Griffin & Pullum, later Griffin, Pullum & Co., was a 19th-century American interstate slave-trading company. The principals were Pierce Griffin and William A. Pullum. They mainly bought people in Kentucky and sold them in Mississippi.
According to J. Winston Coleman in Slavery Times in Kentucky, Pierce Griffin was selling in Natchez as early as 1833, and "from the tax returns of that year, which represented one per cent of the gross sales of all 'transient merchants' and 'vendors of slaves,' it appears that Griffin sold over six thousand dollars' worth of slaves".[1]
Sometimes enslaved people trafficked by Griffin & Pullum were shipped south by steamboat, rather than being driven in coffles, in which case, per court testimony of an agent for Pullum, they were kept chained until the Ohio River became the Mississippi, in order to prevent the prisoners from jumping overboard and attempting to swim to safety in a free state.[2]
Griffin & Pullum was part of the chain of slave traders who kidnapped and trafficked Henrietta Wood to Mississippi.[3] Later in the 1850s, Griffin & Pullum became Griffin, Pullum & Co., with Asa Blackwell and F. G. Murphy representing the Co.[4] Also in 1860 Griffin & Pullum advertised that they were selling out of the "old Elam House" at Forks of the Road slave market, meaning the former premises of R. H. Elam.[5][2] According to historian Steven Deyle, "...newspaper editors in the Lower South helped to promote the [internal slave] trade by occasionally running news stories praising the services of local traders or announcing upcoming sales...In Natchez, the Mississippi Free Trader informed its readers that the firm of Griffin & Pullum had a new lot of slaves for sale, adding that 'this is an old established firm known far and near for the probity that has always marked their every transaction.'"[6]
