Page 176 →Conclusion “Let me have done with American lands”

After moving from London to Bristol in search of cheaper accommodations, Isaac King briefly considered setting up a plantation on the undeveloped tracts of land he still owned in South Carolina. As the 1780s progressed, however, his disillusionment with the recalcitrance of his debtors and South Carolina’s courts mounted. “I can see no inclination in any of the people of the Land of Liberty to pay the Debts they owe to the subjects of a Monarch,” he lamented.¹ Rather than move to South Carolina, he chose to stay in Britain and to sever his landholding ties with the state entirely. “I do not wish to possess Landed property anywhere but England,” he told his attorney in 1788. Three years later, with his tracts in South Carolina still unsold, King instructed his attorney to “sell them for what you can get & let me have done with American lands.”² King’s frustrations were typical of the problems faced by many British residents who had owned land in South Carolina before the war. Some had escaped having their land confiscated only to encounter new legal obstacles.

Margaret Colleton, the London-dwelling owner of Mepshew and Watboo plantations on the Cooper River, did not live to see confirmation of her fears that her lowcountry plantations would be confiscated. In July 1778 she had been “a good deal alarmed” at a report in London of the law recently passed in South Carolina requiring absentee owners of land in South Carolina “to appear there, within a given time upon pain of confiscation of their Property, or some other grievous Penalty.”³ Colleton was among the 237 individuals stripped of their lands by the South Carolina General Assembly at Jacksonborough in February 1782. The forfeiture also applied to her heirs. Colleton died in 1780 and left her plantations to her brother-in-law, James Edward Colleton, from whom ownership was swiftly transferred to a cousin, James Nassau Colleton.⁴ On inheriting the properties, Nassau Colleton began a three-year struggle to overturn their confiscation. In November 1782 he wrote to Benjamin Franklin, then serving as one of the U.S. peace commissioners in Paris, seeking Franklin’s intercession with Congress and with authorities in South Carolina. Nassau Colleton emphasized to Franklin that he had “never been in any manner inimical to their [the American] Cause though he could be of no assist[ance] to it, not having Page 177 →had the actual Possession of any thing in that Country, and the moment he now has the prospect of it, entertains the greatest desire to become a Resident there.”⁵

Taking matters into his own hands, Nassau Colleton left Britain for South Carolina in early 1783. He arrived to find that the war had left his plantations in disarray, like so many others in lowcountry South Carolina. During the war Watboo had “suffered much by the different Armies … from the Destruction of the Negroes, which they have been too much encouraged to.”⁶ Between thirty and forty slaves had fled Mepshew for British-occupied Charleston in the early months of 1783 in the hope of getting to St. Augustine, but they had been seized en route to Florida by an American privateer.⁷ Worse for Nassau Colleton was that his estates had been divided up and sold. He appealed both to the state’s commissioners of forfeited estates and the South Carolina General Assembly arguing that Margaret Colleton’s age and infirmity had made it impossible for her to travel to South Carolina; moreover, she had paid the double tax on her estates, thereby supporting the state’s government. After his initial pleas fell on deaf ears and Watboo was sold at public auction, Nassau Colleton further signaled his commitment to South Carolina by swearing an oath of allegiance to the state to become a citizen. The following year, in March 1784, he was among those whose confiscations were commuted to an obligation to pay an amercement of 12 percent of the value of their properties; in 1786 this final penalty was lifted. As Watboo had already been sold, however, Nassau Colleton received merely the purchase money for the plantation.⁸ Other prewar absentees, including his cousin Thomas Boone, were even less fortunate. Even though he had paid the double tax on his property, such was the resentment toward Boone in South Carolina after his contentious spell as governor in the early 1760s that his appeals for clemency were flatly rejected. “The general opinion here,” one observer in Charleston wrote, “is that he was so strongly attached to the British government as they would and ought to make him a confiscation … he certainly suffered very much, as all his valuable property here was sold.”⁹

