Page 1 →Introduction “A large territory on the Atlantic Ocean, in a temperate latitude”—South Carolina and Great Britain

“Patience is a necessary ingredient to pass thro’ life with tolerable quiet, but very few [are] embued with a sufficiency of it to combat Carolina disappointments,” reflected Isaac King in 1790, looking back on a thirty-year career as one of London’s foremost merchants in the “Carolina trade.”¹ King had been one of a group of merchants in the British capital who specialized in handling South Carolina’s staple exports of rice, indigo, deerskins, and naval stores, and who arranged the shipment of the merchandise, equipment, and slaves on which South Carolina and its economy depended. Like their counterparts in Charles Town, the merchants had grown rich on the back of their trade—in the words of one observer in South Carolina, “in general & almost to a Man by means of their Commissions & profits arising from such Trade, risen from humble & moderate Fortunes to great affluence, from walking upon foot to the command of Conveniences which render their legs and feet almost useless.”² From King’s vantage point in 1790, such wealth seemed a longtime past. The Revolutionary War and American independence had severed his links with South Carolina. Fruitless efforts to reclaim debts and land in the state that had been confiscated after the war had exhausted his patience and consumed him with “Carolina disappointments.” King was not alone. In the previous ten years the relationship between Britain and South Carolina had been marked first by the colony’s dramatic rejection of imperial authority, then by a war of often bitter savagery, and then by a resumption of trade at the war’s end that was as quick—and in many ways quicker—as had been the breakdown of trade at the start of the war and as hard for many in the state to comprehend. This book tells the story of how commerce and politics combined to bring the relationship between Britain and South Carolina to this point.

Why South Carolina’s merchant-planter elite class—one of the British Empire’s wealthiest groups and ostensibly among the chief beneficiaries of the imperial system—came to reject British authority has long been debated by historians. Interpretations stressing the importance of ideological convictions have proposed how political objections overrode material economic arguments for maintaining the status quo.³ Conversely, materialist interpretations of why Anglo-American relations broke down in the 1760s and 1770s attribute a powerfully provocative role to trade, and some in particular to the symbolic Page 2 →“meanings” that goods carried.⁴ According to one consumerist interpretation, “British merchants bore as much responsibility as did members of Parliament for the growing unhappiness of American consumers from the 1760s.”⁵ In exploring how the commercial activities of London’s “Carolina merchants” intersected with their political lobbying on South Carolina’s behalf and how this dual role was understood by their correspondents in the colony, this book shows how economic and political forces were interrelated in the growing disenchantment of South Carolinians with their metropolitan trading partners and the system they represented.⁶

Sixty years before Isaac King’s lament, London’s Carolina merchants had proved their value to the colony in the first of many political interventions on South Carolina’s behalf. They had successfully lobbied the British Parliament in 1730 to achieve a long-cherished ambition for the colony: the liberalization of rice exports. As bureaucratic as it sounds, this was a major achievement. Rice was South Carolina’s principal export crop, in the words of one of its earliest historians, “the staple commodity of Carolina … the chief support of the colony, and its great source of opulence.”⁷ It was also the cornerstone of South Carolina’s slave economy, with its cultivation reliant on the labor of enslaved Africans to plant and harvest the grain, and the source of good profits for planters, merchants, and—through duties—the British government. The 1730 Rice Act allowed South Carolina’s planters and merchants and their British correspondents to ship the grain directly to Spain and Portugal for the first time, opening a significant new market for the crop and marking an important exemption within the strict Navigation Laws that governed trade in the British Empire.⁸ For their lobbying, London’s Carolina traders duly received the thanks of their counterparts in the colony. The passage of the legislation appeared to vindicate a system in which colonial interests could be effectively represented at the empire’s heart by lobbyists and interest groups who themselves stood to benefit from a colony’s greater well-being and development—a variant of the “virtual representation” by which British politicians would in the years before 1776 justify the colonies’ lack of electoral representation in Parliament. Such a system depended on colonial and metropolitan interests being aligned and, as importantly, the perception that these interests were aligned.

