charles Augustus Lamar was rediscovered in 1886 and includes numerous mentions of Trowbridge (sometimes called "Trow"). Lamar and Trowbridge were partners in selling bonds to support a freelance filibuster invasion of Cuba in hopes of bringing it into the Union as another slave state. A letter of 1857 shows that Lamar, Trowbridge, and another New Orleans slave trader named Theodore Johnston were involved in the management of the E. A. Rawlins, which was widely believed to be an illegal transatlantic slave ship, in company with the Richard Cobden and Wanderer. The captain hired to sail the E. A. Rawlins to Africa and back would be paid with "two negroes out of every one hundred that the vessel may land." In November 1859, Lamar griped to Trowbridge: "The Wanderer is going to China, and may return with coolies. They are worth from $340 to $350 each in Cuba, and cost but $12 and their passage. I told you Tucker returned one of the boys sold in Columbus? Sent him to Akin's for my account!!! He is in Joe Bryan's and has had a number of fits. He has the itch, and Joe wants him removed. I don't know what to do with him. No one will take him. He is a dead expense to me." Trowbridge may have been a silent partner in the business, as in 1914, an interview with a survivor of the Wanderer described himself and others trafficked just before the American Civil War as "Lamar's niggers," not naming other investors such as Trowbridge, Johnston, or Nathan Bedford Forrest, etc.[17]
Trowbridge was indicted at the U.S. Circuit Court in Savannah, Georgia in 1859 for "importing and holding slaves". The name of the case was United States vs. Nelson C. Trowbridge. The May 1860 trial ended with a hung jury, and Justice James M. Wayne declared a mistrial.[18]
On April 23, 1862, Trowbridge was arrested and confined at Fort Lafayette on the orders of the U.S. Secretary of War. On April 29, 1862, having given his "written parole of honor not to render aid or comfort to enemies in enemies in hostility to the United States government" Trowbridge was apparently released from federal custody.[19]
Trowbridge appears in the diary of U.S. secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, in the entry of December 21, 1863:
Trowbridge was arrested again in January 1864 and taken to Fort Warren, a military prison in Massachusetts.[20] He was later transferred to Fort Delaware in Delaware. In January 1864 the New York Herald commented on the "intercepted Rebel correspondence":[21]
Convicted of blockade running, Trowbridge was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor at Fort Delaware.[22] He was ordered transferred to Clinton Prison on September 13, 1864. Daniel Tompkins Van Buren and John Adams Dix handed down the orders regarding the transfer process. Trowbridge apparently escaped from Fort Lafayette in fall 1864. He was later described as a "notorious...rebel spy and emissary."[23] He later applied for a presidential pardon, sometimes called the Confederate amnesty program.[24] After the American Civil War, a witness testified to investigators for the U.S. Congress that N. C. Trowbridge was one of the brokers who helped them buy ships for cotton smuggling from the Confederate states.[25]
Trowbridge was listed as a principal of Trowbridge & Co. (N. C. & J. Trowbridge), a dry goods, hardware, seed, and agricultural implement store located at 821 Main St. in Poughkeepsie, New York.[26]
At the time of the 1870 census, Trowbridge was retired and living in New York City. He and his wife had a declared combined net worth of $32,500.[27] In 1879 Trowbridge signed a petition in Madison County, Mississippi recommending a pardon for "Jeff. Pitman" on charges of "shooting with intent to kill" because of "The extreme youth of the prisoner, and his uniform good character as a peaceable, quiet and industrious man. Besides, the evidence was uncertain and contrary, and very grave doubts are entertained as to his actual guilt."[28] Trowbridge died in Canton, Mississippi in 1879, and is buried in Magnolia Cemetery in Augusta, Georgia.[29]
In 1836, Trowbridge married Evalina T. Olive in Richmond, Georgia.[30] In 1864 a Vermont newspaper described him as marrying "a Southern lady and a nigger plantation."[31] They had five children, most of whom lived in New York City as of 1908. Trowbridge's wife was involved with the Horticultural Club of Poughkeepsie in 1860.[32]