Page 42 →Chapter Two “Friends to Assist at Home”

London’s Carolina trade had, since its origins in the first decades of the eighteenth century, been concentrated in relatively few hands. Petitions, letters, and tax assessments reveal how this concentration remained one of the trade’s chief features throughout the middle decades of the century. Its structure paralleled or even prefigured that of other branches of London’s overseas commerce, where the sugar, tobacco, and slave trades were all becoming dominated by fewer and larger trading houses.³ Visiting London in 1749, Henry Laurens identified three trading houses in the capital as being preeminent in the Carolina trade: James Crokatt & Co., John Nickleson, and Richard Shubrick.⁴ Together with John Beswicke, these three firms dominated exports to the colony during the 1740s and 1750s. Through the commercial foundations they laid for their successors, their influence would persist after their retirements or deaths. Other London partnerships specializing in the Carolina trade mostly either sprang from these firms or were closely connected to them. Evidence from merchants’ petitioning and from the registers of ships docking in Charles Town supports a picture of a concentrated trade.⁵

Fourteen years after Laurens’s observations, the concentration of London’s Carolina trade was again made clear in 1763 in Mortimer’s Directory, the first London trade directory to classify merchants by their sectoral or geographic focus. Of the forty-six merchants listed by Mortimer’s as being in North American trade in the capital, just six firms were categorized as “Carolina merchants.” Listings Page 44 →were probably made on the basis of self-identification, with each firm classifying itself by its primary trading concerns, making Mortimer’s a fairly reliable guide to specialization in each branch of trade.⁶ In contrast to the six Carolina traders listed, the directory classified forty-nine firms as West India merchants, nineteen as Virginia merchants, and nine as New England merchants. The connections between the capital’s different Carolina trading houses further emphasize the group’s stability and unified character. Three of the six firms listed in Mortimer’s were James & Charles Crokatt, John Beswicke, and Richard Shubrick. The other three were John Nutt, Crokatt’s son-in law; Grubb & Watson, formerly junior partners in Crokatt’s trading house; and Sarah Nickleson, the sister of Richard Shubrick and widow of John Nickleson.⁷ John Nickleson had died in 1754 of an “Apoplectic Fit” caused, according to one friend, by “the Disobedience of his Children, which he took too much to Heart.”⁸ After his death, Sarah Nickleson took control of the firm, making her one of just a handful of female merchants in an overwhelmingly male business. The other leading Carolina merchants in London during the 1760s and 1770s, William Greenwood and William Higginson, were nephews of John Beswicke who inherited their uncle’s business on his death in 1764.

As in previous decades, London’s trade with South Carolina was not entirely limited to these firms, as warehousemen and other specialist retailers too sent their wares to correspondents in Charles Town on credit.⁹ Other merchants who relocated from Charles Town to London between the 1750s and early 1770s, such as Charles Ogilvie, Samuel Carne, James Poyas, Benjamin Stead, and William Stone, continued trading with the colony; in addition elite London merchants whose trading portfolios stretched across the colonies did business with counterparts in Charles Town.¹⁰ However, the clear majority of London’s Carolina trade by volume and, as importantly, the principal voice of the South Carolina “interest” in the empire’s capital was concentrated among a select group of specialist Carolina merchants.

The choice by merchants such as James Crokatt, John Beswicke, Richard Shubrick, and John Nickleson to establish themselves in London after leaving Charles Town was driven by the capital’s commercial supremacy. London’s sheer size set it apart from all other cities in the British Empire. Its population in 1750 was about 675,000, making it the largest city in western Europe and more than ten times more populous than Britain’s next biggest city, Bristol, with its roughly 50,000 inhabitants. It had around one hundred times more residents than Charles Town.¹¹ In terms of trade, in all of Britain’s overseas commerce in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, London never had less than double the combined share of all the country’s regional “outports” such as Bristol, Liverpool, and Lancaster put together. The dominance was mirrored in trade with Britain’s colonies. London’s share of Britain’s imports from its colonies was more than 64 percent of the total and its exports to the colonies Page 45 →above 70 percent of the total throughout the period.¹² The same was true in trade with South Carolina.

In the rice trade, London was the largest single destination for South Carolina’s exports of the crop between the 1730s and the 1750s, receiving significantly more than either Bristol or Cowes, the two next biggest British rice ports. Most rice was carried on the account and risk of London “principals,” who employed agents in Charles Town and sometimes South Carolina’s minor ports, Beaufort and Georgetown, to buy the grain from local planters or intermediary “country factors” and to arrange its shipment across the Atlantic. After being landed and taxed in Britain, most rice was reexported to Holland and Germany, where it was eaten by people and livestock, especially in winter and particularly when poor European harvests led to shortages of cereal products.¹³ Smaller amounts were retained in Britain for sale to wholesale grocers. London merchants also controlled much of the rice that was shipped on to continental Europe through England’s channel ports such as Cowes and Poole.¹⁴ The capital was also the main recipient of South Carolina’s exported deerskins and naval stores, and it was the destination for an overwhelming share of its indigo after the dye became the colony’s second largest export from the late 1740s.¹⁵

In the indigo trade, the commission system was more common. Through this, Carolinian planters or Charles Town merchants acting for several small producers shipped indigo to merchants—overwhelmingly in London—on their own account and risk, matching the system by which Chesapeake tobacco and West Indies sugar were marketed in the capital. The British merchants sold the dye to specialist dealers or to grocers on their correspondents’ behalf and remitted the proceeds in bills of exchange, promissory notes, or goods. London also dominated Britain’s export trade to South Carolina, principally owing to the more generous credit offered by the capital’s merchants and their better access than merchants in Britain’s regional ports had to the European and Asian goods, especially fabrics, that colonial consumers sought. Most cargoes were sent on credit—by the 1740s typically at 5 percent interest from six months after date of invoice—to Charles Town merchants who either traded independently or were involved in transatlantic partnerships.¹⁶ Evidence from other branches of Anglo-American trade suggests that exporting goods was a particularly profitable line of business, with goods selling for several times their cost price and giving London merchants profit margins of up to 10 percent on export cargoes. However, against these potential rewards the colonial export trade also involved substantial risks, particularly of recipients defaulting on payments and the loss or damage of goods in transit.¹⁷

Following their commercial practice when they had lived and worked in Charles Town, where they had concentrated on exporting produce and importing British and European goods, London’s major Carolina traders mostly avoided direct involvement in the slave trade. This was not for lack of resources Page 46 →or opportunity. London and Bristol together dominated Britain’s slave trade to South Carolina in the first half of the eighteenth century, with ships beginning their journeys in the two ports supplying nearly 25,000 enslaved Africans to South Carolina between 1710 and 1749. Although Bristol and Liverpool would take an increasingly large share of Britain’s Atlantic slave trade as the century progressed, London’s ships and merchants remained major suppliers of enslaved Africans to Britain’s plantation colonies, including South Carolina.¹⁸ Given the merchants’ complicity in South Carolina’s slave system through their willingness to export goods used to clothe, equip, and restrain slaves in the colony and to import slave-made produce such as rice and indigo, their general avoidance of the slave trade was surely due to commercial rather than moral reasoning—perhaps an aversion to the greater risks involved in the traffic in human cargoes. Timing may also have been a factor. The commercial ascent in London of Crokatt, Beswicke, Shubrick, and Nickleson during the 1740s coincided with a decade-long hiatus in the Atlantic slave trade to South Carolina. After the Stono Rebellion in September 1739, in which as many as one hundred slaves seeking to escape to Spanish Florida had killed about forty white settlers living south of Charles Town, South Carolina’s Assembly introduced prohibitively high duties on slaves brought into the colony in an attempt to curb the growth of its black population. Between 1740 and 1748 just eight slave ships, of which only two were registered in London, arrived in Charles Town, landing 1,550 slaves from Africa. In the previous ten years, 1730–39, eighty-two slave ships had, by contrast, arrived in South Carolina, landing more than 20,000 slaves. Of these voyages, thirty-four were made by ships registered in London.¹⁹

