d by the best white people of the city.
Robert Harlan made considerable money buying and selling race horses.
Thompson Cooley had a successful pickling establishment. On Broadway
A. V. Thompson, a colored tailor, conducted a thriving business. J.
Pressley and Thomas Ball were the well-known photographers of the city,
established in a handsomely furnished modern gallery which was
patronized by some of the wealthiest people. Samuel T. Wilcox, who owed
his success to his position as a steward on an Ohio River line,
thereafter went into the grocery business and built up such a large
trade among the aristocratic families that he accumulated $59,000 worth
of property by 1859.[60]

A more useful Negro had for years been toiling upward in this city. This
man was Henry Boyd, a Kentucky freedman, who had helped to overcome the
prejudice against colored mechanics in that city by exhibiting the
highest efficiency. He patented a corded bed which became very popular,
especially in the Southwest. With this article he built up a creditable
manufacturing business, employing from 18 to 25 white and colored
men.[61] He was, therefore, known as one of the desirable men of the
city. Two things, however, seemingly interfered with his business. In
the first place, certain white men, who became jealous of his success,
burned him out and the insurance companies refused to carry him any
longer. Moreover, having to do chiefly with white men he was charged by
his people with favoring the miscegenation of races. Whether or not this
was well founded is not yet known, but his children and grandchildren
did marry whites and were lost in the so-called superior race.

A much more interesting Negro appeared in Cincinnati, however, in 1847.
This was Robert Gordon, formerly the slave of a rich yachtsman of
Richmond, Virginia. His master turned over to him a coal yard which he
handled so faithfully that his owner gave him all of the slack resulting
from the handling of the coal. This he sold to the local manufacturers
and blacksmiths of the city, accumulating thereby in the course of time
thousands of dollars. He purchased himself in 1846 and set out for free
soil. He went first to Philadelphia and then to Newburyport, but finding
that these places did not suit him, he proceeded to Cincinnati. He
arrived there with $15,000, some of which he immediately invested in the
coal business in which he had already achieved marked success. He
employed bookkeepers, h