Another to pursue his losses doggedly was Charles Ogilvie, among the largest absentee owners of South Carolinian estates before the war. From London, where he lived until his death in 1788, he continued to stake his claim to his confiscated properties in South Carolina and Georgia. He petitioned the assembly for the return of Richfield and Mount Alexander, his two most valuable plantations, which had been seized and sold in 1782. Both were eventually returned to his sons and heirs, John Alexander Ogilvie and Charles Ogilvie Jr., though some of Mount Alexander’s acreage had been sold to an American officer. Richfield remained in John Alexander Ogilvie’s hands until 1802.¹⁰ John Alexander Ogilvie also went to Georgia to investigate his father’s affairs there. As late as 1803 Ogilvie’s possessions in Georgia were still being scrutinized by Britain’s debt and compensation commission.¹¹

Page 178 →A resurrection of the transatlantic market in South Carolinian land after American independence suggested, as did Britain’s renewed preeminence in South Carolina’s transatlantic trade, a return to antebellum conditions. American independence and the ongoing legal wrangles over Loyalist confiscations and prewar debts did not deter some in Britain from buying lands or taking possession of inherited estates in South Carolina. For many, the new state still offered the hope of profits that were unachievable in Britain. John Martin, a resident of Cumberland in northern England, inherited an estate near Georgetown from his brother. After crossing the Atlantic to settle his new lands in 1788, he was enraptured by his new planter’s lifestyle. “I have a very good house to live in,” he wrote from his plantation, Belvoir, to his son in London, “and pretty near 60 negroes small and great about me to do what I order. Almost 30 are employ’d every day amongst the Rice … my Garden & Vineyard afford all sorts of Delicates, such as Peaches, Pomegranates, Figgs, Grapes … and all kinds of Vigatables.” Martin made plans to send rice, indigo, and cotton to Britain in exchange for imported goods, believing that “most things sell for near one hundred per cent.” A neighboring storekeeper was thought to make such a high margin even though he did not import his goods personally.¹² Martin was not alone in Britain in seeing the potential of South Carolinian land. The London merchants James Bourdieu and Samuel Chollet acquired five thousand acres of prime undeveloped land on the Edisto River in 1785, apparently with a plan to partition it into smaller tracts for resale. Reckoned by a surveyor to be “of the best quality,” it was valued at two guineas per acre.¹³ Transatlantic landholding, it seemed, might continue much as it had before the American Revolution.

With South Carolina in urgent need of capital to rebuild and restock, British investors such as Bourdieu & Chollet were obvious sources of investment. Sales of land in South Carolina and Georgia on the British market reflected British residents’ continuing interest in the region’s economic prospects. In 1787 Henry Laurens tried to sell his two Georgia plantations, Broughton Island and New Hope, in Britain. Though each had been ravaged during the war, Laurens hoped that together with two undeveloped tracts and lots in the planned town of Brunswick, the plantations would raise some eight thousand pounds. He advised his friend William Manning that the offer price was just half their actual value and persuaded him to advertise the lands in London, Bristol, and Liverpool newspapers. Recognizing the integration of the plantation economies of the American South and the West Indies, the advertisements emphasized the tracts’ complementarity for a buyer with land in the West Indies. The South Carolina properties would make “an excellent Addition to an Estate in Jamaica, or other West India islands” on account of the lumber and provisions they might supply, given their number of “Cypress, Pine, Oak, Hickory, and Ash trees” and “Ranges for raising Horned Cattle, Horses, Hogs &c. in the greatest Abundance.”¹⁴

Page 179 →Vast tracts in South Carolina’s backcountry, its population growing fast with the arrival of new settlers, were also offered at auction in London, further indicating the hopes that Britain remained a fertile market for Carolinian land. Tracts on the Congaree and Wateree Rivers, near the state’s new capital, Columbia, and totaling some 250,000 acres, were auctioned in London in 1789. Appearing alongside adverts for Jamaican plantations and English country estates, auction notices stressed that the lands were at least partially cultivated, including “several capital rice works, with houses and other buildings” and land “naturally adapted to the culture of indigo and tobacco,” as well as being good cattle country. Potential owners need not fear having to eke a living out of the woods: the plantations were touted as equivalents to more familiar West Indies or British investments.¹⁵ The same year a plantation sixty miles from Charleston and with navigable river access to the port was auctioned at Garraway’s Coffee House in London, while a Charleston wharf with stores and five town lots was offered in the British capital for private sale.¹⁶