The 1730 Rice Act heralded a series of successful political interventions by the “Carolina lobby” in Britain on the colony’s behalf over the next thirty years. London’s Carolina traders were to the fore. Financial stimuli were secured for the cultivation of silk, naval stores—the hemp, pitch, tar, turpentine, and certain types of lumber used to build and equip shipping—and indigo—the blue dye extracted from the indigo plant, which was from the 1750s second only to rice among South Carolina’s exports. Military resources were sought to protect the colony and its trade. The merchants often found a receptive audience in Britain’s political circles. From British policy makers’ point of view, South Page 3 →Carolina mattered commercially and strategically. Founded in 1670, it was throughout most of its colonial period Britain’s southernmost colony of real size in North America. In comparison, Georgia, established in 1732, had a population of less than one-tenth of South Carolina’s until as late as 1760. South Carolina was a vital link in the chain of imperial defense, a bulwark against threats from the rival French and Spanish Empires and from the Indian tribes on the southern frontier of British North America. It needed a robust economy and a population that could not only defend the colony but also provide a ready market for British goods and services and supply Britain with much-needed commodities. The fact that throughout the period from 1730 to 1783 more than half of South Carolina’s residents were enslaved did not trouble British policy makers. In line with the precepts of mercantilism that governed British economic policy—that the nation’s economic interests could best be strengthened by government intervention, through protection of domestic industries by tariffs, monopolies, and a favorable balance of overseas trade, and that colonies should support, benefit, and strengthen the “mother country”—these considerations underlay South Carolina’s value to Great Britain.

Rice had taken its place as South Carolina’s staple cash crop in the 1720s. Exports of the crop trebled during that decade, and with further steady growth throughout the colonial era, by the 1770s rice was behind only tobacco and the grain of the northern colonies as the third most valuable commodity export from British North America.⁹ Rice’s rise to preeminence followed the settlers’ earlier ventures in trading with the region’s Native Americans—Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws—for deerskins to export, a trade that remained important to South Carolina for much of the eighteenth century and linked the colony’s transatlantic trade to Indian trading networks stretching far into the North American continent. Other enterprises in supplying beef and pork, wood, and enslaved Indians to Britain’s Caribbean colonies connected South Carolina to markets and communities across the Atlantic Ocean and around its shores from its earliest British settlement.¹⁰ Connections to the West Indies were especially formative—many of South Carolina’s first white settlers had come from Barbados—and would continue to be vital throughout the colonial period and beyond.¹¹

Visitors to South Carolina were struck by its similarities with the West Indies in its climate, the characteristics of its elite white society, and above all by its demography. Enslaved black people were a majority of South Carolina’s population from about 1710. In the words of one visitor from England, “with a few Exceptions, [they] do all the Labour or hard Work in the Country, and are a considerable Part of the Riches of the Province.”¹² Such characteristics meant that the colony more closely resembled the plantation societies of Barbados and Jamaica than it did Britain’s other mainland slave colonies, such as Virginia and Maryland. Back in London even officials responsible for overseeing Britain’s Page 4 →colonies had difficulty distinguishing between South Carolina and the Caribbean islands.¹³ Before the American Revolution marked the political separation of thirteen colonies from Great Britain, South Carolina was one of more than two dozen British colonies in the Western Hemisphere. Its connections for much of the eighteenth century with Jamaica and Barbados were at least as strong as those with Massachusetts, New York, or Virginia—a fact that histories of the American Revolution have often failed to emphasize.¹⁴

