John Hamilton was born on October 6, 1844 at at Dandridge, Jefferson County, Tennessee, United States, the brother of Samuel Martin Inman. Both his parents, Shadrach W. and Jane Martin (Hamilton) Inman, were of Revolutionary stock, the former of English descent, the latter of north-of-Ireland ancestry. The boy spent his early life upon his father's plantation, and in his general store.
After attending a neighborhood academy of Tennessee, Inman refused to go to college.
Initially, Inman worked for a year in a bank in Georgia, where he began to show the financial ability displayed in later life. From 1862 to 1865 he was in the Confederate army, though the sentiment of his section of East Tennessee was strongly Unionist and he was threatened with physical violence on his discharge from the army.
In the fall of 1865 he went to New York with only a few dollars, since his father had been ruined by the war, and secured employment in a cotton house. Soon he became a partner, but in 1870, organized the new firm of Inman, Swann & Company.
He was one of the organizers, and long a director, of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, later to be absorbed by the United States Steel Corporation. He was also interested in the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, in the Central Railroad & Banking Company of Georgia, and became influential in the Richmond & Danville Railroad and in the Richmond & West Point Terminal Railway & Warehouse Company, which was organized first as an adjunct to the Richmond & Danville, but later controlled the parent corporation and all its leased and subsidiary lines. Inman served as president of both these corporations, which were later to be the backbone of the Southern Railway system.
He had interests in various other Southern enterprises (though he was a promoter rather than a builder), and claimed that he had been instrumental in the investment of at least $100, 000, 000 of Northern capital in the South.
The financial depression culminating in the panic of 1893 precipitated the bankruptcy of most Southern railroads and seriously crippled him. His attempts to recoup by speculating in cotton were disastrous, and his losses led to a nervous collapse in 1896.
He died at a sanitarium at New Canaan, Connecticut, to which he had been secretly removed, and not at a hotel in the Berkshires, as is stated in most accounts.
John Hamilton Inman is remembered as a tycoon in the age of laissez-faire, cut-throat capitalism, he nevertheless helped the economic development of his native state and the South in general. He was one of the organizers of the New York Cotton Exchange, and until the end of his life was a prominent figure in the cotton trade of the world. He was also a director in various important banks and insurance companies in New York, and from its organization to his death was a member of the New York Rapid Transit Commission which was charged with the duty of finding a solution of the traffic problems of New York City.
His enthusiastic belief in the possibilities of Southern industrial development had its influence at a time when most financiers were skeptical, and his attempts to combine Southern railways laid a foundation upon which stronger hands were later able to build.
Inman was a man of abounding energy, undoubted financial ability, and considerable personal charm.
Inman married, in 1870, Margaret McKinney Coffin of Monroe County, Tennessee.