South Carolina’s postwar land legislation was carefully constructed, however, to prevent an influx of foreign investors or long-term reliance on their capital. New laws designed to encourage settlement in the state tolerated temporary absenteeism while setting time limits on the practice. As such, the laws represented a marked hardening of South Carolina’s prewar ambivalence toward absentee landownership. The tax act passed in March 1783—the first law enacted in the state after independence from Great Britain was formally secured—renewed the double tax first imposed in 1778 on land, town properties, and slaves owned by nonresidents.¹⁷ A year later, in March 1784, the state repealed a law dating back to 1704 that had permitted newly arrived “aliens” to buy or inherit land in South Carolina. In its place, a new citizenship law was passed, making Page 180 →citizens of all “free white persons” who lived in the state for one year and swore allegiance. The law notionally sanctioned absenteeism, allowing nonresidents to retain lands in South Carolina unless they had been named in the 1782 Confiscation Acts. This was on the proviso, though, that they become citizens or sell their land to citizens within seven years; March 1791 was the cut-off point. “Whereas sundry real estates within this State are the property of persons not citizens thereof, and have not been confiscated by the Legislature,” the statute declared, “Be it therefore enacted by the authority aforesaid, That nothing herein contained shall extend to deprive any such person or persons of their property in the said real estates; provided, they shall be admitted citizens of this State, or sell their said estate to a citizen thereof, within seven years from the passing of this Act.”¹⁸

Similar legislation balanced incentives for foreigners to invest much-needed capital in South Carolina with safeguards to stop their influence from becoming too powerful. An aversion to the memory of indebtedness and “domination” by external powers, such as Britain’s prewar Carolina traders, was clearly felt, as it was in other states as well. One of North Carolina’s delegates to Congress put it explicitly: “Aliens cannot hold soil in the United States…. However the means of becoming a Citizen with us [North Carolina] is extremely easy. Was not this distinction held up British Merchants and others would try to hold us again in a species of Slavery by getting Mortgages & other holds on our Lands.”¹⁹ The precarious balance between investment and influence was made manifest in another act passed in South Carolina in 1784. Its boldly stated purpose was “to encourage subjects of Foreign States to lend money at interest on real estates within this state.” The act allowed foreigners to lend money to individuals in the state and permitted South Carolinians to mortgage their land as security in these transactions. However, while foreigners were allowed to prosecute lawsuits to recover debts, they could not take possession of property in the state through mortgage foreclosures. Instead they could sell any property gained in this way and repatriate the proceeds.²⁰ An important channel through which British creditors had come to own land in South Carolina before the war was closed. Through the 1784 acts, South Carolina’s state government sought to prevent the prewar Anglo-Carolinian polity Page 181 →from being reproduced. British capital might have an influential role to play in postwar development, but it would not be allowed to be a harbinger of a renewed metropolitan-colonial relationship.

Across the United States the right of foreigners to own land was formally legalized only in Pennsylvania.²¹ For its part, Georgia followed South Carolina’s lead. A law passed in Georgia in February 1785 allowed foreign lenders to pursue their debtors through the state’s courts, but like South Carolina’s legislation the previous year—on which it was clearly modeled—it denied the foreign lenders the right to enter or take possession of any premises that fell into their hands through defaults.²² Other acts in Georgia went further and exceeded South Carolinian precedent. While foreigners who owned lands in South Carolina were given seven years’ grace to become citizens and thereby keep their properties, Georgia’s 1785 Citizenship Act gave noncitizens the right to own personal property, rent houses, and sue for debts but prevented them from suing to acquire real estate in lieu of debts owed them. The same year the state imposed a double tax on lands whose owners had been absent from the state for more than a year, resurrecting the charge imposed on nonresidents in 1778. With the aim of discouraging land banking and promoting settlement in Georgia, the double tax was imposed on uncultivated lands whether the owners lived abroad or elsewhere in the United States. Significantly, however, absentee owners who were citizens of and who lived in another American state were excused the double tax if they brought a portion of their lands into cultivation; for foreign owners, there was no such remission.²³