Not only were South Carolina’s connections with the West Indies economically essential to the colony, with slaves on the islands’ sugar plantations being major consumers of its rice, but they also reinforced the colony’s strategic significance within the British Empire. South Carolina was both a leading source of provisions for the West Indies—in British policy makers’ eyes, the jewel of the empire—and important to their defense. Charles Town was the largest town and the most important harbor in the southern half of British North America. Its population by 1730 numbered about four thousand residents, split almost equally between free whites and enslaved blacks. Within a decade this grew to six thousand, placing Charles Town behind only Boston, New York, and Philadelphia among the most populous towns in British North America. As well as being a major port, it was an important station for the Royal Navy in its defense of Britain’s possessions in the Americas. In the warfare between Britain, France, and Spain that punctuated the eighteenth century, the port’s value was magnified. The navy could use Charles Town as a base for patrols against the enemy privateers that preyed on British shipping and could itself disrupt rival nations’ Atlantic commerce. Further enhancing its value to Great Britain, South Carolina’s semitropical climate, abundant cultivable land, and slave labor force could provide Britain with much-desired commodities such as naval stores and, later, indigo that the country could not produce itself and which therefore did not compete with domestic industries. The significance of this point was not lost on South Carolina’s governor James Glen when he characterized the colony in a report to his superiors in London in 1751. It was, he told them, “a large territory on the Atlantic Ocean, in a temperate latitude, the soil of which is found by experience capable of producing many commodities no way interfering with the product of the mother country, whose ports are good, and whose rivers are many of them navigable.”¹⁵

The merchants who handled the fruits of South Carolina’s land and labor, the produce shipped downstream on the colony’s rivers from plantations to Charles Town, are this book’s central characters. For a group of such importance in South Carolina’s development, the colony’s merchants and their counterparts across the Atlantic have been surprisingly neglected by history. “The role of merchants is often derided or devalued, when not dismissed altogether or assumed away … the area’s precocious and prepossessing economic experience was due in large part to markets, merchants, and merchant capital,” the historian Peter Page 5 →Coclanis has observed; and for another, R. C. Nash, “our knowledge of the role of British merchants and capital in the South Carolina trade is very limited.”¹⁶ In the titles of two articles considering Anglo-American relations and the nature of Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century, the historian Jacob Price posed two questions: “What did Merchants do?” and “Who Cared about the Colonies?”¹⁷ The answers to both these questions are interrelated.

The merchants at the forefront of London’s Carolina trade—men such as Isaac King—cared about South Carolina for reasons that were commercial, economic, and social. The way they managed and manifested these concerns had profound implications for the stability of the imperial-colonial relationship between Britain and South Carolina, for that relationship’s eventual collapse, and for the reconstitution of the relationship in a new form after American independence. In London, Carolina merchants had an important role as political as well as commercial connections in the fabric of the British Empire. They were South Carolina’s leading lobbyists, operating alongside official agents employed by the colony to represent its interests. Not only was the British capital the country’s most important port and the center for Britain’s trade to South Carolina, but in addition the London Carolina merchants’ location placed them close to the imperial corridors of power, facilitating their access to the political decision makers they sought to influence. Their lobbying was part and parcel of their regular business activities. As did merchants in other branches of Britain’s colonial trade—but more actively and with greater success than most—the Carolina traders organized and signed petitions to the key institutions of imperial government: Parliament, the Treasury, and the Board of Trade, a committee of Great Britain’s Privy Council that formally reported to the monarch and was charged with overseeing all matters relating to Britain’s trade and colonies. They gave evidence to parliamentary committees investigating South Carolina’s trade and defense and provided statistics to inform government policy. They reported all this back to their correspondents in Charles Town.

London’s leading role in South Carolina’s commerce was well known to contemporaries. “There are between Two and Three Hundred sail of shipping yearly Loaded from this port,” the Charles Town merchant Robert Pringle told a prospective British entrant into the Carolina trade in 1738, “& the Chief part are Large ships for London & to London especially.”¹⁸ The capital’s preeminence in South Carolina’s transatlantic trade and the consequent influence of its merchants continued up to and beyond the American Revolution.¹⁹ London was the most important destination for South Carolina’s exports throughout the eighteenth century: it received the lion’s share of the colony’s indigo exports, the majority of its deerskins, and a large proportion of its rice. In terms of exporting goods to South Carolina, London’s preeminence was still more pronounced, and it increased during the colonial period to account for between 85 and 90 percent of British merchandise exports to the colony between 1760 and 1774. In addition, Page 6 →while London’s position in the Atlantic slave trade is often overlooked, with the roles of Bristol and Liverpool better known, the capital’s merchants and shipping played a pivotal organizational and financial role in supplying the labor upon which South Carolina’s economy and wealth were founded. London was the most important British port in the slave trade to South Carolina during the 1720s and 1730s, a dominance that declined only gradually in the second half of the eighteenth century. Throughout the period slave importers in Charles Town relied heavily on credit advanced by London merchants.²⁰

