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Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and Britain’s Atlantic Commerce, 1730–1790: Notes

Trade, Politics, and Revolution: South Carolina and Britain’s Atlantic Commerce, 1730–1790
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table of contents
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Notes on the Text
  9. Chronology
  10. Dramatis Personae
  11. Introduction: “A large territory on the Atlantic Ocean, in a temperate latitude”—South Carolina and Great Britain
  12. Chapter One: “The Metropolis of South Carolina”, London Lobbying and Charles Town Commerce
    1. Mercantilism and “Interest”
    2. Defense, Rice, and the Emergence of a Carolina Lobby in London
    3. Getting into the Carolina Trade
    4. Trading in Charles Town
    5. Relocating to Britain
  13. Chapter Two: “Friends to Assist at Home”, London’s Carolina Trade in the 1740s and 1750s
    1. “Carolina merchants”: The Composition and Organization of London’s Carolina Trade
    2. “Transactions with a few well chosen Friends”: The Concentration of London’s Carolina Trade
    3. “For which this Province is Greatly Oblig’d”: London Lobbying in the Early 1740s
    4. Trade and the “National Interest”
    5. “Indefatigable in the service of this Province”: The 1748 Indigo Bounty
  14. Chapter Three: “Cankers to the Riches of a Country”?, Transatlantic Absenteeism in Colonial South Carolina
    1. Conceptions of Absenteeism in Colonial South Carolina
    2. Acquiring Lands in South Carolina
    3. Retaining Assets in South Carolina
    4. Returns on Absentee-Owned Plantations
    5. Absenteeism and Agency
  15. Chapter Four: “From Humble & Moderate Fortunes to Great Affluence”, The Transatlantic Carolina Trade and Imperial Crises
    1. “Supported by the Whole Body of Merchants in London”
    2. “The important services they have done to America in General”
    3. “Commissions & profits arising from such Trade”
    4. “Join to quench the growing Evil”
    5. “I don’t know that we have a Zealous friend or Advocate among the Merchants”
    6. “Parties in the attempt against us”
  16. Chapter Five: The Voyage of the Lord North, American Independence, Anglo-Carolinian Trade, and Unfinished Business
    1. “The usual intercourse of Commerce be again resumed”: London Merchants and Wartime Lobbying
    2. “Enjoyment on one side, and Restrictions on the other”: The Restoration of Anglo-American Trade
    3. “Commerce again shall lift her drooping head”: The Resumption of Anglo-Carolinian Trade
    4. “Members and heads of a British faction”: Anti-British Sentiment in Charleston
    5. “Manifestly far from being cordial Friends”: Echoes of Prewar Trade
    6. “After a Storm at Sea is over”: British Merchants and the Postwar Carolina Trade
    7. “No lawful impediments”: Pursuing Prewar Debts in Britain and South Carolina in the 1780s
    8. “Carolina disappointments”: Assessing the Debts in the 1790s
  17. Conclusion: “Let me have done with American lands”
  18. Abbreviations
  19. Notes
  20. Bibliography
  21. Index

Page 187 →Notes

Introduction

  1. 1. Isaac King to Joshua Ward, 9 October 1790, IKL.
  2. 2. Henry Laurens (hereafter HL) to Isaac King, 6 September 1764, PHL, IV, 400–401.
  3. 3. The classic analysis is Robert M. Weir, “‘The Harmony We Were Famous For’: An Interpretation of Pre-revolutionary South Carolina Politics,” WMQ 26.4 (1969): 473–501.
  4. 4. Progressive historians in the early twentieth century saw a reaction against indebtedness as being a preeminent motivating force behind the American Revolution, most notably Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918), esp. 359–60; Charles A. Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1927), esp. 270–72. A more nuanced understanding of economic factors, in particular their role in informing and reinforcing ideological positions, is a feature of more recent scholarship. See, for example, Marc Egnal, New World Economies: The Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Canada (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 351–77; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 39–129.
  5. 5. Timothy H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 119 (May, 1988): 88.
  6. 6. There is extensive literature on merchant “interest groups” or “lobbies” and the colonies’ official agents in London, who often helped to coordinate the lobbying: Michael G. Kammen, A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics and the American Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968); Jack M. Sosin, Agents and Merchants: British Colonial Policy and the Origins of the American Revolution, 1763–1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). The interaction of colonial interest groups and the British state has been elaborated most fully in Alison Olson, Making the Empire Work: London and American Interest Groups, 1690–1790 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), which highlighted the important connective role that semistructured interest groups such as merchant lobbies played in the British Empire and argued that mutual interest was a powerful force for stability: “in the heyday of empire substantial numbers of Americans identified with English interest groups and through them had an informal but effective voice in the making of English decisions that affected them; they co-operated with the British government because they were getting what they wanted out of it” (Olson, Making the Empire Work, xi). For sectoral studies of colonial interest groups and the British state, see Rebecca Starr, A School for Politics: Commercial Lobbying and Political Culture in Early South Carolina (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Alison Olson, “The Virginia Merchants of London: A Study in Eighteenth Century Interest Group Politics,” WMQ 40.3 (1983): 363–88; Andrew O’Shaughnessy, “The Formation of a Commercial Lobby: The West Indies Interest, British Colonial Policy and the American Revolution,” Historical Journal 40.1 (1997): 71–95; O’Shaughnessy, “The West India Interest and the Crisis of American Independence,” in Roderick A. McDonald, West Indies Accounts: Essays in the History of the British Caribbean in Honour of Richard Sheridan (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1996), 126–48; William A. Pettigrew, “Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688–1714,” WMQ 64.1 (2007): 3–38.
  7. 7. Page 188 →Alexander Hewitt, An Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, 2 vols. (London, 1779), I, 109.
  8. 8. 3 Geo. II c. 28, in Great Britain, The Statutes at Large, from Magna Charta, to the Twenty Fifth Year of the Reign of King George the Third, Inclusive, 14 vols. (London, 1786), V, 553–55. For a summary of the origins and impact of the Navigation Acts, see Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 36–38. The first Navigation Act in 1660 compelled all goods taken to and from the colonies to be carried in English or colonial ships, with the masters and three-quarters of the crews to be English or colonial subjects. It “enumerated” or specified a list of colonial-produced commodities that could be exported only to England or to another English colony, including sugar, tobacco, coffee, indigo, and cotton. Prohibitive duties were placed on foreign tobacco and sugar to reward colonists with a virtual monopoly of the home market for their produce. Further Navigation Acts in 1663, 1673, and 1696 codified and reinforced the legislation’s “mercantilist” strictures. Rice was added to the enumerated list in 1704.
  9. 9. Nuala Zahedieh, “Economy,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 58.