For would-be British buyers, legal and political deterrents ultimately outweighed the investment potential of properties in South Carolina. The likes of John Martin and Chollet & Bourdieu were few and far between. Uncertainty clouded the political backdrop. Continuing diplomatic tensions between Britain and the United States were accompanied in Britain by the widespread expectation that the confederation between the states would soon fall apart. In South Carolina hostility toward exiled Loyalists persisted longer than perhaps anywhere else in the United States, reflecting the particular bitterness of the Revolutionary War across the South.²⁴ Not only did this hinder efforts to recover prewar debts, but in addition it also further deterred Carolinian refugees from returning to their estates. Together with the hostility toward British merchants in Charleston, widely reported in the British press, and the impending compulsion for those owning land in the state to take citizenship, many potential British buyers were put off. Exiled in Britain, the former lowcountry planter Elias Ball wrote in October 1788 to discourage his cousin in South Carolina from trying to sell land on the British market. The impending citizenship requirement, he advised, made British residents reluctant to buy lands in America: “Your states have taken the most effectual steps to prevent people purchasing estates. No man can hold an Estate in your country for any length of time without he becomes a Citizen & Page 182 →resides among you & no man will chuse to risque himself a property in a country where the legislature interferes in private contracts & bargains made between man & man.”²⁵

Agricultural depression and falling land prices in South Carolina further dashed hopes of quick and easy profits. According to his cousin, Richard Shubrick “never Receiv’d a Farthing from his Estates he sold in Carolina.”²⁶ Nor did John Martin’s high hopes for his Carolinian estates materialize. After he died in 1790, his son discovered that Belvoir Plantation was worth just sixteen hundred pounds, against his father’s estimate of four thousand pounds, and that his father had been deeply in debt. Visiting the plantation, his attorney reported “only eight shillings and ten pence found in money.” Martin Jr. duly disposed of the plantation lands, keeping only two Georgetown plots since “they might improve in time.”²⁷ Henry Laurens was similarly frustrated in his attempts to sell his Georgia plantations in Britain. No buyers were forthcoming, despite the plantations’ supposedly bargain price, and Laurens retained the lands until his death in 1792. Likewise a 107,000-acre tract near Camden in the center of South Carolina that had been advertised in London newspapers in 1789 failed to attract a buyer. It was put up for auction the following year.²⁸

The transatlantic marketing of lands in South Carolina and Georgia and the laws that governed these land sales epitomized the ambivalence that characterized relations between Britain and its former colonies after the war. Britain was an important source of capital and investment. South Carolinians recognized and sought to harness this. At the same time they feared the influence of the former imperial power, which portended a return to prewar control and restraint; hence the citizenship requirements written into land legislation. This ambivalence was mirrored in postwar trade. While British ships flocked once again to Charleston and British merchants again became the chief suppliers of slaves, goods, and equipment to the state, for many in South Carolina this was a marriage of necessity, not choice. The intertwined concerns of land and trade in South Carolina after 1783 signaled how individuals and the state alike struggled to reconcile divergent economic and political urges.

Transatlantic ownership of plantations lands and urban properties had been central to the Anglo-Carolinian polity over the previous sixty years. For all the negative connotations that the term aroused in Britain, absenteeism had been a powerful and beneficial connective force, underpinning the economic and commercial links that Britain’s Carolina merchants had with the colony. It was integral to the special assiduity with which these merchants advocated for South Carolina and represented its needs and grievances in the imperial corridors of power. Later, as political tensions between Great Britain and its colonies in North America mounted, absentees’ ownership of these lands and properties in South Carolina became to many in the colony a symbol of British control. Measures taken after the war to preclude absenteeism reflected how its political and Page 183 →economic significance was appreciated in the state. Preventing lands from falling into the hands of permanent nonresidents allowed South Carolina to exercise the autonomy and control that many residents felt it lacked in its postwar trade with Britain, despite the exclusion of the most objectionable prewar and wartime British merchants from business. British capital and goods were vital to South Carolina’s economy: French, Spanish, and Dutch traders were unable to compete in either quality of goods or the credit they offered. For all the popular anger in South Carolina at Britain’s renewed preeminence in its trade, suppressing it was neither practical nor wise. In contrast, curtailing British landownership within the state offered a means of asserting autonomy and signifying a different relationship with the former mother country without endangering economic redevelopment.