The composition and structure of London’s Carolina trade made the merchants within it especially active in their engagement with government. The trade was concentrated in relatively few hands. Most of the merchants at the forefront of the trade until the 1760s had lived and worked in Charles Town; many had bought houses and lots in the town and plantations across South Carolina’s lowcountry and continued to hold on to these after leaving the colony. In contributing to the merchants’ particular political activism on South Carolina’s behalf, these compositional features would be a force for stability for much of the colonial period. As Anglo-American relations deteriorated from the 1760s, however, they took on very different implications. The merchants’ activism with the government on commercial issues contrasted with inaction on more explicitly political matters. Concentration of trade became synonymous with domination of trade. Ownership of property and land in South Carolina became less a symbol of a benevolent stake in the colony than a facet of remote control. As British officialdom increasingly encroached into the lives of South Carolina’s leading merchants and planters, they found that the system of lobbying and representation that had long proved effective could no longer provide relief. Their interests were no longer aligned with the men with whom they traded. Disputes between British merchants and their correspondents in South Carolina reflected in microcosm the geopolitical shifts of the time and show at an individual level how disenchantment with and then resistance to imperial authority developed.

Between the 1730s and the 1760s the lobbying, petitioning, and legislative initiatives mounted by London’s Carolina merchants to gain favorable treatment for South Carolina and its goods sent important signals to their counterparts in Charles Town. These initiatives were seen to manifest the traders’ commitment to the colony from which their wealth derived; even if unsuccessful, the intent behind the lobbying was itself significant.

Exploring the commercial trajectories of London’s leading mid-century Carolina merchants is also vital to understanding the lobby’s development. It was in South Carolina’s own “metropolis,” Charles Town, that these traders began their careers before relocating to London in search of still greater profits. In the capital they dominated Britain’s trade with South Carolina and became the Page 7 →colony’s principal advocates. Their routes into trade, such as through commercial apprenticeships and by captaining transatlantic shipping, and the influence of their early careers in Charles Town had lasting consequences. Experiences in South Carolina helped them build the capital and connections needed to prosper in transatlantic business and propelled them to the forefront of London’s Carolina trade.

The lobby reached its zenith during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Charles Town’s merchants looked to their “Friends at Home”—a doubly revealing epithet—to represent mutual interests in imperial political forums. The structural features of London’s Carolina trade strengthened its political impact. Chief among these features were its concentration in a relatively small number of hands, the personal experience that most of the merchants had of living and working in Charles Town, and the emergence of dynamic leadership within the trade. These distinguished the capital’s Carolina lobby from other North American interest groups and contributed to its effectiveness. Merchants settled into business in London and came to dominate Britain’s trade with South Carolina. The commercial activities of individual merchants were closely linked with their collective lobbying. James Crokatt’s rise as London’s leading Carolina merchant and the colony’s foremost advocate in the capital revealed how shrewd traders could combine economic patriotism with commercial gain. The lobby’s successes in securing a bounty—a supplementary sum paid by the government to incentivize production—on South Carolinian indigo and stimuli for the colony’s silk, potash, and hemp came as it tapped into a favorable ideological environment in British politics.

