Lewis C. Robards

Lewis C. Robards was a 19th-century American slave trader of Lexington, Kentucky. He had an unscrupulous reputation as a dealer, and he was widely known for his "special" offerings: fancy girls, meaning young, light-skinned enslaved women and girls offered for sexual exploitation. Robards was also considered a likely culprit in several cases of kidnapping into slavery. His slave pen was funded in part by a loan from John Hunt Morgan; when he could not repay the loan his premises were sold to Bolton, Dickens & Co., a multi-state slave-trading firm based in West Tennessee.

Life and work According to a family history published in 1910, Lewis (or Louis) Robards was the oldest surviving child of Nancy Merriman and George Lewis Robards (b. 1795). George L. Robards was veteran of the war of 1812, who received, at the Battle of New Orleans, "a severe wound by having a bayonet run through his right leg, and afterward he walked to his home in Bullitt County, Kentucky." George L. Robards was the son of Lewis Robards and his second wife, Hannah Winn. Lewis Robards' first wife was Rachel Donelson. Rachel Donelson's second husband was Andrew Jackson, who was elected U.S. president in 1828.

Robards, in partnership with his brother Alfred O. Robards, may have started as a field agent for, first, Lexington slave trader Joseph H. Northcutt, and, second, Lexington slave trader R. W. Lucas. Robards eventually opened his own slave prison and trading operation, located on Short Street, in sight of the home of Abraham Lincoln's brother-in-law, Levi Todd. In 1850, Robards paid James McMillin to kidnap a legally free woman named Arian Belle, and her four-year-old child Martha, from Mason County, Kentucky, in the middle of the night. After dinner visited a negro jaila very large brick building with all the conveniences of comfortable life, including hospital. Tis a place where negroes are kept for sale - Outer doors & windows all protected with iron grates, but inside the appointments are not only comfortable, but in many respects luxurious. Many of the rooms are well carpeted & furnished, & very neat, and the inmates whilst here are treated with great indulgence & humanity, but I confess it impressed me with the idea of decorating the ox for the sacrifice. In several of the rooms I found very handsome mulatto women, of fine persons and easy genteel manners, sitting at their needle work awaiting a purchaser. The proprietor made them get up & turn round to show to advantage their finely developed & graceful formsand slaves as they were this I confess rather shocked my gallantry. I enquired the price of one girl which was $1,600 Robards also had a slave pen behind his house on North Broadway, with "tiny brick cells eight feet square, furnished with straw and ventilated with a small iron-grated window high on the heavy wooden door." The women were kept on the upper story of Robards' West Short Street building.

R. C. Thompson may have also had possession of Robards' slave-prison real estate at some point before the building burned down in 1864.

Robards was sued several times during the course of his career, for selling sick or dying people while warranting them "sound." The case of Henrietta Wood was neither the first nor the last time he was accused of selling people who had been kidnapped people into slavery. At the time of the 1870 census, 55-year-old "Louis C. Roberds" lived in the household of a 74-year-old farmer named George C. Roberds in Smith Mills, Henderson County, Kentucky, near the Mount Vernon post office.