The postwar political connotations of trade and land reprised their prewar significance. Trade between Britain and South Carolina had long been shaped by politics; in the decade before the Revolutionary War, the trade had become increasingly politicized. As did merchants in other branches of Britain’s overseas trade, but with special assiduity, London’s Carolina merchants understood lobbying as a vital and regular aspect of their business. Within the transatlantic Carolina trade, this lobbying was for much of the eighteenth century a force for stability. Successes between the 1730s and the 1750s in securing bounties and stimuli or in opening new markets for South Carolina’s produce, as London merchants capitalized on prevailing political sentiment and economic theory, signaled the merchants’ commitment to the colony’s agricultural diversification and economic growth. In the London Carolina lobby’s effectiveness on commercial issues, however, the seeds of later disharmony were laid.

The quietude of London’s Carolina merchants during the political controversies of the late 1760s and the 1770s contrasted with their earlier activism on more explicitly commercial matters. This political passivity coincided with changes within the group. London’s Carolina trade was concentrated in relatively few hands throughout the eighteenth century. Between the 1730s and the early 1760s the capital’s leading Carolina merchants were men who had spent their early careers in Charleston building experience and connections. As these men retired from trade in the 1760s, the merchants who replaced them as London’s preeminent Carolina traders lacked the depth of their forerunners’ connections to the colony. Against rising tensions within the British Empire, the trade’s concentration among—or, to some Carolinians, domination by—a small group of London traders took on menacing dimensions. The group’s apparent ambivalence toward the American policies of successive British governments was interpreted as signifying personal lack of interest in American grievances or, worse, outright hostility. Evidence of the traders’ purported profiteering—achieved variously through their dominant share of Britain’s Carolina trade, the credit through which they ensnared colonial correspondents, and their disparagement of Carolinian produce for personal gain—as manifested in grandiose Page 184 →mansions and opulent lifestyles, had confirmed that Carolinian and British interests were no longer aligned.

Not only in South Carolina was trade with Britain fundamental to conceptions of independence and identity after the war. Commercial issues would be central in the often fraught relationship between Great Britain and the United States throughout the decade after American independence. Not until the negotiations for the Jay Treaty in 1794 would the British and American governments formally attempt to resolve the commercial, territorial, and financial disputes that marked the two nations’ uneasy postwar rapprochement. Within the United States, business connections with and attitudes toward Britain and its remaining colonies would influence individual and regional perspectives on the merits, nature, and limits of closer federal union. Atlantic reengagement—and specifically absorption into a commercial orbit where Great Britain remained the leading player—confounded Jeffersonian ideals of agrarianism and self-sufficiency. For Britain, exports to the United States grew to some 25–30 percent of the country’s total exports in the years that followed American independence.²⁹ In return, the United States remained a vital supplier of Britain’s commodity imports, notably the cotton that fueled British industrial growth and from the 1790s supplanted indigo and then rice as South Carolina’s principal agricultural staple and the raison d’être of the state’s slave economy.

Reaction to the Jay Treaty would reopen the lingering sores of restored Anglo-Carolinian trade. The treaty maintained restrictions on trade between the United States and the British West Indies, one of several clauses that, to the treaty’s opponents in America, smacked of quasi-colonial subordination to Great Britain. Planters throughout the southern states condemned the Jay Treaty for its failure to compel Britain to pay compensation for slaves liberated during and after the war. A wave of protests in Charleston in July 1795, after ratification of the treaty, harked back to the anti-British rioting of 1783 and 1784.³⁰ For Britain’s prewar Carolina traders—or their inheritors—who were still pursuing debts owed them in the former colony, there was a modicum of relief as the United States agreed to reimburse some of their claims. After more than a decade of pursuing the claims, however, this small victory for the merchants was largely pyrrhic. Compensation amounted to far less than the sums claimed, while further diplomatic and bureaucratic hurdles lay ahead. William Higginson and John Nutt would have to wait until 1803 to receive their compensation, fully twenty years after American independence and nearly thirty years since the debts had been contracted: Higginson received some £40,173 of the £211,533 that he and his late partner, William Greenwood, had claimed; Nutt got a paltry £10,978 of the £251,387 that, including interest, he had sought.³¹ At the start of a new century in which Britain would continue to be central to South Carolina’s commerce, residents on either side of the Atlantic were still coming to terms with the breakdown, reconstitution, and political entanglements of trade.