Page 47 →The Atlantic slave trade to South Carolina began to reach its previous heights from 1748. A reduction of the high import duties four years earlier and surging European demand for rice and a takeoff in indigo cultivation led planters to demand more slaves. By this point London’s leading Carolina traders were well established in profitably importing South Carolinian produce and exporting goods from Britain, continental Europe, and beyond to the colony. They were not inclined to diversify into the slave trade, a riskier though very profitable field. James Crokatt responded to a proposal from Henry Laurens for a joint venture “in a Guinea Vessel with Slaves to Carolina” by explaining that he was “fully employ’d with Business on Commission & chuses to be confin’d in that way.” Signifying his lack of moral qualms about the trade, however, Crokatt willingly gave Laurens letters of introduction to slave traders in Bristol and Liverpool.²⁰ After Crokatt, Beswicke, Shubrick, and Nickleson retired or died, their commercial successors for the most part followed the same trading model, concentrating on exporting goods and importing commodities, and left the traffic in human cargo to specialist slave traders. This aversion to the slave trade among London’s Carolina traders from the 1740s contrasted with the earlier generation of the capital’s Carolina traders. The likes of Stephen and David Godin and Samuel Wragg had combined commodity and slave trading. By comparison, of the six Carolina specialists listed in Mortimer’s in 1763, only Richard Shubrick and John Nutt were recorded to have had stakes in slaving voyages to South Carolina. Shubricks & Co., the Charles Town trading house in which Richard Shubrick was in partnership with his brother Thomas, intermittently imported slaves into Charles Town, including 220 slaves brought from Gambia and the Windward Coast in 1755. Nutt was part of an eight-man consortium that owned the slave ship Cape Coast in 1758.²¹

Page 48 →Just as London’s Carolina traders mostly eschewed diversifying into the slave trade, they seem to have largely avoided other geographic branches of trade and focused predominantly on South Carolina. This was probably a function of the difficulty all merchants in long-distance overseas trades encountered in maintaining trust, reputation, and accurate market intelligence, considerations that were easier to control by trading predominantly to a single location or region.²² Diversifications into different branches of trade appear to have been supplementary or speculative ventures. James Crokatt conducted some trade with the West Indies and joined other London merchants, including fellow Carolina traders Andrew Pringle and Charles Ogilvie, in beginning a trade with Guadeloupe and Martinique, the Caribbean islands captured from France during the Seven Years’ War. The three signed a petition to the government in 1762 against restoring the islands to France on the grounds that they would be unable to recover debts owed to them by planters on the islands.²³ The import-export trade with South Carolina was, however, the merchants’ principal concern; it generated large enough profits to discourage them from diversifying much into other sectors.

These profits translated into status and wealth. London’s Carolina merchants often owned the ships that plied the Atlantic, crossing from west to east with rice, indigo, naval stores, and deerskins or in the other direction with textiles, ironwork, furniture, and other goods to be sold in Charles Town. Owning these ships generated extra profits for the merchants from hiring out space on the vessels to smaller traders for their goods and by avoiding the costs of chartering vessels themselves. Buying an oceangoing ship required substantial capital, further pointing to the Carolina merchants’ wealth, especially when—as was often the case—one merchant was a ship’s sole owner.²⁴ Directorships of London institutions, especially the capital’s limited liability insurance companies, also reflected the wealth and status that London’s Carolina merchants enjoyed. John Nickleson, for example, was a director of Royal Exchange Assurance; his brother-in-law, Richard Shubrick, was for fifteen years a director of the London Assurance Corporation and on account of his maritime expertise was an “elder brother” of Trinity House, the body responsible for the upkeep of Britain’s lighthouses.²⁵

Philanthropic service and donations further signaled the wealth and status of London’s Carolina merchants. Sitting on charitable boards, they moved among the capital’s commercial elites. As with commercial lobbying, their philanthropic activities indicated how they understood the overlapping roles of commerce, private initiative, and government. Through membership on charity boards, London’s Carolina merchants epitomized the well-established belief that private initiative could directly stimulate Britain’s “national interest.” Several of them directed their philanthropy—a by-product of their commercial profits—toward nautical causes, reflecting the maritime character of their business and the contemporary preoccupation with Britain’s naval prowess. A number Page 49 →subscribed to the Marine Society, which funded poor boys to join the Royal Navy. Sailors’ welfare organizations such as the “Hospital for decay’d Seamen in the Merchants’ Service” and the “Corporation for the Relief and Support of Sick, Maimed and Disabled Seamen, and of the Widows and Children of such as shall be Killed, Slain, or Drowned in the Merchants’ Service” were other favored causes.²⁶ Most explicitly yoking social concern with patriotic ends—and in this case in the expectation of financial dividends for himself—James Crokatt invested one thousand pounds in the Free British Fishery Society, an organization formed in 1749 to promote herring fishing in the hope of boosting Britain’s shipping fleet, training sailors, and alleviating poverty.²⁷ Charity in the “national interest” also complemented the Carolina traders’ political lobbying. Both reflected the idea that it was the role and responsibility of the concerned individual to promote economic and social well-being. Moreover, the desired outcomes would lead to national advantages—whether a better manned and more active Royal Navy or more productive colonies—which would in turn benefit the individual donor or lobbyist. For London’s Carolina merchants, this benefit might be an Atlantic Ocean made safer by an empowered navy or, thanks to their lobbying for favorable treatment of South Carolina’s produce, more rice or indigo to trade. Philanthropy, advocacy, and self-interest went hand in hand.

The way businesses were organized in the transatlantic Carolina trade reinforced the concentration of trade in relatively few hands. One aspect of this was the manner in which partnerships were formed. Making transatlantic partnerships with traders in Charles Town offered London’s Carolina merchants assured outlets for their goods and reliable suppliers of rice, indigo, naval stores, and deerskins for British and continental European markets. It also gave London traders reliable “market intelligence” on local conditions in South Carolina: which imported goods were in demand—increasing their price—and which were oversupplied and therefore to avoid sending; spot prices for the colony’s agricultural exports; details of shipping movements in Charles Town; and the threats of privateers along the Carolina coast during wartime. Partnerships also reduced a trading house’s exposure to the age-old problems of principal-agency: the liability of agents on the ground to mismanage the firm’s affairs, to trade on their own account, or at worst to actively defraud the firm. Retaining a family member as a business partner in Charles Town, as Richard Shubrick arranged with his brother Thomas, was, at least in theory, the most effective form of mitigating these problems and, more generally, of assuring trust—a commodity critical to success in a long-distance and precarious business environment.

