Lewis C. Robards was a slave trader who ran a slave jail in Lexington, Kentucky, where he became notorious for trafficking what the white slave trade called “fancy girls”, light-skinned Black girls and women who were specifically sold for sexual slavery.
Lewis C. Robards came from a respected Kentucky family. His father, George Robards, was a veteran of the War of 1812. His grandfather had once been married to Rachel Donelson, who later became the wife of President Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. So the Robards name had weight, but whatever dignity his family name might have had, Lewis chose to invest in a different kind of legacy, one soaked in blood and cruelty.
In the 1840s, Robards and his brother started working as slave agents for bigger slave traders. But Lewis eventually broke out on his own. He set up his operation on West Short Street in downtown Lexington, just steps away from the home of Abraham Lincoln’s brother-in-law. There, in a converted theater, he ran one of the most notorious slave jail in the country.
Robards’s slave jail was different from others. He catered to men looking for something “fancy.” The top floor was designed for show. Carpeted rooms, fancy furniture, and young Black women, many of them light-skinned and very young, sat quietly, sewing or pretending to be busy while waiting to be sold.
The jail even had a bar. Robards would serve drinks to his clients, get them relaxed, and then take them upstairs for “private inspections.” Robards’ “fancy girls” were talked about in bars, brothels, and steamboats from Kentucky to New Orleans. White men bragged about the things they’d seen, or done, in Robards’ jail, after a few drinks.
One visitor in 1854, future U.S. Senator Orville Browning, described how Robards would make the girls stand up and turn around so buyers could inspect their bodies. One of the girls he asked about was priced at $1,600 (over $60,000 today).
Downstairs, it was a different story. In the basement, known as “the dungeon,” the darker-skinned enslaved Africans, those not considered beautiful or “fancy”, were locked in cells, kept in the dark, and left to wait for shipment downriver.
The success of Robards’ business wasn’t just about who he sold, it was about where the women came from. Some were kidnapped. Others were born into a system designed to produce them.
That’s where people like Calvin Smith came in.
Smith was a wealthy planter in the antebellum South who ran a breeding plantation that focused on producing light-skinned, biracial children, children who, if female, were highly valued as “fancy girls.” These girls were born into rape, then sold into rape. On Smith’s farm, enslaved women were forced to have children with mixed-race men, some of whom were also enslaved, others hired out by white owners. It was a cold, calculated business model based entirely on generating a particular “product”: girls who looked white enough to fetch a premium price at the markets of men like Robards.
This pipeline, from forced conception on breeding farms like Smith’s, to display rooms at slave jails like Robards’, was big business. Traders didn’t just rely on natural reproduction. They engineered it. And when that wasn’t enough, they turned to kidnapping.
In 1850, Robards paid $600 (over $22,000 today) to have a legally free Black woman named Arian Belle and her daughter kidnapped from Kentucky. They were taken in the middle of the night and placed on a steamboat headed south.
Luckily, Arian had friends who noticed she was missing. They raised the alarm and were able to take her case to court. She and her daughter were rescued, but many others weren’t so lucky.
Robards was later named in the famous case of Henrietta Wood, a free woman from Ohio who was lured across state lines, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in the deep South. Robards helped make that happen, too. Her case, years later, became one of the rare instances where a Black woman successfully sued her kidnapper, resulting in the largest court-ordered slavery reparation in U.S. history.
Robards didn’t build his empire alone. He was backed financially by John Hunt Morgan, who would later become a Confederate general. Morgan gave him a $6,100 loan, worth more than $200,000 today, to expand his slave-trading business. Some of that money funded the “jail,” while some was likely used to purchase and traffic new captives.
But the deal didn’t end well. When Robards couldn’t pay the loan back, Morgan took him to court. The slave jail was auctioned off, and one of the women Robards owned, a woman named Rebecca, was sold to cover the debt. Other traders, also sued Robards for failing to sell their slaves as promised, or for not returning them after failed sales. His reputation, once twistedly respected in trading circles, began to fall apart.
In 1864, his notorious slave jail burned down, destroying the stage on which so many light-skinned girls had been paraded. By then, the Civil War had already shattered the slave economy that had once made men like Robards rich.
After the collapse of his business, Robards faded into the background. In 1870, census records show him staying with an older man in Henderson County, Kentucky, stripped of power, stripped of wealth. He lived out his final years quietly, forgotten by most
No one knows when or where Robards died. There’s no marked grave. No obituary. Just the legacy of a man who built his fortune selling Black girls into sexual slavery.
Must Read
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The Role of the US Government in the Forced Sterilization of Black Women
How Enslaved Black Women Resisted Slave Breeding By Using Cotton Roots as Contraceptives
Fancy Girls: How Light-Skinned Enslaved Girls Were Bought and Sold for Sex in 19th Century America
Lumpkin’s Jail: The 19th-Century American Slave Breeding Facility for Enslaved Africans
Source:
http://wiki.wcaleb.rice.edu/Lewis%20Robards
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015014632247?urlappend=%3Bseq=191
https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt74xg9f541m_3_3