  10. 10. In the extensive literature on South Carolina’s Atlantic connections and the role of exogenous demand in its early economic history, see in particular Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Peter A. Coclanis, “Global Perspectives on the Early Economic History of South Carolina,” SCHM 106.2 (2005): 130–46; R. C. Nash, “Urbanization in the Colonial South: Charleston, South Carolina, as a Case Study,” Journal of Urban History 19.1 (1992): 3–29; R. C. Nash, “South Carolina and the Atlantic Economy in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries,” Economic History Review 45.4 (1992): 677–702; Kenneth Morgan, “The Organization of the Colonial American Rice Trade,” WMQ 52.3 (1995): 433–52. On the organization and structure of the Atlantic Carolina trade, see in particular R. C. Nash, “The Organization of Trade and Finance in the Atlantic Economy: Britain and South Carolina, 1670–1775,” in Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina’s Plantation Society, ed. Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), notably 74–107; R. C. Nash, “The Organization of Trade and Finance in the British Atlantic Economy, 1670–1830,” in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 95–151. On the interrelation of Atlantic and inland Indian trades, see Eirlys M. Barker, “Indian Traders, Charles Town and London’s Vital Link to the Interior of North America, 1715–1755,” in Money, Trade and Power, ed. Greene et al., 141–65; Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss, “Indians and the Economy of Eighteenth-Century Carolina,” in Atlantic Economy, ed. Coclanis, 297–322.
  11. 11. On the formative influence of the Caribbean in South Carolina’s settlement and development, see Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 56–67; Converse D. Clowse, Economic Beginnings in Colonial South Carolina, 1670–1730 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 69–227; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through to the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974), 13–34; Richard S. Dunn, “The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina,” SCHM 72.2 (1971): 81–93; Jack P. Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” SCHM 88.4 (1987): 192–210; Richard Waterhouse, “England, the Caribbean, and the Settlement of South Carolina,” Journal of American Studies 9.3 (1975): 259–81.
  12. 12. George Milligen Johnston, A Short Description of the Province of South-Carolina, with an Account of the Air, Weather, and Diseases, at Charles-Town. Written in the year 1763 (London, 1770), 25.
  13. 13. Wood, Black Majority, 33.
  14. 14. Page 189 →Important exceptions that emphasized the thirteen colonies’ integration into a wider British American empire include Jack Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of the Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America.
  15. 15. “An Attempt towards an Estimate of the Value of South Carolina, for the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 1751,” in The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697–1774, ed. H. Roy Merrens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 178.
  16. 16. Peter A. Coclanis, “The Hydra Head of Merchant Capital: Market and Merchants in Early South Carolina,” in The Meaning of South Carolina History: Essays in Honor of George C. Rogers, Jr., ed. David R. Chesnutt and Clyde N. Wilson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 2; Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2001), 75.
  17. 17. Jacob M. Price, “What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660–1790,” Journal of Economic History 49.2 (1989): 267–84; Jacob Price, “Who Cared about the Colonies? The Impact of the Thirteen Colonies on British Society and Politics, c. 1714–1775,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 395–436.
  18. 18. Robert Pringle (hereafter RP) to Richard Thompson, 2 September 1738, LRP, I, 30.
  19. 19. London’s primacy in Britain’s overseas trade in the eighteenth century has been examined and reasserted in Perry L. Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society, 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Perry Gauci, Emporium of the World: The Merchants of London, 1660–1800 (London: Continuum, 2007); Zahedieh, Capital and the Colonies. These join important works on the overseas trade of Britain’s regional “outports” such as Bristol and Glasgow, notably Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and their Trading Activities, c. 1740–1790 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975). Historians’ greater focus on the outports has reflected the more extensive survival of commercial correspondence and administrative data from these locations. In contrast, London’s eighteenth-century port books were destroyed by officials at the Public Record Office in the 1890s, and much other material on the capital’s commerce was lost during the Blitz. On the destruction of the port books, see Jacob M. Price and Paul G. E. Clemens, “A Revolution of Scale in Overseas Trade: British Firms in the Chesapeake Trade, 1675–1775,” Journal of Economic History 47.1 (1987): 2.
  20. 20. Converse D. Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 1717–1767: Statistics from the Port’s Naval Lists (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981), 54–55, 59, 67, 81; Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2001), 74–107; David Richardson, “The British Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina,” Slavery and Abolition 12.3 (1991): 125–72; Daniel C. Littlefield, “The Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina: A Profile,” SCHM 91.2 (1990): 68–99.
  21. 21. T79/37/289, National Archives, London.

Chapter One: “The Metropolis of South Carolina”

  1. 1. Cape Finisterre is the westernmost point in Spain. See 3 Geo. II c. 28, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, V, 553–55.
  2. 2. Historians have debated the Rice Act’s economic significance for South Carolina. For Eugene Sirmans, it “started a boom in the colony’s rice production,” and Kenneth Morgan noted that rice production and prices nearly doubled in its wake. John McCusker and Russell Menard, however, have suggested that its “effect was small.” See M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 162; Morgan, “Colonial American Rice Trade,” 439; McCusker and Menard, Economy of Page 190 →British America, 179. Providing statistical ballast to McCusker and Menard’s observation, Peter Coclanis demonstrated the exponential growth of South Carolina’s rice industry during the 1720s, when exports grew more than threefold, implicitly downplaying the significance of the legislation; see Coclanis, “Rice Prices in the 1720s and the Evolution of the South Carolina Economy,” Journal of Southern History 48.4 (1982): 531–44, esp. 532. For a discussion of the 1730 rice lobbying in the context of commercial lobbying in London, see Starr, School for Politics, esp. 24–43, which suggested how the tactics and style of London lobby politics influenced South Carolina’s political culture.
  3. 3. JHC, XXI, 464, 470; Great Britain, Calendar of Treasury Books and Papers, 1729–45, 5 vols. (London: H.M.S.O, 1897–1903), I, 332. The petitions themselves appear not to have survived. On the MPs’ interests and activities, see Romney Sedgwick, ed., The House of Commons, 1715–1754, 2 vols. (London: H.M.S.O, 1970).
  4. 4. Wood, Black Majority, 148–53; Richardson, “British Slave Trade,” 170–72.
  5. 5. Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 64–65; Coclanis, “Rice Prices in the 1720s,” 533.
  6. 6. On the revolt against and revocation of proprietorial government, see Robert M. Weir, Colonial South Carolina: A History (New York: KTO Press, 1983), 94–103; Walter B. Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 102–7.