Fraternal partnerships spanning the Atlantic, whether legally binding or more informal, were a feature of British trade with South Carolina and Georgia Page 50 →throughout the eighteenth century. Besides Richard and Thomas Shubrick, this was also the case in the connections between Samuel Wragg in London and his brother Joseph in Charles Town during the 1720s and 1730s, between Robert Pringle in Charles Town and his brother Andrew in London in the 1730s and 1740s, and within Graham, Clark & Co., leading merchants in Georgia’s Atlantic trade during the 1760s and early 1770s, in which John Graham represented the firm in Savannah and his brother James controlled business in London.²⁸ For traders unwilling or unable to rely on a brother on the other side of the Atlantic, long-standing and trusted friends could fill the breach. Having entered transatlantic partnership with Ebenezer Simmons and Benjamin Smith, James Crokatt confined his export trade to the port almost exclusively to his partners.²⁹ From London, John Beswicke entered into a series of partnerships with Charles Town traders, again showing the value attached to trusted and reliable correspondents “on the spot.”³⁰

Against the security offered by formal transatlantic partnerships, conducting trade with a number of different correspondents in South Carolina offered competing advantages, not least of which were the greater volumes and higher profits that might be achieved as a consequence. James Crokatt’s partnership with Simmons & Smith in Charles Town ended as planned in 1745, when its seven-year term expired, and the firm’s assets were liquidated and divided among the three men, each receiving just under seven thousand pounds. The end of the partnership prompted a shift in Crokatt’s trading strategy.³¹ From 1745 he shipped goods on credit—ranging from textiles to building materials—directly to a multitude of independent traders and storekeepers in Charles Town, receiving remittances in cash, bills of exchange, or rice in a fleet of vessels either co-owned with Charles Town merchants or owned solely by him.³² Reaching consumers in the interior of South Carolina and Georgia, Crokatt also sent merchandise directly to lowcountry planters for their use.³³ Having gained expertise and reputations, London’s principal Carolina merchants found that new firms in Charles Town clamored hard to get business from them, thereby reinforcing their grip on the capital’s Carolina trade. The traders in one start-up business asked Robert Raper, the long-serving agent in the port for John Beswicke and James Crokatt, to tell Charles Crokatt, who inherited his father’s business, that they were setting up in trade and “want much to deal with him.” Raper assured Crokatt that the traders were “honest industrious young men” who would, moreover, “not live extravagantly as too many of our Merchants here.” He provided a similar service to William Greenwood and William Higginson after they took over Beswicke’s firm, telling them of a new partnership in Charles Town whose members were keen to do business with them. The partnership would “apply to you for Goods & desired I would recommend them,” Raper related. Furthermore, they were creditworthy, solvent, and had a reputation for being in good “Circumstances,” essential attributes for would-be Atlantic traders touting for connections in London.³⁴

Page 51 →For aspiring merchants in Charles Town, choosing the right trading correspondents in Britain required careful deliberation. Confidence and trust were hard-won commodities based on reputation and recommendation; having forged a link with a particular London trading house, a Charles Town merchant often directed the bulk of his trade to it. Moreover, there were economies of scale in shipping rice, indigo, or deerskins in a single consignment to one trading house rather than in several consignments to many. Doing so reduced transaction costs in shipping charges and insurance and simplified making remittances. Reflecting in 1755 to a London correspondent on the successful campaign for a bounty on Carolinian indigo that James Crokatt had led seven years earlier, Henry Laurens described his Charles Town counterparts’ partiality to particular trading houses. Some might have expected that Crokatt’s endeavors would have persuaded all the town’s traders to switch their commercial allegiances to him. Because of the traders’ established connections, however, they had not. “You may Possible think the Mercantile Men ought to consign all their Indigo to him [Crokatt],” he explained, “but as every one has his Perticular Freind that sends out all his goods it cant be expected that they would send part of their Remittance to a different hand.”³⁵ Long-term and relatively exclusive trading relationships between Charles Town and London reflected the belief that the greatest stability and surest profits came from confining one’s trade to a small circle of correspondents. This persisted throughout the colonial era, again helping to perpetuate the concentration of London’s Carolina trade. As Laurens counseled a young trader, he should not be “anxious to obtain a numerous Correspondence, it will plague you in the Carolina Trade, sometimes perplex you to discharge all the business consign’d to you, and what is worse than all, it will sometimes draw Censure upon you for Partiality or Neglect, when in fact you have acted with the strictest Candour and the greatest Diligence. And finally the Profits arising from it, will not be so clear as those which result from transactions with a few well chosen Friends.”³⁶

The process of forming partnerships within London’s Carolina trading houses also helped to maintain the trade’s concentration in a small and selfperpetuating circle. Just as commercial logic encouraged the formation of partnerships in Charles Town and between merchants on either side of the Atlantic, there were sound business reasons for merchants to go into partnership in London. For established traders, it reduced workload by spreading tasks and lessened their personal financial exposure; for aspiring merchants, it reduced the capital barriers to entering trade and, by offering the prospect of gaining a financial stake in the firm, incentivized clerks and apprentices. James Crokatt employed at least four apprentices as clerks and bookkeepers in his Cloak Lane countinghouse in the late 1740s. In 1749, being “desirous of easing himself of some part of the Fatigue of so great a concern,” he brought two of his apprentices, Richard Grubb and Alexander Watson, into a seven-year partnership. Crokatt invested sixteen thousand pounds, four-fifths of the firm’s total stock of twenty Page 52 →thousand pounds, with his junior copartners each putting in two thousand pounds for one-tenth stakes. The partners drew on the firm’s joint stock for their subsistence, with these deductions reckoned in the annual accounts. As the partnership was based at Crokatt’s house, its terms allowed him to deduct ten pounds a year from the firm for coal and fifty pounds “for the entertainment of strangers”—an early corporate hospitality account. With an eye to the future, the terms of partnership also included a provision for Crokatt’s son Charles to take a share in the firm when ready. He duly did, becoming copartner in 1755 and taking over the firm in his own right in 1760.³⁷ Other Carolina traders as well perpetuated their businesses by bringing sons or other young relatives into their firms. Richard Shubrick’s son, also Richard, inherited his father’s firm, while John Beswicke trained his nephews William Greenwood and William Higginson. Beneath this veneer of stability, however, were profound contrasts in the merchants’ experience, with important consequences for the character of London’s Carolina trade. Unlike their predecessors, who had each personally lived and traded for several years in Charles Town, this new generation of London’s Carolina merchants had spent their formative years in trade in the capital itself.

The Carolina merchants’ geographic concentration within London meant that the trade was doubly concentrated in a small number of hands and, with just a few exceptions, in a small area within the historic City of London. Their close proximity reflected a common pattern within the different sectors of London’s overseas commerce. Traders in longer-established branches of American trade had long congregated in particular city wards: Virginia traders, for example, mostly operated in Tower and Aldgate Wards.³⁸ Propinquity was valued for several commercial reasons. It enabled traders to relay information easily about ships’ sailings, to exchange intelligence on matters such as anticipated crop yields and prices and the creditworthiness of transatlantic correspondents, and to arrange shared cargoes. Such clustering took place from the 1740s among London’s Carolina merchants, reflecting both the increasing volume of trade between London and South Carolina and the trade’s growing prominence as a sector of London business.