The spells that London’s leading Carolina traders—up to the 1760s at least—had spent in the colony distinguished them from many of their counterparts in other sectors of North American trade in Britain. This followed a practice more common in London’s West Indies trade, in which many of the capital’s merchants had honed their commercial expertise in the Caribbean. Absenteeism was typically associated in eighteenth-century Britain with ownership of lands in the West Indies or Ireland, and with harmful consequences. For the London Carolina merchants, ownership of property and plantations reinforced their commercial interests in the colony and contributed to their particular assiduity in promoting the colony’s interests in Britain: absenteeism helped to amplify South Carolina’s voice in the imperial corridors of power. Initially treated with ambivalence in the colony, by the eve of the American Revolution, however, this absenteeism had come to assume more negative political connotations.

The composition and structure of the transatlantic Carolina trade broadly served as a force for stability in relations between Great Britain and South Carolina. However, there was a multidimensional breakdown of trust within the trade during the 1760s and 1770s. Viewed retrospectively, the lobbying achievements of London’s Carolina merchants over the previous thirty years took on a new Page 8 →dimension as the merchants’ previous activism contrasted with their apparent inactivity and reluctance to intervene in the political disputes that exercised South Carolinians from the 1760s onward. Commercially, the concentration of London’s Carolina trade in relatively few hands—once a factor in the efficiency of its lobbying—came to be seen as domination. While historians have assessed the economic implications of how specific trades became concentrated in fewer hands during the eighteenth century, this work assesses the political ramifications of this process. London merchants were held to be increasingly unsympathetic or even hostile to South Carolina’s interests. As tensions between Britain and its American colonies mounted, the perceived commercial and political dependence on these uncertain London “friends” seemed no longer either effective or wise to many Carolinians. Their complaints were not expressed as explicit challenges to the mercantilist precepts that governed the British Empire’s trade. However, critiques of supposed commercial malpractice were a tacit or at least incipient rejection of the systemic constraints that the empire imposed on the colony, constraints that had—many believed—led to the malign concentration of trade in London, furnished the capital’s traders with great and excessive wealth, and allowed these traders to manipulate business in their own favor.

Events during the decade following American independence cast fresh light on the discord leading up to 1776. The postwar resumption of Anglo-Carolinian trade was marked both by commercial upheavals and by continuities. This book explores how trading links between South Carolina and Great Britain in the 1780s were strongly influenced by prewar politics. Britain remained the new state’s largest overseas market, but this structural continuity—much bemoaned by many observers in Charleston—masked pronounced discontinuities within Britain’s postwar Carolina trade. London’s leading prewar Carolina merchants, nearly all of whom had come to be considered by Patriot observers as hostile to South Carolina’s interests by the eve of the war, were spurned in postwar commerce because of their supposed prewar politics. Conversely, London merchants who had sympathized with or actively supported the American cause were favored. Exercising commercial choices in this way, South Carolinians confounded contemporary jeremiads that decried ongoing subservience to monolithic British business interests. Investigating how London’s Carolina merchants continued to press and lobby the British government during and after the Revolutionary War also demonstrates the centrality of commercial matters in British policy making toward the United States during the 1780s and, accordingly, to Anglo-American relations in this critical decade of uneasy and hesitant rapprochement.

Like Isaac King, having conducted “a considerable Trade as a Merchant to the then Province of South Carolina” before the war, Joseph Nicholson was another merchant reduced by debts “from a Situation of comparative Elevation in which he and his Family enjoyed every comfort that affluence could afford to one of embarrassment and distress.”²¹ His family submitted a claim to the British Page 9 →government after the war for compensation for his losses. His and King’s experiences typified the trajectories of the merchants whose commercial and political roles were crucial in South Carolina’s development between 1730 and 1790. This development was achieved on the backs of displaced Native Americans and enslaved Africans, through agricultural innovation, economic stimulation, and political encouragement. At every stage of the process, merchants on either side of the Atlantic were central. Their trade and their lobbying had once brought South Carolina and Great Britain together. These activities also sowed the seeds for an irrevocable falling-out. The merchants’ stories of political activity and inactivity, profits and losses, and reputation and notoriety are at the heart of this book.