  7. 7. “The Metropolis of South Carolina”: this epithet featured commonly in eighteenth-century descriptions of the town. For example, in 1709 the surveyor John Lawson “arriv’d at Charles Town, the Metropolis of South Carolina,” while a visiting British officer, Lord Adam Gordon, noted his arrival in Charles Town, “the Metropolis of South Carolina,” in 1764. Describing the British campaign in the southern colonies in 1779, James Madison observed Britain’s “rapacious zeal for the rich and flourishing Metropolis of South Carolina.” See John Lawson, A New Voyage to South Carolina, containing the exact description and natural history of that country: together with the present state thereof (London, 1709), 2; [Lord Adam Gordon], “Journal of an Officer who Travelled in America and the West Indies in 1764 and 1765,” in Travels in the American Colonies, ed. N. D. Mereness (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 397; James Madison to William Bradford, 30 October–5 November 1779, in James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, Congressional Series, ed. William T. Hutchinson et al., 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962–1991), I, 312.
  8. 8. On mercantilism and colonial policy, see Michael G. Kammen, Empire and Interest: The American Colonies and the Politics of Mercantilism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970), esp. 40–42, 48–50; Menard and McCusker, Economy of British America, 35–38; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 27–29; Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 15–20.
  9. 9. James Glen, “An Attempt towards an Estimate of the Value of South Carolina, for the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, 1751,” in Colonial South Carolina Scene, ed. Merrens, 183.
  10. 10. Francis Yonge, View of the Trade of South Carolina, with Proposals Humbly Offer’d for improving the same (London, c. 1722), 12–14.
  11. 11. Joshua Gee, The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered, 3rd ed. (London, 1731), esp. iv (quote), 22–23, 48–53, 100–106.
  12. 12. Olson, Making the Empire Work; O’Shaughnessy, “Formation of a Commercial Lobby.”
  13. 13. On parliamentary petitioning, see James Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Macon, Ga.: Mercer, 1986), 17; Julian Hoppit, “Patterns of Parliamentary Legislation, 1600–1800,” Historical Journal 39.1 (1996): 109–31. On the composition of eighteenth-century parliamentary committees, see Paul Langford, “Property and ‘Virtual Representation,’ in Eighteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 31.1 (1988): 102–3.
  14. 14. Page 191 →Kammen, Rope of Sand, 3–15; Ella Lonn, The Colonial Agents of the Southern Colonies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945), 53–59.
  15. 15. The 1704 Naval Stores Act had introduced a bounty of six pounds per ton on colonial hemp, four pounds per ton on tar, four pounds per ton on pitch, three pounds per ton on rosin and turpentine, and one pound per ton on masts. See 3 & 4 Anne c. 10, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, 176; Thomas Cooper and David J. McCord, eds., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia: A. S. Johnson, 1836–41), II, 600–602; Lonn, Colonial Agents, 66–67.
  16. 16. The petitions were CO5/1264/301; CO5/1265/11; CO5/1293/71–74; CO5/1293/75–77; CO5/867/117; CO5/358/50–51; CO5/358/146; CO5/358/244–47; CO5/358/284; CO5/359/233–50; CO323/9/11–13; CO5/361/48; CO5/361/105–6 (National Archives, London). A handful of names on the petitions are illegible and have been excluded from the subsequent analysis. One of the two lists was compiled by Stephen Godin in 1729, when he was acting as London agent for South Carolina’s Council. The council at the time was at odds with the colony’s assembly over the assembly’s desire for more local currency to be issued, which the council—and many London merchants—feared would lead to inflation in South Carolina and the devaluation of debts contracted in the colony. Samuel Wragg was then acting as agent in London for the South Carolina Assembly—or as Godin termed it, “the Planters’ pretended Parliament.” Godin presented the Board of Trade with a list of “British Merchants Trading to Carolina who are no[t] Planters” (CO5/361/9–11). The other list was drawn up retrospectively by South Carolina’s Assembly in 1737 and identified the “several Merchants and Traders in London” active in 1730 (CO5/367/116–39). On the analytical utility of petitions in assessing commercial organization, see Gauci, Politics of Trade, 129–34.
  17. 17. Jacob Price and Paul Clemens identified some 111 firms that imported tobacco into London in 1719, using the sole surviving London port book from the eighteenth century (Price and Clemens, “Revolution of Scale,” 19–21).
  18. 18. The ten who appeared five or more times, with the number of times their names appeared and the inclusive dates within the period 1715–30, were Samuel Barons (eight, 1715–23), John Bell (five, 1715–30), James Crane (five, 1715–23), David Godin (nine, 1717–30), Stephen Godin (eleven, 1715–30), John Hewlett (five, 1719–30), John Lloyd (seven, 1715–29), Richard Shubrick (father of the Richard Shubrick discussed below; five, 1722–30), Samuel Wragg (five, 1719–30), and William Wragg (six, 1715–30). On the Wraggs and Godins, see Henry A. M. Smith, “Wragg of South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 19.3 (1918): 121–23; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 283–85, 729–31.
  19. 19. RP to Thomas Morson, 28 December 1738, LRP, I, 56–57.
  20. 20. Instances of unsuitable merchandise sent for sale in Charles Town by ill-informed British merchants abound in Pringle’s papers. One firm speculatively sent a cargo of buckram, a stiff cloth useful only for corset makers, of which there were none in Charles Town; a dozen fishing rods were part of another cargo, which was “Intirely unsaleable here & not at all proper for this Country” and which was eventually sent back to London. Woollens that arrived at the start of the summer and which the Charles Town storekeeper would have to keep in storage for several months were a regular bugbear. See RP to James Goodchild, 18 June 1739, 16 June 1740, and 31 March 1741; to Andrew Pringle, 29 March 1742; to Cookson & Wellfitt, 10 April and 2 September 1742, LRP, I, 99, 226–27, 306–7, 356–57, 361–62, 398–99.
  21. 21. Great Britain, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 45 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860–1994), XXXIV, 243–44.
  22. 22. Records of shipownership corroborate the link between petitioning activity and scale of participation in London’s Carolina trade. Samuel Barons and John Bell, both of whom signed more than five petitions, each had a stake in ten vessels that cleared Charles Town between 1717 and 1739. John Lloyd and Thomas Hyam, who signed five and four petitions respectively, had stakes in five vessels. See CO5/510, National Archives, London; Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 141, table C-61.
  23. 23. Page 192 →CO5/510, National Archives, London; Transatlantic Slave Trade Database: http://slavevoyages.org/voyages/mODR6HMW (accessed 31 October 2016).
  24. 24. George C. Rogers Jr., Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston, 1758–1812 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1962), 12; W. Robert Higgins, “Charles Town Merchants and Factors Dealing in the External Negro Trade, 1735–75,” SCHM 65.4 (1964): 206.