When James Crokatt transferred from Charles Town to London, he established himself in premises on Coleman Street, north of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He probably chose this location because it was near the trading house of his longtime associate Samuel Wragg. As he supplanted the elderly Wragg as the capital’s leading Carolina trader, Crokatt triggered a congregation of Carolina merchants. After Crokatt moved in 1747 to premises on Cloak Lane, closer to the River Thames, nearby streets straddling Dowgate, Vintry, and Walbrook Wards became the nexus for London’s Carolina traders. The area gave easy access to Thames-side wharves and warehouses immediately to the south. A short walk north led to the Royal Exchange, the hub of London’s trading and a vital stop on a merchant’s daily rounds, where cargoes could be brokered, insurance agreed, and commodity trades arranged. By 1760 the Carolina trade occupied a Page 53 →special “walk” in the Royal Exchange alongside dedicated sections for Virginia, New England, and West Indies traders; for specialist commodities; and for other branches of trade such as to Turkey, Portugal, and Italy.³⁹

Like other fields of commerce, the Carolina trade had its own special coffeehouse. Besides providing coffee, it was a venue for merchants to meet, receive correspondence, read newly arrived copies of colonial newspapers, and do business. A Carolina Coffee House had existed in London since before 1749, when it could be found on Birchin Lane, at the heart of the area where the Carolina merchants had their premises. Together, the Royal Exchange, Carolina Coffee House, and the proximity of trading houses facilitated another of the Carolina traders’ activities: petitioning. A petition could be quickly circulated among traders living and working near one another and meeting one another daily at the coffeehouse, at the Exchange’s Carolina “walk,” and at riverside wharves. Signatures could be rapidly collected and the group mobilized.⁴⁰ While this was true in other branches of trade, the concentration of the Carolina trade in a relatively small number of hands along with the traders’ geographic congregation seem to have expedited these processes and made London’s Carolina lobby particularly responsive. Britain’s wars with Spain and France between 1739 and 1748 and the political-economic climate in their wake would test the ability of London’s Carolina merchants to capitalize on the group’s internal coherence and respond to the political opportunities that arose.

In 1715 the Yamassee War had led to the first organized lobbying by merchants in London on South Carolina’s behalf. Given the colony’s exposed position on the southern frontier of British North America, Spanish, French, and Indian threats continued to loom large in the minds of its residents and its supporters in Britain. These threats were made all the more serious after the outbreak of war with Spain in 1739 and France in 1744. As they had thirty years earlier, Carolinians seized upon colonial defense as an issue on which London’s Carolina traders could particularly influence British government policy. Wartime increased the traders’ usefulness to the British government as a source of information on South Carolina, as the government sought news of military dispositions and the colony’s defensive readiness. This gave the traders particular access to government, enabling them to lobby for extra protection for the colony. Charles Town’s merchants could exert leverage on the government, Robert Pringle suggested, by galvanizing their connections in London. As he wrote to his brother Andrew in the capital in 1743, “the Merchants & trading people [of Charles Town] ought to be Inform’d of & their Opinion ask’t & advis’d with in all affairs of that nature, & that they may advise their Friends to assist at Home.” London merchants had formed a committee the previous year to lobby for three army companies to defend South Carolina against any Spanish attack.⁴¹ Andrew Pringle, a former ship’s captain turned Carolina trader in London, was one of the “Friends at Home” who successfully pressed for greater military and naval protection for the colony. His brother thanked him in March 1744 for his “Good Offices to have Page 56 →the Companies and Gallies Granted to us, for which this Province is Greatly Oblig’d to you.” While the irascible Robert Pringle regretted that not all the capital’s Carolina merchants were as diligent in serving the colony, his complaint that “if all the Gentlemen in this Trade has as just Concern for it as you, things would goe better here than they doe” nonetheless emphasized the common belief in how effective London lobbying could be.⁴²

The forcible impressment of merchant seamen in Charles Town into the Royal Navy particularly vexed the port’s traders. As with military protection for the colony, it was a matter where they felt their London counterparts could profitably intercede with government. Whether naval officers could legally force merchant seamen in the American colonies to join the navy was a moot point of law during the 1730s and 1740s. The 1708 “Act for the Encouragement of Trade to America” had prohibited any impressment in America except for naval deserters, but it was subject to differing legal interpretations in Britain. Some jurists believed that the law gave colonial governors residual powers to impress in emergencies and as such banned only impressment by naval officers; others believed that the statute had expired at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713.⁴³ Whatever its precise legal status, impressment was taking place in Charles Town even before war broke out with Spain in 1739. Traders in the port felt its impact strongly. “The Merchant Shipping here sufferr very much by the King’s Ships that are from time to time Stationed here, who Instead of Encouraging & being a Help & protection to our Navigation are a Nusance & very much Distress same in a great many Respects,” Robert Pringle told a London correspondent in 1737; “Captain Collcott, notwithstanding he is all Clear & Ready to sail & waits only for a Wind to carry him over the Bar, has this Day had three Page 57 →of his best Sailors Impress’d on board his Majesties Ship the Rose, Capt. Charles Windham, Commander when there is no manner of Occasion for Same neither any law or Authority for so Doeing.” Such a complaint might have come from any number of ports in Britain that suffered the incursions of the press-gang. But without parliamentary representatives to present Charles Town’s grievances or direct access themselves to the government in London, Charles Town’s merchants looked to their counterparts in the capital to make special solicitations. Demonstrating the imperfections of the system in practice, however, little assistance had come from that quarter: “it is a great pity the Merchants of London, who are the most proper persons to Represent [the] same, Did not make immediate Application to Parliament, in order to have so great a Hindrance & grievance to Trade Effectually Remedied,” Pringle complained.⁴⁴

If naval impressment was an annoyance to Charles Town’s merchant shipping in peacetime, it became a far greater problem in wartime. Having loaded a ship with rice for London in May 1740, Pringle was alarmed to discover that the day before its scheduled departure, all its sailors had been impressed onto the HMS Tartar, stationed in the port. Fortunately for Pringle—and no doubt for the sailors too—he managed to secure their release the following day.⁴⁵ Impressment disrupted trade by depriving ships of manpower in an intermittent and Page 58 →unpredictable way. In terms of its cost, its impact was more sustained as labor shortages put merchant sailors at a premium. They were able to command higher wages, thereby raising freight costs. With naval demands increasing as the war continued, trading vessels were forced to leave Charles Town shorthanded or were unable to sail at all during the winter of 1742–43. Pringle reported how one ship in January 1743 had been “Detain’d sometime since he has been Loaded & Clear’d at all the Offices purely for want of Sailors, having had Two impress’d on board one of the Kings Ships with whom we have had a pretty Deal of Trouble & Charge before had them [the seamen] Return’d, having oblig’d them to Return them, ’tho one happen’d to be Drown’d in Endeavouring to make his escape by Swimming a Shoar.” Pringle had apparently secured the surviving seaman’s return by threatening to sue under the 1708 law, which levied a twenty-pound fine on any Royal Navy captain who impressed merchant sailors, and he believed he was the first person in the port to do so.

