Let's see, there's Simon Legree, the fictional slaveowner who tortured Uncle Tom to death; there's Edwin Epps, who was Solomon Northup's final owner during his Twelve Years a Slave. And now we have James Paul -- up until now little-known tin smith. He came to Tuscaloosa in the early 1820s and set up his tin shop, where because of the limited number of skilled workers he was able to prosper. And purchase some sizable portions of land in Tuscaloosa County and some humans, too -- including ten year old Cornelius Sinclair in October 1825 for probably $300. Sometime early next year two Methodist ministers, Joshua Boucher and Robert Kennon, filed a suit to free Sinclair and also took him from Paul and that set up a whole host of suits. Paul sued them for stealing Sinclair -- as Judson Crump and I say in our paper, that's sort of laughable. And Paul also told people around town that they had stolen Sinclair from him. That, in turn, led to two defamation suits by Boucher and Kennon. As I've said before, twelve jurors in Tuscaloosa concluded that Sinclair was, in fact, free. And so he escaped -- but only after his supporters had spent something like $450 to gather evidence and make his case.
Some years later James Paul moved to Columbus, Mississippi -- where he was accused of killing one of his runaway slaves, then burning his body. Paul was indicted for this in 1843 in Lowndes County and then fled to Texas. Eventually, so the story goes, he was brought back to Lowndes but died before trial. Some of this story we have on good authority -- that is, there's an indictment for him in Lowndes County. Other parts of the story appear in a post-War reminiscence whose details are difficult to confirm.
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