  25. 25. Olson, “Virginia Merchants of London,” 371, 378–80. Interaction with the Board of Trade fell correspondingly, with no Virginia merchants appearing before it between 1733 and 1751. Although Olson noted continuing interaction between London’s Virginia merchants and the treasury, she observed a net decline in the Virginia merchant community’s activity and impact. The capital’s Virginia traders had been by far the most active North American commercial lobby in London before 1725: they had submitted thirty-six petitions to the king, Parliament, and other branches of government. London’s New England merchants had petitioned sixteen times, and the capital’s New York merchants had petitioned on six occasions.
  26. 26. CO5/538/50–51 (quote), National Archives, London.
  27. 27. Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 100.
  28. 28. CO5/1264/301, National Archives, London. The petition was signed by Samuel Barons, John Bell, Joseph Boone, Michael Cole, James Crane, Edward Cripps, Stephen Godin, David Guerard, Richard Higginson, Abel Kettleby, Robert Livingston, John Lloyd, John Metcalfe, William Newbury, John Payne, Samuel Pickering, Andre Poon, H. Wigginton, Philo Woodward, Joseph Wragg, and William Wragg. CO/5/1264/301, National Archives, London.
  29. 29. Weir, Colonial South Carolina, 83–85; Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 62–86.
  30. 30. CO5/1265/11, National Archives, London. Along with colonial agent Kettleby, fourteen merchants trading to South Carolina signed the petition against Virginia’s arms trade with the Indians: Samuel Barons, Nathaniel Bradley, Michael Cole, Henry Daniels, James Deane, Stephen Godin, Richard Higginson, Robert Johnson, James Kinloch, John Lloyd, Andre Poon, William Rhett Jr., John Styleman, and William Wragg. In total there were twenty-nine signatories to the two petitions, of whom fifteen signed only the July petition, five signed only the September petition, and nine signed both.
  31. 31. JHC, XVIII, 262.
  32. 32. David Ramsay, History of South Carolina from Its First Settlement in 1670, to the Year 1808, 2 vols. (1809; repr., Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Co., 1959), II, 114.
  33. 33. On the legislative framework for South Carolina’s commodity exports, including rice, two classic works remain useful starting points: Lewis C. Gray, A History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie, 1933), esp. 284–86; and Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History. Vol. IV, England’s Commercial and Colonial Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1938), esp. 96–97.
  34. 34. 3 & 4 Anne c. 5, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, IV, 170.
  35. 35. Gee, Trade and Navigation, 23. The role of the enigmatic ship’s captain in the enumeration was later invoked by both G. L. Beer and C. M. Andrews in their influential accounts of Britain’s colonial trade (George Louis Beer, The Commercial Policy of England towards the American Colonies [New York: Columbia College, 1893], 53; Andrews, Colonial Period of American History, IV, 97).
  36. 36. Great Britain, Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, from April 1704 to May 1782, 14 vols. (London: H.M.S.O., 1920–28), II, 617–18.
  37. 37. Great Britain, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, XXXIII, 62.
  38. 38. CO5/358/146, National Archives, London; JHC, XX, 62–63.
  39. 39. The bill appears to have had support from both the government and regional trading interests. The three MPs who introduced it to Parliament are indicative: Martin Bladen, MP for Stockbridge in Hampshire, was a member of the Board of Trade, was an expert on trade Page 193 →and colonial affairs, and owned a plantation in the West Indies; Sir Abraham Elton was a commercial magnate in and MP for Bristol; and Archibald Hutcheson, MP for Hastings in Sussex, was a well-connected former member of the Board of Trade. The most likely reason for the bill’s failure is that it ran out of parliamentary time. Wragg’s costs are revealed in a retrospective claim for a total of £500 he submitted to South Carolina’s Assembly in 1742 for his efforts. However, the assembly found no evidence that he had spent more than the £183 it agreed to reimburse him. See Commons Journals, XX, 463–65; Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1742–1744, 225–26; Sedgwick, House of Commons, 1715–1754.
  40. 40. A. S. Salley, ed., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, February 23rd 1724/5 to 1st June 1725 (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1945), 23 March 1725, 66.
  41. 41. Earl John Perceval, Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of Viscount Percival, afterwards First Earl of Egmont, 3 vols. (London: H.M.S.O, 1920–23), 26 March 1735, II, 154. For their part, the Georgia Trustees recognized the reciprocal advantages of good relations with Fury and his employers. Agreeing to the South Carolinian authorities’ request that Fury’s salary be temporarily paid through a bill drawn on the trustees in London, Egmont recorded that the trustees considered that “it was a neighbourly action, and would engage Mr. Fury to be affectionate to our colony” (Perceval, Manuscripts, 16 January 1735, II, 221). Fury had been appointed as South Carolina’s metropolitan agent in 1733.
  42. 42. 8 Geo. II c. 19, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, V, 674–75; Commons Journals, XXII, 453, 464–65, 469, 473–75, 493. Some seventeen of the thirty-seven MPs named to the committee that considered the bill and proposed the law’s extension to Georgia were members or trustees of the Georgia Society. On the Georgia interest in Parliament, see also Richard Dunn, “The Trustees of Georgia and the House of Commons, 1732–1752,” WMQ 11.4 (1954): 551–65; Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 1730–1775 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 2–11, 34–48.
  43. 43. Quoted in Kammen, Empire and Interest, 68.
  44. 44. Of nineteen merchant “associates” studied by David Hancock whose pre-London travels are known, for example, three had spent time in North America; see Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 41n. See also William I. Roberts III, “Samuel Storke: An Eighteenth-Century London Merchant Trading to the American Colonies,” Business History Review 39.2 (1965): 149.
  45. 45. Richard Sheridan estimated that if Antigua was typical of the Caribbean islands as a whole, a majority of London’s West Indies merchants had spent time in planting or trade on the islands (Sheridan, “Planters and Merchants: The Oliver Family of Antigua and London, 1716–84,” Business History 13.2 [1971]: 113). For other examples of West Indies merchants’ formative spells in the Caribbean islands, see Richard Pares, “A London West India Merchant House, 1740–69,” in The Historian’s Business and Other Essays, ed. R. A. Humphreys and Elizabeth Humphreys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 225; D. W. Thoms, “The Mills Family: London Sugar Merchants of the Eighteenth Century,” Business History 11.1 (1969): 3; Hancock, Citizens of the World, 46–51.
  46. 46. The earliest record of Crokatt in South Carolina is from 1728, when he was executor of the will of David Durham, a Berkeley County planter (SCG, 26 February 1732; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 213).
  47. 47. Population statistics are from Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 114, table 4–3; Carter et al., Historical Statistics, V, 651–55. On South Carolina’s economic development during the 1720s and 1730s and Charles Town’s commercial dynamism, see Coclanis, “Rice Prices in the 1720s,” 532–33; Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 72–76; Nash, “Urbanization in the Colonial South,” 3–29; Emma Hart, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth Century British Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 17–50; Jeanne A. Calhoun, Martha A. Zierden, and Elizabeth Paysinger, “The Geographic Spread of Charleston’s Merchant Community, 1732–67,” SCHM 86.3 (1985): 186.