Perhaps because of the uncertainty surrounding the act, redress from Parliament was once again sought through the lobbying and solicitations of Carolina merchants in Britain. Sending copies of the South Carolina Gazette, which carried reports of the Royal Navy’s impressments in Charles Town, to his brother in London, Pringle hoped that they would “be taken Due Notice of by all our Merchants & Trading People at Home, & by which they may judge of how Little Service & how Little the Trading Interest is Regarded or Taken Notice of by the Commanders of the Kings Ships sent on this Station.” Once again, however, merchants in Britain failed to meet the standards of advocacy that Pringle, at least, expected. He observed that “Merchant Ships are Greatly Oppress’d here by the King’s Ships Impressing their Hands, which makes Sailors Wages Run very high” but regretted that “It is pity that it is not taken Notice of by the Gentlemen in Trade at Home in order to have it Remidied.”⁴⁶

The success of earlier lobbying had perhaps heightened expectations of the Carolina lobby’s efficacy and influence, and indeed of the willingness of the British government to meet its demands. Pringle’s comments are revealing: London’s Carolina traders simply had to ask for redress, whether for military reinforcements for the colony or for naval impressments, and the problems would be “Remidied.”⁴⁷ The same applied to commercial privileges. Permission to export rice directly to Madeira might have been “Obtain’d by proper Application,” he complained to correspondents on the island in 1742.⁴⁸ In reality, South Carolina’s advocates in Britain operated in a more complex environment. Carolinian demands for commercial privileges would need changes to the Navigation Acts, while policy makers had to balance the demands against the claims of other colonial lobbies. The permission to export rice directly to Spain and Portugal, for example, granted to South Carolina in 1730 and extended to Georgia in 1735, had set a precedent for other colonial lobbies to exploit. In March 1739 West Indies merchants and planters petitioned Parliament for freedom to send sugar, Page 59 →coffee, indigo, cocoa, and ginger directly to continental Europe. They cited the fact that South Carolina had “received a Liberty of the same Nature, with regard to Rice” and hoped that this precedent would “be a farther Inducement to this House, to grant this Liberty to our Sugar Islands.”⁴⁹

Compared to securing the amendment to the Navigation Acts that allowed direct rice exports to southern Europe in 1730, the ambitions of London’s Carolina merchants and the colony’s official agent in London, Peregrine Fury, during the 1740s were more modest. Fury was a professional bureaucrat with strong military ties, and unlike South Carolina’s other agents before and after him, he appears not to have had personal links with the colony. His spell as agent typified the potential for the conflicts of interest that were inherent in the system of colonial agency. He combined his service to South Carolina with being agent for several army regiments, which sometimes conflicted with his duties for the colony and explains the South Carolina Assembly’s eagerness to replace him on more than one occasion—the role was offered to James Crokatt in 1746 and to another London resident, John Sharpe, the following year. Most notably, in 1742–43 the assembly believed that Fury had suppressed the colonial government’s critical report of the military expedition which James Oglethorpe had led in 1740 against St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, a document which his employers in South Carolina had explicitly instructed him to publish in London. Fury was accused of acting “too much like a courtier” and was charged by the assembly with being “more a Friend to Generall Oglethorpe than to this Province.”⁵⁰

Despite Fury’s inauspicious leadership, London’s Carolina lobby enjoyed some success in the 1740s. In 1740 the British government sought to put an embargo on exports of British and colonial foodstuffs to foreign markets, in the hope of both weakening Spain and France and preventing scarcity in Britain. In collaboration with their colleagues in Bristol, the capital’s Carolina merchants successfully lobbied for rice to be excluded from the list of embargoed produce.⁵¹ Their petitions emphasized the benefits that South Carolina’s planters and Britain’s shipping alike had derived from direct rice exports to Spain and Portugal. They also stressed the colony’s strategic significance and precariousness. Fears of Spanish attack and slave insurrection, heightened by the Stono Rebellion—widely attributed to Spanish incitement—the previous year were uppermost. Such was the climate of fear and economic depression in South Carolina that, the traders reported, “the Number of their Inhabitants is so greatly decreased, that the Planters have been scarce able to keep in Subjection their own Slaves, who have been encouraged, and are much too disposed to rebel.” An embargo on rice exports would “occasion a total Stagnation of their Trade and Commerce,” with dire consequences for the colony. The rhetoric was persuasive, and the act eventually passed by Parliament banned exports of corn, grain, malt, flour, bread, and biscuits, along with other foodstuffs, but specifically excepted rice. The preferential treatment Page 60 →of rice was made all the more impressive by the failure of the agents of Britain’s more northerly American colonies to get corn exports similarly exempted.⁵²

When the House of Commons debated renewing the embargoes in 1742, South Carolina’s lobby in London again secured the continued exemption of rice. Particularly vociferous in Parliament in support of the colony were Sir John Barnard, MP for the City of London and a staunch advocate of merchant interests, and William Bowles, a merchant as well as an MP. Arguments about the harm that an embargo on rice exports would cause to British shipping and manufacturing and about South Carolina’s strategic and economic peril were again to the fore. The Gentleman’s Magazine recorded the debate, substituting names of places and individuals with barely disguised alternations to circumvent official restrictions on parliamentary reporting. The account offers a rare insight into Commons debates. According to the magazine, Barnard warned that “by prohibiting the Exportation of Rice, we shall … in one Year, reduce the Colony of S. Carolana [sic] below the Possibility of subsisting; the chief Product of that Country, the Product which induced us originally to plant it, and with which all its Trade is carried on, is Rice. With Rice the Inhabitants of that Province purchase all the other Necessaries of Life, and among them the Manufactures of our own Country. This Rice is carried by our Merchants to other Parts of Degulia [Europe], and sold again for large Profit.” Bowles was still more direct: “The Province of Carolana [sic] … has already suffered the Inconveniences of this War beyond any other Part of his Majesty’s Dominions, as it is situate upon the Borders of the Iberian Dominions, and as it is weak by the Paucity of the Inhabitants in Proportion to its Extent; Let us therefore pay a particular Regard to this Petition, lest we aggravate the Terror which the Neighbourhood of a powerful Enemy naturally produces, by the severer Miseries of Poverty and Famine.”⁵³ Having again secured the exemption of rice from the export embargo, London’s Carolina lobby achieved further legislative success in 1742 when permission to export rice directly to Spain and Portugal was extended.⁵⁴

Changes in Britain’s political environment during the late 1740s would fuel a surge in the Carolina lobby’s activity. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 brought nine years of war with Spain and four years of war with France to an inconclusive end. Peace allowed British policy makers to scrutinize the country’s American colonies and their trade with new purpose. British naval dominance in the war had kept French victories on land in check, preserving a rough balance of power. Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, however, Britain’s politicians had watched the development of French naval power and overseas trade with growing alarm. In the immediate postwar years Britain was gripped by a conviction that France would heed the lesson of its wartime naval defeats and build up its marine forces to challenge Britain’s naval hegemony, threaten the Page 61 →country’s overseas empire and trade, and undermine the domestic prosperity that was believed to stem from these. Stimulating Britain’s overseas trade would catalyze a national revival to combat France’s naval and commercial menace. Seizing the initiative, Parliament passed a flurry of legislation between 1748 and 1751 to promote specific trades and manufacturing, ranging from banning the importation and sale of French textiles to bounties to promote whale and herring fishing.⁵⁵

Promoting trade between Britain and its American colonies was a particular priority. First, an increase in the volume of colonial trade would enlarge Britain’s merchant fleet, training more sailors whose labor could be diverted to the Royal Navy in wartime. Second, greater colonial output would lead to higher demand in the colonies for British-made goods, stimulating the domestic economy. Third, colonial economic expansion would encourage new settlement and population growth. This would increase the colonies’ ability to defend themselves and reduce both their susceptibility to foreign attack and the onus on British regular armed forces to come to their aid—at high cost to the British state. Greater Atlantic trade would also satisfy fiscal ends. Fighting the war had raised Britain’s national debt to an unprecedented £68 million. The cost of servicing it was widely seen as a millstone around the neck of the national economy by perpetuating high taxes, by disrupting credit markets since the profitability and security of lending to government deterred lending to private enterprise, and by discouraging holders of government debt from engaging in more productive economic activity.⁵⁶ Higher volumes of trade would yield greater customs revenues from the taxes paid on imports and reexports. Customs duties amounted to about 20 percent of government revenue in 1747, when the general rate of customs duty on imported goods and produce was raised from 15 percent to 20 percent of an import’s official value. Such a rise, together with increases in extra duties on specific imports, was politically preferable to raising the land tax or introducing an income tax as a means of filling the national coffers.⁵⁷

At the end of war in 1748, government policy sought to make the American colonies pay a greater indirect fiscal contribution to the costs of empire. They would do so through yielding more taxable output. The approach contrasted with the policies that would be adopted after 1763, following the Seven Years’ War. An even more costly conflict for the Exchequer, the Seven Years’ War would lead the British government to turn—with profound repercussions—to its American colonies for a direct fiscal contribution for the debts incurred in their defense and the anticipated future costs of their protection. The two approaches were different means to the same end—the principle that the colonies should pay their way—and the strategy of indirectly augmenting revenues taken immediately after 1748 was an important precursor to the more direct and controversial approach taken a decade and a half later. Leaving aside its long-term portents, however, the strategy of stimulating colonial production was in the short term one on which South Carolina and its advocates in London were well placed to capitalize.

