John Hart Crenshaw

1797 – 1871

John Hart Crenshaw was a wealthy Illinois salt manufacturer who exploited a legal loophole to lease enslaved labor from Kentucky for his Gallatin County saline works, making him one of the few Illinois residents legally permitted to profit from slave labor in a nominally free state. He was also indicted for kidnapping free Black Illinoisans and selling them into Southern slavery in the 1820s and again in 1842, though acquitted both times.