  48. 48. Page 194 →Will of James Crokatt, Prob. 11/1029, National Archives, London; Will of John Crokatt, Prob. 11/703, National Archives, London; Lothrop Withington, ed., “South Carolina Gleanings in England,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 6.3 (1905): 121–22. William Woodrop married Elizabeth Crokatt (b. 1708, Edinburgh), on 3 May 1737. See Mabel L. Webber, “The Mayrant Family,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 27.2 (1926): 83; PHL, I, 46n, 130n; LRP, II, 699.
  49. 49. George C. Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), 13; Great Britain, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, XLI, 133, 157; SCG, 20 September and 1 November 1735.
  50. 50. RP to Cookson & Wellfitt, 20 March 1742, LRP, I, 350.
  51. 51. RP to Andrew Pringle, 22 September 1740, LRP, I, 248–49.
  52. 52. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vols. A, 220; B, 153; E, 313; F, 153; South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, Judgement Rolls: 19A, 36A, SCDAH.
  53. 53. Thomas Colyer-Ferguson, ed., The Marriage Registers of St. Dunstan’s, Stepney, in the County of Middlesex, 1697–1719 (Canterbury, 1898), 74; SCG, 26 February, 30 September, and 16 December 1732; 7 July and 25 August 1733; 29 October 1737; 2 February and 15 April 1738; Charles Town Naval Office list, 1738, CO5/510, National Archives, London.
  54. 54. SCG, 16 February 1734, 5 April and 31 May 1735, 31 January 1736 (quote), 6 November 1740; Charles Town Naval Office list, 1736–37, CO5/510, National Archives, London.
  55. 55. HL to Thomas Lloyd, 7 September 1767, PHL, V, 299–300.
  56. 56. Several studies of Laurens relate the episode. See C. James Taylor, “A Member of the Family: Twenty-five Years with Henry Laurens,” SCHM 106.2 (2005): 123–25; Joseph P. Kelly, “Henry Laurens: The Southern Man of Conscience in History,” SCHM 107.2 (2006): 104–6; David D. Wallace, The Life of Henry Laurens (New York: Putnam, 1915), 15–18; Daniel McDonough, Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens: The Parallel Lives of Two American Patriots (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 17–18. For Laurens’s contemporary letters describing his disappointment, see PHL, I, 178–85.
  57. 57. HL to Thomas Lloyd, 7 September 1767, PHL, V, 299–300.
  58. 58. Robert Raper to John Beswicke, 11 January 1762, LRR.
  59. 59. Peter Taylor Sr. to Peter Taylor Jr., 21 August 1758, Taylor Family Papers, SCL.
  60. 60. HL to John Mill, 9 October 1767, PHL, V, 343.
  61. 61. RP to John Richards, 3 August 1739, LRP, I, 121–22; Walter B. Edgar, “Robert Pringle and His World,” SCHM 76.1 (1975): 1.
  62. 62. RP to Andrew Pringle, 10 July and 7 September 1742, and to John Keith, 3 September 1742, LRP, I, 387–88, 404–5, 406–9.
  63. 63. James Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 17 March 1743, OFP; Calhoun et al., “Geographic Spread,” 200.
  64. 64. RP to Andrew Pringle, 18 March and 4 April 1745, LRP, II, 827–30, 833–36; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 542–44.
  65. 65. RP to Thomas Pringle, 21 October 1746, Pringle-Garden Papers, SCHS.
  66. 66. Alexander Cumine to Alexander Ogilvie, 1 and 22 April (quote) 1763 and 17 March 1770, OFP. Cumine’s strategy failed to pay off. The barriers to entering trade in Charles Town were greater than he had expected, and after seven years of trying to enter business he instead took a job as a Latin teacher.
  67. 67. HL to Bright & Millward, 12 January 1770; to Jeremiah Meyler, 12 January 1770; to Stephenson, Holford & Co., 31 July 1770; and to Mayne & Co., 1 August 1770, PHL, VII, 214–15, 216–17, 315–16, 317.
  68. 68. James Habersham to John Nutt, 31 July 1772, in James Habersham, Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, vol. VI, The Letters of the Hon. James Habersham, 1756–1775 (Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1906), 195.
  69. 69. HL to John Lewis Gervais, 23 January 1773, PHL, VIII, 539.
  70. 70. Page 195 →Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 9 February 1751, OFP.
  71. 71. Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 17 July 1752, OFP.
  72. 72. The mortality rate among slaves on board British ships in the Atlantic slave trade between 1701 and 1750 has been calculated at 15.6 percent per voyage. This does not include the deaths of slaves before leaving the coast of Africa or, once they had arrived in the Americas, before they had disembarked or been sold, which could be nearly as high. See Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines, and Ralph Shlomowitz, “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” WMQ 58.1 (2001): 105–6, tables II, V, XI. Stephen D. Behrendt has estimated that “each year in the slave trade about one in five crew members died” (Behrendt, “Markets, Transactions Cycles, and Profits: Merchant Decision Making in the British Slave Trade,” WMQ 58.1 [2001]: 180).
  73. 73. Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 17 July 1752, OFP.
  74. 74. Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 20 August 1752 (postscript to 17 July letter), OFP.
  75. 75. For an overview of the organization and structure of Charles Town’s colonial-era trade, see Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2001), 77–85; Morgan, “Colonial American Rice Trade,” 441–47.
  76. 76. Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 56. Six of the other wharves were named after local merchant-planters: Rhett’s Bridge, Elliott’s Bridge, Motte’s Bridge, Pinckney’s Bridge, Lloyd’s Bridge, and Brewton’s Bridge; the largest, containing the city market, was simply Middle Bridge (Calhoun et al., “Geographic Spread,” 188).
  77. 77. Miscellaneous Records, 1749–51, 292–301, SCDAH; SCG, 19 October–9 November 1738.
  78. 78. South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, Judgement Rolls: 23A/58A, 24A/1A, 2A, 26A; 24B/2A, 19A, SCDAH.
  79. 79. SCG, 17 April 1736, 30 April 1741.
  80. 80. SCG, 15 May 1736, 7 September 1734.
  81. 81. South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, Judgement Rolls: 27B, 19A; 33A/108A, SCDAH.
  82. 82. CO5/367/61, 80–81, 87a; CO5/365/37–40, National Archives, London; W. O. Moore Jr., “The Largest Exporters of Deerskins from Charles Town, 1735–1775,” SCHM 74.3 (1973): 144–47; SCG, 18 September 1736; J. H. Easterby and R. Nicholas Olsberg, eds., Journal of the Commons House of Assembly of South Carolina, 14 vols., 1736–57 (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1951–89), 1736–39, 174. On the public provision of goods to native Indians, see Mancall et al., “Indians and the Economy of Eighteenth-Century Carolina,” 304–6.