Page 62 →Despite the end of hostilities in 1748 and the gradual growth of Georgia on its southern frontier, which provided a buffer of sorts against external threats, South Carolina remained perilously exposed to the intrigues of rival imperial powers. The colony was a vital link in the chain of colonial defense. It was also a major producer of staple commodities that yielded much-needed customs duties; a market for British manufactured goods, supporting domestic industry and employment; and crucially, a vital source of the shipping and marine training that were seen as essential to British naval supremacy in future wars. The prevailing spirit of national revivalism—and the inseparable imperial-maritime-commercial rationale that underlay it—gave South Carolina and its advocates in London a particular opening. The political climate coincided with more vigorous leadership within London’s Carolina lobby and then roused the lobby to new levels of activity, further enhancing its ability to take advantage of these opportunities. Since relocating to London in 1739, James Crokatt had acted as the capital’s de facto expert witness on Britain’s most southerly North American colonies, and he invariably was called to give evidence when Parliament investigated their condition or trade. His status reflected his personal experience in South Carolina, particularly the distinction conferred by being a member of the Royal Council, and the extent of his trade with the region.⁵⁸ Through his commercial and political standing, Crokatt also assumed effective leadership of London’s Carolina traders during the late 1740s, supplanting the colony’s official agent, Peregrine Fury, in representing South Carolina and its trade in the capital’s political arenas.

At the end of hostilities in 1748, the British government proposed reducing military forces in its southernmost North American colonies, despite the continuing latent threat from Spain. Crokatt took a petition from London’s “principal Traders” in the Carolina trade to ministers “Praying that the Forces in Georgia & So. Carolina be kept in Pay & continued”—a protest against the disbanding of a regiment of British regulars in the region. Although the protest was unsuccessful, the lobbying was noted in South Carolina.⁵⁹ Crokatt also had a long track record of promoting agricultural innovation and diversification in South Carolina. Dating back to his days in Charles Town, he had urged planters and traders to take advantage of the stimuli on offer from the British government. Back in February 1737 the South Carolina Gazette had devoted its front page to a letter from Crokatt reminding readers of the bounty on pitch and tar made in a particular “Swedish” fashion. Two weeks later he had backed up his advice with a personal pledge to buy for at least fifty shillings a barrel any Swedish-style tar.⁶⁰ With his customary eye for profit, Crokatt saw both the economic benefits for South Carolina of a revitalized trade in naval stores and a commercial opportunity for himself. From London he continued to promote a more diverse agricultural base in the colony, urging experimentation with cochineal, cotton, hemp, and tar. Cotton, he wrote, is “known to grow well in Carolina and is now worth Page 63 →double the Price it was six Years ago…. Hemp, I am told, grows well there, and we know Tar is no where cheaper; it is a simple Manufacture, few Tools required, and easily taught even to Negroes.”⁶¹ In 1747 he sent to South Carolina a model of a mill for extracting sesame oil, and the next year he sent a model of an all-purpose plough for cultivating grain or indigo. Both were displayed at the public treasurer’s office in Charles Town.⁶²

“Rice and Indigo are the two pillars on which our future prosperity must be built. In Rice we are unrivalled, let us try to excel in Indigo as well,” Governor Glen declared to a joint session of the South Carolina Assembly and Royal Council in March 1749.⁶³ His call to arms followed Parliament’s decision the previous year to grant a sixpence-per-pound bounty on imports of indigo from South Carolina into Britain. Indigo was poised to become South Carolina’s second most important crop, behind rice, heightening the colony’s importance to Britain as a supplier of key commodities, bringing further wealth to the colony’s merchant and planter elites, and deepening the colony’s reliance on slavery (table 3). Indigo was much in demand in Britain as a dye, but the country relied on imports from French and Spanish colonies. South Carolina had long been identified as an ideal source to meet Britain’s needs: “The Indigo Plant grows exceeding well [in South Carolina]; and ’tis thought, if rightly improv’d, we might be supplied … not only to answer our Home-Consumption, but with large Quantities for Re-exportation,” the mercantilist theorist Joshua Gee had proposed in a popular treatise in 1729.⁶⁴ Besides having the right climate for growing indigo, the colony’s lowcountry topography was suitable, as the dye-producing plants thrived in the sandy, higher-lying soil where rice could not be grown. Planters also found that the annual cycle of slave labor for planting and harvesting the crop, in April and May, and then beating and draining the plant’s leaves and stems in vats to extract the dye, between July and September, coincided with seasonal lulls in rice cultivation. This allowed them to work their slaves year-round: for these reasons, South Carolina’s Assembly declared in May 1749 that “Indico proves an excellent colleague with Rice.”⁶⁵

Spearheaded by James Crokatt, the campaign for the indigo bounty was his greatest achievement as South Carolina’s leading advocate in London. Historians have debated the bounty’s long-term economic significance for South Carolina; politically it had important symbolism as the most significant of several parliamentary interventions on South Carolina and its trade during the late 1740s and early 1750s, and in the way it reasserted the efficacy of the Carolina lobby in London.⁶⁶ Crokatt took a two-pronged approach to promoting the cultivation of indigo, seeking both to improve its production quality and to incentivize its growth to meet robust existing demand in Britain. In 1746 and 1747 he published two pamphlets on growing, processing, and marketing the crop under Page 64 →the pseudonym “a Friend to Carolina.” He sent them to South Carolina in the hope that they would be “useful in assisting the Planters in Carolina, to excel all others, as much in the Indigo, as they have done in Rice.”⁶⁷ The second element of his approach was to capitalize on the British government’s receptivity to measures that promoted colonial economic development.

