Among the documents I perused at Aberdeen’s Evans Memorial Library were local historian John Rodabough’s newspaper columns from the 1970s. Densely detailed and wide-ranging, Rodabaugh’s articles did not shy away from chronicling Monroe County’s roots as a center of Mississippi’s slave trade.

Let me remind you: Wyatt Moye (1793-1862) lived in Greene and Edgecombe Counties in the general vicinity of Stantonsburg. He served as Greene County sheriff for a while, then as an Edgecombe County legislator, where he sponsored legislation to create Wilson County. He was also a slave dealer. Working with other men from Edgecombe County, Moye was a trader and factor, moving “excess” or troublesome Black people from the Upper South to the Lower, where vast cotton fields awaited them.

The photograph of Wyatt Moye’s house, above, makes plain the abundant wages of human trafficking. In his 14 March 1972 “Port of Aberdeen” column, Rodabough described the house as “[t]he finest raised cottage of antebellum Aberdeen.” “The first floor was brick. The main floor above it was frame with a hipped roof. Brick piers supported the gallery of the main floor. A staircase rose from the walkway to that level. The floor of the lower porch was brick. Inside center halls bisected four rooms on each floor.”

As to Moye himself, Rodabough wrote, “Wyatt Moye was a partner in the banking firm of Cunningham, Moye & Co., which flourished in Aberdeen in the 1850’s. After his first wife’s death, he remarried in 1858 “and put his house up for sale. He moved to Memphis.”

Moye was also a director of Mississippi Mutual Insurance Company, which was incorporated in 1850. Among the lives it insured were those of enslaved people — to the benefit of their enslavers. Per Rodabough’s 31 August 1972 column: “In 1855 this firm was two doors from the northwest corner of Commerce and Locust Streets. On September 20, 1858, they purchased the building of Cunningham, Moye & Co., located [at] the present site of the western third of the First National Bank.” “Cunningham, Moye & Company was formed January 11, 1854, with a cash capital of $200,000. The firm was comprised of William R. Cunningham, Wyatt Moye, Robert S. Adams, and Moses J. Wicks.”

The Yazoo Democrat, 2 February 1853.

The I. Y. Johnson Home (Moye-Johnson) on the corner of Canal and Hickory Street in Aberdeen, Mississippi, built in 1855 by Wyatt Moye; Rodabough (John E.) papers, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State University Libraries (electronic version).