  83. 83. Easterby and Olsberg, Journal of the Commons House, 20 January 1742, 318.
  84. 84. Easterby and Olsberg, Journal of the Commons House, 12 January, 28 February, and 28 April 1743, 109, 249, 395, 403; 13 January 1744, 520. On the broader impact of the 1739–48 warfare for Charles Town’s trade, see Stuart O. Stumpf, “Implications of King George’s War for the Charleston Mercantile Community,” SCHM 77.3 (1976): 161–88.
  85. 85. RP to Andrew Pringle, 17 April 1742, LRP, I, 371; Easterby and Olsberg, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 16 and 18 February 1742, 379, 395. On the Shubricks’ naval connections, see also SCG, 20 December 1742, 21 February 1743, 21 September 1748; Stumpf, “Implications of King George’s War,” 165.
  86. 86. Higgins, “Charles Town Merchants,” 205–17.
  87. 87. Littlefield, “Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina,” 69–70; Richardson, “British Slave Trade,” 127–29. Richardson estimated that about eighty thousand slaves came directly from Africa, with about thirteen thousand imported into South Carolina from other British colonies, and that 87 percent of the slaves brought directly from Africa were carried on vessels owned in Britain.
  88. 88. Littlefield, “Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina,” 94–98.
  89. 89. Klein et al., “Transoceanic Mortality,” tables II, V.
  90. 90. SCG, 19 April 1739.
  91. 91. Page 196 →SCG, 14 June 1735. The story was newsworthy enough to be reprinted in a Philadelphia newspaper the following month: American Weekly Mercury, 31 July 1735. Peter H. Wood cited this case as an example of “semi-organized crime” by black slaves (Wood, Black Majority, 215–16). No court records of criminal cases in Charles Town before 1769 have survived.
  92. 92. Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 265–68, 379–80.
  93. 93. Henry A. M. Smith, “The Baronies of South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 18.1 (1917): 8–9. On the Ball family, see Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (London: Penguin, 1999).
  94. 94. SCG, 22 November 1742; RP to Andrew Pringle, 11 June 1744, LRP, II, 708; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 326.
  95. 95. CO5/366/105–6; CO5/381/262; CO324/37/112, National Archives, London. The Gazette reported Crokatt’s appointment on 1 June 1738.
  96. 96. SCG, 2 December 1732, 13 November 1736; Hennig Cohen, The South Carolina Gazette, 1732–1775 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953), 17–18. For other examples of Crokatt’s links to Scottish causes, see SCG, 29 September 1738, 19 April 1739; Scots Hospital of King Charles II, A Short Account of the Institution, Progress, and Present State of the Scottish Corporation in London (London, 1777), 39.
  97. 97. SCG, 27 December 1735, 31 January 1736, 22 December 1737.
  98. 98. SCG, 9 April 1737, 3 August 1738 (quote).
  99. 99. St. Philip’s Parish, Charleston, S.C., Vestry Minutes, 1732–74, 50, SCDAH.
  100. 100. SCG, 4 May 1738, 21 June 1742 (on Beswicke); 22 April 1745, 7 April 1746 (on Shubrick).
  101. 101. Nash, “Trade and Business,” 13. Notable Charles Town merchants in the first category were Gabriel Manigault, John Guerard, and Henry Laurens. George Austin, Laurens’s business partner and a native of Shropshire, England, was a notable member of the second group.
  102. 102. Kathryn Roe Coker, “Absentees as Loyalists in Revolutionary War South Carolina,” SCHM 96.2 (1995): 125–26; Eugene M. Sirmans, “The South Carolina Royal Council, 1720–1763,” WMQ 18.3 (1961): 392.
  103. 103. Sirmans, “South Carolina Royal Council,” 392.
  104. 104. George Udney to William Middleton, 13 January 1753, Middleton Family Papers, HA93: 722/124, microfilm, SCDAH.
  105. 105. On bills of exchange and other instruments of commercial credit, see Gauci, Emporium of the World, 52, 145; Price, “What Did Merchants Do,” 278, 280. On the evolution of merchant banking, see Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2009), 42–48.
  106. 106. Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 20 March 1760, OFP.
  107. 107. SCG, 25 February 1764.
  108. 108. On “backward integration” strategies in Atlantic trade and planting, see Hancock, Citizens of the World, 81, 143–71; S. D. Smith, “Gedney Clarke of Salem and Barbados: Transatlantic Super-Merchant,” New England Quarterly 76.4 (2003): 510.
  109. 109. Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 22 February 1761, OFP. Ogilvie had been in partnership with John Ward during the 1750s, which terminated in March 1759. He then went into partnership with John Forbes, with whom he continued after relocating to London. See SCG, 31 March 1759; Calhoun et al., “Geographic Spread.” 203, 209.
  110. 110. Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 22 February 1761, OFP.
  111. 111. SCG, 23 March 1747.
  112. 112. SCG, 1 February, 19 April, 2 June 1739.
  113. 113. SCG, 16 November 1738–16 June 1739. Crokatt’s gift for advertising apparently rubbed off on his young partner, Benjamin Smith. Smith’s three-column spread in the largest type to announce the formation of his new firm, Benjamin Smith & Co., in 1752 has been called “the boldest advertisement that had yet appeared in the Gazette” (Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 14).
  114. 114. SCG, 5–25 April and 22 November 1735, 5 March 1737.
  115. 115. Page 197 →SCG, 15 and 22 May, 5 June 1736. For further examples of his assertiveness in reclaiming debts, see SCG, 9 February and 15 April 1738.
  116. 116. SCG, 15 January 1737. See also Judgement Rolls: 23A/58A; 24A/1A, 2A; 26A/78A, SCDAH; SCG, 12 May 1733, 26 May 1746, 21 January 1751.
  117. 117. SCG, 29 December 1739. Crokatt’s relationship with his agent, Robert Raper, continued for nearly thirty years. When they settled their account in 1767, Raper expressed his hope that “we may finish our Concerns as amicably as we began which I think was in the year 1739” (Robert Raper to James Crokatt, 14 February 1767, LRR).
  118. 118. Miscellaneous Records, 1749–51, 292–301, SCDAH; SCG, 19 October–9 November 1738. Smith had been at Crokatt’s trading house as early as June 1735, when he was identified in a newspaper advertisement (SCG, 21 June 1735).

Chapter Two: “Friends to Assist at Home”

  1. 1. RP to Andrew Pringle, 30 May (quote) and 20 July 1744, LRP, II, 699–701, 728–30.
  2. 2. Scottish-born Robert Pringle still conceived of Britain as “Home” in the 1740s, an affective and linguistic trait shared by many Carolinians whether born in Britain or in the colony.