Crokatt set about lobbying Parliament for a bounty on imports of South Carolinian indigo by writing a pamphlet, Reasons for laying a Duty on French and Spanish Indigo, and granting a Bounty on what is made in the British Plantations. He sent it to the Board of Trade and, unusually, went to the lengths of having it printed, a rarity among petitions to the board and indicative of his sophisticated lobbying tactics. The petition articulated a familiar rhetoric of economic patriotism, carefully attuned to prevailing political-economic discourse. An indigo bounty, it claimed, would boost Britain’s textile industry by delivering the vital dye more cheaply and reliably, would alleviate South Carolina’s economic depression and promote population growth in the colony, and would increase British shipping and consequently naval power. Bounties were a tested economic stimulus for fledgling industries: colonial naval stores had long been incentivized in this way. Indigo making was similarly deserving, the petition argued, requiring the helping hand of state before it could flourish independently. As Crokatt’s pamphlet observed, “All new Manufactures should like weak Children be carefully nursed at first, tho they afterwards increase without assistance.”⁶⁸

In galvanizing the lobby, Crokatt assembled a broad array of interest groups behind the application. The approach recognized the value of consolidated, cross-sectional advocacy in petitioning Parliament even if, in the political-economic climate that followed the peace in 1748, the proposals were effectively pushing at an open door. The ad hoc lobby encompassed sectors involved in every stage of indigo’s journey from its raw state to usable dyestuff: the planters growing the crop; Atlantic merchants shipping it; commodity dealers; and dyers and clothiers from Devon in the southwest of England to Yorkshire in the north. In all, Parliament heard more than twenty separate petitions in support of an indigo bounty. Their content fused claims for the supply requirements of British industry, benevolent concern for South Carolina’s welfare, and arguments for competitive advantage over France. Particularly compelling were statistics revealing Britain’s heavy dependence on the French West Indies for its indigo. This, it was said, augmented French marine power while reportedly siphoning some £150,000 from British to French coffers.⁶⁹ The range of witnesses who gave evidence to the parliamentary committee considering the matter further showed the comprehensiveness of Crokatt’s campaign. Indigo brokers; captains of transatlantic shipping; three Carolinian planters, including Robert Pringle, on a short visit to Britain; and representatives of both the linen and woolen industries—two sectors whose interests were more often opposed than united, but which each relied on regular supplies of good indigo—all testified. “All the Witnesses agreed,” concluded the official report of proceedings, “that there is an absolute Necessity for the Use of Indico in the Dyeing Trade; and that no good Blue can be dyed without it.”⁷⁰ Faced by such a sectionally and geographically broad coalition and given the prevailing appetite for patriotic commercial measures, Parliament quickly approved the proposals. In May 1748 it legislated for a bounty of sixpence per pound on imports of indigo from South Carolina, to run for seven years.⁷¹

Source: Carter et al., Historical Statistics, V, 749–50; Robert C. Nash, “South Carolina Indigo, European Textiles and the British Atlantic Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 63.2 (2010): 317, table 3.

Note: Terminal dates for the years are 1747–52, March to March; 1752–53, March to January; 1753–67, January to January.

Page 66 →The introduction of the bounty vindicated Crokatt’s labors. It also gave South Carolina’s residents renewed and compelling evidence of the practical benefits of commercial advocacy. Securing the bounty signaled that the British government was alert to South Carolina’s interests and that a lobby in London could effectively represent the colony’s claims. Reaction in South Carolina to the bounty was celebratory. The assembly and council jointly drew up an address of “humble and hearty Thanks” to George III in March 1749; having received from Crokatt an account of the lobbying and copies of the petitions presented to Parliament, the assembly expressed its thanks to him and voted unanimously to reimburse him the £215 he had spent from his own pocket on orchestrating the campaign.⁷² “He [Crokatt] is indefatigable in the service of this Province & I think every Inhabitant indebted to him,” reflected his onetime apprentice Henry Laurens.⁷³ Even Governor Glen, who was no friend of Crokatt, told the assembly that he was “no stranger to the Character and Abilities of Mr. Crokatt,” adding, “He well deserves the Reputation he is known to have.”⁷⁴ Alongside his commercial experience and longtime spokesmanship in London for South Carolina’s interests, Crokatt’s management of the indigo campaign in 1748 was instrumental in his selection by the assembly the following year to replace Peregrine Fury as the colony’s agent in London.

Success in securing the indigo bounty was followed by further lobbying campaigns attuned to the mood of patriotic commercialism in Britain. In 1750 Crokatt and his fellow Carolina traders were to the fore in a campaign seeking financial encouragement for colonial silk cultivation—one of several attempts throughout the colonial period to promote sericulture in South Carolina and Georgia.⁷⁵ Their lobbying strikingly echoed the indigo bounty campaign two years earlier. Parliament was petitioned by weavers, dyers, and merchants and heard evidence from expert witnesses including Crokatt and John Nickleson. The political-economic rhetoric they used mirrored the indigo campaign too. It lamented Britain’s reliance on foreign silk, in this case purportedly leading to an outflow of four hundred thousand pounds annually; trumpeted the greater population and security that silk would bring Britain’s southern colonies; and suggested the virtuous economic feedback that Britain’s manufacturers and exporters would enjoy through extra colonial demand for their goods. Recognizing that “to encourage the Growth and Culture of Silk in his Majesty’s Dominions in America … will greatly tend to the Increase and Improvement of the Silk Page 67 →Manufactures of this Kingdom,” a line of reasoning that highlights where Britain’s main priorities lay, Parliament agreed to remove duties on all silk imported from the American colonies.⁷⁶

Crokatt again took the lead in a campaign the next year to promote colonial potash manufacturing. Potash could be made from the ashes of trees that were cleared to make land for growing crops in North America and offered a useful supplementary income for Carolinian planters. It was vital in Britain for making glass and soap and as a bleaching agent in the textile industry. A petition to Parliament in May 1751 reflected these mutual interests on either side of the Atlantic. Like the indigo and silk petitions before, it presented an alliance of cross-sectoral and both domestic and colonial interests. The petition was signed jointly by agents for several of Britain’s North American colonies, “Merchants trading thither, Soapmakers, Dry Salters [dealers in chemicals], Whitsters [bleachers], and others,” and sought incentives for colonial ash making.⁷⁷ Their arguments reiterated a familiar blend of commercial patriotism and colonial promotion: Britain’s reliance on Scandinavian supplies of ash harmed the nation’s balance of trade—a favorite political preoccupation; while Britain’s heavily forested North American colonies were a source of abundant ashes that could both supply domestic demands and promote colonial development. Only expertise and parliamentary encouragement were needed to create a flourishing industry. The plans were described in the House of Commons as “Mr. Crokatt’s proposals,” indicating his authorship and his guidance of the petitioning and lobbying campaign. Together with Robert Dinwiddie, recently appointed lieutenant governor of Virginia, and James Abercromby, who was North Carolina’s official agent and a former resident of South Carolina, Crokatt assured Parliament of the southern colonies’ productive capacity. The campaign succeeded in getting colonial produce exempted from Britain’s 6s.2d. duty on ash imports.⁷⁸ Further emphasising to his colonial employers his commitment to South Carolina’s agricultural diversification and economic development, Crokatt wrote to the Committee of Correspondence, the subcommittee of South Carolina’s Assembly charged with communicating with the colony’s London agent, to urge the colony to take advantage of the act. He enclosed a pamphlet explaining how to make ashes and expressed hope that “some Planters … would soon turn their Thoughts and Hands that Way.”⁷⁹

Not all of the Carolina lobby’s efforts in the late 1740s and early 1750s guided by Crokatt proved as successful. They nonetheless were further signals of metropolitan commitment to the colony’s economic development. The British state might not always be amenable, but the London merchants’ efforts to alter imperial laws and regulations suggested an alignment of commercial interests between the capital’s Carolina traders and their transatlantic counterparts. Crokatt’s first instructions as agent in 1749 had been to secure direct rice exports to additional foreign markets besides Spain and Portugal, but he was no more successful than Fury had been in this: South Carolina would have to wait until Page 68 →1764 for further relaxations in the law. He was also asked, as Fury had been, to press for South Carolina to be given the right—as Newfoundland, the New England colonies, New York, and Pennsylvania enjoyed—to import salt directly from Portugal.⁸⁰ In petitioning the Board of Trade, Crokatt carefully fused South Carolina’s interests with broader imperial priorities: “The Sea Coast and all the Rivers in the Province of South Carolina abounds with great Plenty of Fish, as Bass, Sturgeon, Herrings & c. whereby a very Considerable Fishery might be established to the great Benefit of that Province in particular, and of these Kingdoms in general, but the Difficulty of obtaining Salt proper for Curing Fish has prevented that Branch of Commerce from being extended further than for their own private Consumption.” The best salt for curing fish and other provisions came from mainland Europe. As a perishable commodity, however, it did not survive the journey—as required by law—from Europe first to Britain and then on to South Carolina. Direct shipments were needed. Furthermore, since ships often sailed from Britain to Europe laden with corn and then crossed the Atlantic laden only with ballast to South Carolina “in order to return with the Produce of that Province to Great Britain,” carrying salt would not only supply the ships with freight income but would also save them the expense of buying ballast.⁸¹