  3. 3. Price and Clemens, “Revolution of Scale.” 21–24; Price, “What Did Merchants Do,” 281.
  4. 4. HL to Francis Bremar, 27 March 1749, PHL, I, 232. Laurens’s omission of John Beswicke from this list, despite the scale of Beswicke’s involvement in London’s Carolina trade, probably reflected the small amount of trade the two did with one another.
  5. 5. Great Britain, Journal of the Commissioners for Trade, VIII, 273; CO5/65/1–3; Charles Town Naval Office Lists: CO5/509–11, National Archives, London.
  6. 6. The concentration of London’s Carolina trade in the early 1760s is further confirmed by ships’ manifests detailing indigo exports from South Carolina in 1764 (Charles Town Naval Office, ships’ manifests, January–April 1764, CO5/511/2–63, National Archives, London).
  7. 7. Thomas Mortimer, The Universal Director… [Mortimer’s Directory] (London, 1763). As the only London directory published before 1788 that was classified by field, Mortimer’s is an invaluable source for the study of the city’s merchants in the 1760s. The largest group is general merchants, without a defined field of trade. However, the directory has some limitations as a source. Containing around 2,900 names and addresses, including 1,252 individuals and firms listed as merchants, it was less comprehensive than contemporary directories such as the rival but unclassified Complete Guide. The Complete Guide contained around 4,200 entries in its 1760 edition and around 6,000 in 1765. After Mortimer’s was published in 1763 no further classified London directories were published before 1788, making it hard to track participation in each trade over time. See Peter J. Atkins, The Directories of London, 1677–1977 (London: Mansell, 1990), 22. Sketchley’s Bristol Directory was the first classified directory in Bristol, in 1775. Among the 168 merchants listed, it categorized just one specialist Carolina trader, Samuel Brailsford. Formerly a prominent merchant in Charles Town, he had relocated to Britain in the late 1760s. See James Sketchley, Sketchley’s Bristol Directory; including Clifton, Bedminster, and the out-parishes of St. James and St. Philip (Bristol, 1775).
  8. 8. His children’s “disobedience” included his eldest daughter’s elopement with an unsuitable husband, which had resulted in John Nickleson “raging like a Madman” and his wife “drowned in Tears”; and the conduct of his “Brutal Son” Jack, of whom Peter Manigault, visiting from Charles Town, remarked that “for sure a greater Mixture of Fool & Villain never met together in one Man.” See Peter Manigault to Gabriel Manigault, 26 February 1754, Peter Manigault Papers, SCHS.
  9. 9. For example, the linen drapers Pomeroys & Streatfield and the woollen drapers Rogers & Dyson, who traded to South Carolina between the 1740s and the 1770s, and the textile wholesaler Nathaniel Newberry (PHL, I, 15n, 232; VIII, 261; Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts”; City of London Land Tax Assessments, MS.11316/132–34, Guildhall Library, London; London Directories).
  10. 10. Page 198 →Major London overseas traders whose diverse portfolios included some interests in the Carolina trade included Sir William Baker, Richard Oswald, and Samuel Touchett.
  11. 11. Peter Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 7.
  12. 12. On London’s dominance of British overseas trade, see Christopher J. French, “Crowded with Traders and a Great Commerce: London’s Domination of English Overseas Trade, 1700–1775,” London Journal 17 (1992): 29–32; Patrick K. O’Brien, “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 61.
  13. 13. Morgan, “Colonial American Rice Trade,” 436–38.
  14. 14. No data on the destination of Charles Town rice exports survive for the 1740s, but London’s average annual share of the port’s rice exports to Britain between 1734 and 1738 was 42 percent and between 1758 and 1760, 30 percent; see Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 63, table B-26. A lawsuit brought by Richard Shubrick against a Capt. Salmond, whom Shubrick had chartered to collect a cargo of rice in Winyaw (Georgetown) in 1762–63, is an illuminating account of how the transatlantic rice trade was organized and the principal role of London merchants in it. Salmond was contracted to take a cargo to Madeira and then sail to Winyaw, where he would stay for forty days, unless loaded and dispatched earlier. In Winyaw, he was to “load his ship with such rice and other goods as the plaintiff’s agents & c. should tender to be laden.” If the ship failed to arrive in Winyaw by 1 March 1763, Shubrick’s “factors or assigns” could choose either to load the ship as specified or refuse it altogether. Shubrick brought the case since Salmond never sailed from Madeira to Winyaw, and it was decided in Shubrick’s favor. See Thomas Parker, The laws of shipping and insurance, with a digest of adjudged cases; containing the acts of parliament relative to shipping, insurance and navigation … from Trinity term 1693, to Michaelmas term 1774 (London, 1775).
  15. 15. As with rice, there are no data on the destinations of Carolinian deerskins or naval stores between 1738 and 1758. However, between 1734 and 1738 London received an annual average of 50 percent of the colony’s deerskin exports, 57 percent of its tar, and 53 percent of its pitch; and between 1758 and 1760 an annual average of 60 percent of its deerskins, 18 percent of its tar (second to Poole), and 31 percent of its pitch. See Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 54–55, 67, tables B-11, B-32; Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2001), 88–89.
  16. 16. For more detail on the economic organization of South Carolina’s Atlantic trades, see Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2001), 74–107; Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2005), 95–151, which elaborates on the comparative context of South Carolina’s trade; Nash, “South Carolina Indigo,” 362–92; Morgan, “Colonial American Rice Trade,” 433–52. The Rawlinson, Davison & Newman Account Books (Guildhall Library, London) are underused sources on the marketing of rice and indigo, and a variety of other imported colonial produce, in London.
  17. 17. S. D. Smith and T. R. Wheeley, “‘Requisites of a Considerable Trade’: The Letters of Robert Plumsted, Atlantic Merchant, 1752–8,” English Historical Review 124 (2009): 556; Roberts, “Samuel Storke,” 155; Zahedieh, Capital and the Colonies, 69, 252–79.
  18. 18. Richardson, “British Slave Trade,” 137–39; Littlefield, “Slave Trade to Colonial South Carolina,” 84–94.
  19. 19. On London’s share of the Atlantic slave trade to South Carolina, see Richardson, “British Slave Trade,” 139. For evidence that the principal London Carolina merchants of the 1740s and 1750s had had limited direct participation in the slave trade when they had been based in Charles Town, see Higgins, “Charles Town Merchants,” 205–17.
  20. 20. HL to James Crokatt, 2 January 1749; and to Isaac Hobhouse, 21 March 1749, PHL, I, 200–201, 226–27.