Crokatt organized petitions from “several merchants in London, trading to his Majesty’s Colonies in America” and, alongside London’s Carolina traders, from London merchants and shipowners involved in trade to Virginia and to Nova Scotia, two other colonies seeking direct salt imports.⁸² Such cross-trade coherence was rare and pointed to the sophistication of the lobbying. Crokatt also testified in support of the petitions in Parliament, where he was joined by fellow Carolina traders Andrew Pringle and Richard Shubrick. Their personal testimony of living and trading in Charles Town was central to their appeal as they set out the alignment of imperial and domestic interests. Crokatt reported that he had lived for more than ten years in South Carolina and spoke of the difficulty of procuring salt there for preserving fish and beef. Shubrick told the Commons that he had “lived for some time in Carolina, and had cured great Quantities of Provisions for the Use of his Majesty’s Navy.” Referring to Nickleson & Shubrick’s service as “agents victuallers” in Charles Town for the Royal Navy, he shrewdly conflated colonial and naval-imperial imperatives.⁸³ In response to strong opposition from Britain’s salt manufacturers, who stood to lose an important market, the proposals were rejected, however. Domestic pressure had trumped colonial interests, a telling exposition of the balance of power in lobbying in Britain when domestic and colonial interests were not aligned or were contradictory.⁸⁴ Though the failure of this campaign revealed the limitations of commercial lobbying, through it the capital’s Carolina merchants had once again shown their commitment to the colony’s development and a willingness to advocate on its behalf. For Crokatt personally, his reputation as an ardent representative of South Carolina’s commercial interests was reinforced.

Page 69 →It is through Crokatt that the value that authorities in South Carolina attached to effective commercial-political lobbying in London can be seen most clearly. In particular, the controversy that was sparked when he tried to resign as South Carolina’s official agent in London in 1753 reveals perceptions of his personal effectiveness and the influence of the role more generally. In attempting to give up the position, Crokatt complained that “the Service and Duty required is more than is Compatible with my Present Plan of Life.” He had never wasted so much time, he told the Committee of Correspondence, as he had in waiting on the Board of Trade.⁸⁵ Despite his success as a lobbyist, his relations with authorities in South Carolina had not always been harmonious. Before being appointed as agent, he was accused of prioritizing his own interests above those of the colony when, with eight other London merchants, he had appealed to the Board of Trade against South Carolina’s emission of paper currency, which the merchants feared would depreciate the value of debts they were owed in the colony.⁸⁶ More controversial still was his support for a rogue Indian trader, Charles McNair, whose claims for financial reimbursement from the Crown were opposed by South Carolina’s Assembly and its governor James Glen but which Crokatt—allegedly owed money by McNair’s partner—supported.⁸⁷

For the merchant-dominated South Carolina Assembly in Charles Town, these blemishes on his record were outweighed by his achievements in commercial matters. Refusing to accept Crokatt’s resignation, the assembly instructed the Committee of Correspondence to ask him to reconsider, and it continued to treat him as South Carolina’s official agent. Even though several years had passed since he had secured the indigo bounty, Crokatt’s efforts to promote agricultural diversification and innovation and as an advocate in London for South Carolina’s trade were central to the high reputation he enjoyed in the colony. He was, Henry Laurens wrote, “not lightly esteem’d by the People.” When Crokatt eventually retired from the post in 1755, his former apprentice judged that “a good deal was due from this Province to Mr. Crokatt for his unwearied Endeavours to serve us in Promoting the Culture of Indigo beside other matters … but its impossible in such a Country as this to get all the People to be of one mind. He has some very strong Opponents in the Councell who wont allow him that Merit as the Commons House thought his due.”⁸⁸

Crokatt’s resignation was a pivotal moment in South Carolina’s political development. Underlying the dispute was the recognition by each branch of government—the governor, the Royal Council, and the assembly—that it was vital for the colony to be effectively represented at the heart of the empire. Who should be agent and who should appoint him set the assembly at loggerheads with the council and the governor. The constitutional wrangling that followed marked the assembly’s growing political ambitions and paralyzed South Carolina’s government for nearly three years. Culminating in the assembly’s refusal to pass a tax bill until its rights were recognized, the dispute was an early example of Page 70 →the brinksmanship that would be a hallmark of South Carolina’s politics for the next hundred years.⁸⁹ In the short term, the assembly’s determination to keep Crokatt in post between 1753 and 1755 signaled the significance it accorded the London agency, and in particular the benefits that an assiduous and well-connected agent could bring.

A combination of factors gave the Carolina lobby in London particular energy in the late 1740s and early 1750s. The ideological environment ushered in by the end of war with Spain and France made the institutions of state—the Board of Trade, the British Treasury, and Parliament—unusually receptive to the lobbying of colonial interest groups. The government’s agreement was not guaranteed: the failure of the salt lobbying in 1750 showed the overriding traction of domestic interests. Insofar as it promoted Britain’s own economic, strategic, and military priorities, however, colonial economic development assumed a new degree of importance for British politicians. Initiatives that could help colonies pay a greater share of the cost of their defense were especially welcome. As a producer of staple commodities that could not be supplied domestically and with its orientation toward export markets, South Carolina was well placed to capitalize on the political-economic climate. Proposals such as a bounty for colonial indigo and duty-free status for colonial silk and potash were directed at a sympathetic audience. Strong and effective leadership, which the Carolina lobby found in James Crokatt, gave the proposals direction and authority. Crokatt not only skillfully marshaled the Carolina lobby but was also able to assemble cross-sectoral coalitions, most broadly and effectively in support of the indigo bounty.

Crokatt also exemplified the traits that gave London’s Carolina lobby particular energy and influence, setting it apart from the capital’s less active Virginia and New England lobbies. Like other leading London Carolina merchants who petitioned and testified in Parliament, he had lived and traded in South Carolina. This gave their evidence added credibility; moreover, the deep personal and social links that London’s Carolina traders had with the colony help to explain their assiduity in lobbying. Property holdings in South Carolina further reinforced their ties with the colony, deepening their commercial and economic stake in its development. The consolidation of London’s Carolina trade in relatively few hands contributed as well to the lobby’s industriousness, by permitting rapid mobilization and imbuing the merchants’ claims with authority. The concentration stemmed from structural and compositional features within London’s Carolina trade, including the pattern of merchant relocations from Charles Town to London, the formation of transatlantic partnerships, and the networks of credit that extended from Great Britain to South Carolina. The concentration facilitated London’s Carolina lobby at a time of relative political harmony between Britain and its American colonies. It would, however, have very different consequences as political-economic attachments were tested and challenged from the 1760s onward. There would be a small step from concentration of trade to domination of trade.