  21. 21. Page 199 →Among the other merchants who specialized in London’s goods export trade to South Carolina between 1749 and the American Revolution, during which time sixty-three ships departed on slaving voyages from London and completed their journeys in South Carolina, only Benjamin Stead was active in the slave trade. He was a prominent slave trader in Charles Town before relocating to London in 1759, and his participation in the slave trade in London was concentrated in three years, when he had a stake in five slave voyages between 1764 and 1766. See Transatlantic Slave Trade Database: http://slavevoyages.org/voyages/0xw15R6C (accessed 31 October 2016). See also Richardson, “British Slave Trade,” 125–72; Higgins, “Charles Town Merchants,” 208, 210–11; SCG, 17 July 1755.
  22. 22. In this, the Carolina merchants appear to have more closely matched the commercial strategies of London’s largest colonial merchants in the late seventeenth century, among whom Zahedieh observed “very high levels of regional specialization,” than the merchants profiled by David Hancock, who participated in several different branches of trade. See Zahedieh, Capital and the Colonies, 103 (quote), 286; Hancock, Citizens of the World.
  23. 23. South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, Judgement Rolls: 45A/153A, SCDAH; Crokatt v. Muilman [1770], C12/540/24; CO5/65/27–29, 30–34, 37–39, 40–42, National Archives, London.
  24. 24. Charles Town Naval Office Lists: CO5/509–11, National Archives, London.
  25. 25. Read’s Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 14 July 1750; [J. Osborn], A Complete Guide to All Persons who have any Trade or Concern with the City of London, and Parts Adjacent, 2nd–16th eds. (London, 1740–83), 1749–55, 4th–6th eds.; Trinity House, The royal charter of confirmation granted by His most excellent Majesty King James II. To the Trinity-House of Deptford-Strond; for the government and increase of the navigation of England… (London, 1763), 180.
  26. 26. Jonas Hanway, An Account of the Marine Society [List of subscribers to the Marine Society], recommending the piety and policy of the institution, and pointing out the advantages accruing to the nation …, 6th ed. (London, 1759), 13; Court and City Register. For the year 1755 …, 19th ed. (London, 1755), 207; Public Advertiser, 19 January 1754; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 21 December 1764. On the culture of charity in mid-century London, see Donna Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).
  27. 27. Bob Harris, “Patriotic Commerce and National Revival: The Free British Fishery Society and British Politics, c. 1749–58,” English Historical Review 114 (1999): 285–313.
  28. 28. James Habersham to Graham, Clark & Co., 15 February and 15 June(?) 1771, in Habersham, Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, 121, 142–43.
  29. 29. South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, Judgement Rolls: 24B/32A, 26A/72A, 26A/75A, 27B/15A, SCDAH. These record the lawsuits through which Crokatt pursued debtors in Charles Town.
  30. 30. The turnover in personnel in these partnerships indicates the fluidity of Charles Town’s commercial scene, in contrast to the relative stasis of London’s Carolina trade. Beswicke’s partnerships were with, successively, John Crokatt and Alexander Livie (1752–53), then with Livie and John McQueen (1753–54), with McQueen alone (1754–58), and with McQueen and Maurice Harvey (1758–62). See South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, Judgement Rolls: 33A/87A; 37A/12A; 45B/20A, SCDAH.
  31. 31. Miscellaneous Records, 1749–51, 92–94, 292–301, SCDAH.
  32. 32. Crokatt’s business with Charles Town trading houses in this period was recorded in the first volume of the Laurens papers. See HL to Richard Grubb, 16 March 1748; to James Crokatt, 16 April 1748; to Savage & Pickering, 26 December 1748, PHL, I, 121–22, 130–31, 191–92. On Crokatt’s shipping interests, see Charles Town Naval Office lists, CO5/510, National Archives, London; HL to James Crokatt, 13 April 1748, PHL, I, 126–27; Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 151; R. Nicholas Olsberg, “Ship Registers in the South Carolina Archives, 1734–1780,” SCHM 74.4 (1973): 212, 225.
  33. 33. Judgement Rolls: 32A/65A; 43A/50A, 139A/171A, SCDAH.
  34. 34. Page 200 →Robert Raper to Charles Crokatt, 13 January 1764; to Greenwood & Higginson, 6 March 1765, LRR.
  35. 35. HL to Rawlinson & Davison, 24 September 1755, PHL, I, 344.
  36. 36. HL to John Hopton, 4 September 1771, PHL, VII, 559.
  37. 37. Crokatt v. Barclay (1748), C12/2203/55; Watson v. Crokatt (1760), C12/907/77; Crokatt v. Muilman (1770), C12/540/23, National Archives, London.
  38. 38. On the different sectoral locales within London, see Gauci, Emporium of the World, 32, 43, 96.
  39. 39. Evidence on the Carolina merchants’ locations was derived from [Osborn], Complete Guide to … London, 1740–83, 2nd–16th eds.; Kent’s Directory, 1742, 1754, 1762; Mortimer, Universal Director [Mortimer’s Directory]; London Evening Post, 24 January 1753; Public Advertiser, 13 June 1758; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 31 January 1774. On the Royal Exchange, see Gauci, Emporium of the World, 39–56.
  40. 40. Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), 147–49. On coffeehouses as a specific locus for mercantile petitioning, see Alison Olson, “Coffee House Lobbying,” History Today 41.1 (1991): 35–41.
  41. 41. RP to Andrew Pringle, 21 January 1743, LRP, II, 487–88.
  42. 42. RP to Andrew Pringle, 9 March 1744, LRP, II, 662.
  43. 43. Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London: Continuum, 2007), 85–90; Dora Mae Clark, “The Impressment of Seamen in the American Colonies,” in Essays in Colonial History Presented to Charles McLean Andrews by His Students (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1931), 205–12.
  44. 44. RP to James Hunter & Co., 2 April 1737, LRP, I, 11.
  45. 45. RP to John Erving, 17 May 1740, LRP, I, 207. Crew members of another merchant vessel, the Caesar, were less fortunate in their attempts to avoid impressment by a gang from the Tartar, with one killed while resisting (SCG, 17 and 24 May 1740).
  46. 46. RP to Andrew Pringle, 27 January and 5 February 1743, and to Richard Partridge, 29 January 1743, LRP, II, 491–92, 497. On shortages of manpower caused by naval impressments, see also RP to Andrew Pringle, 31 December 1742, LRP, II, 471. The Royal Navy’s impact on shipping was probably the reason that Charles Town’s merchants, as Robert Pringle reported, were not too concerned about the lack of naval protection against Spanish vessels off the Carolina coast during the war: “we have had no King’s ships on a Cruize for these Ten Months past, so badly is this coast taken care of & yet the Merchants here won’t be Unanimous to Complain of Same.”
  47. 47. The failure of London’s Carolina lobby to press for the 1708 law to be enforced or for impressment in Charles Town to be otherwise curbed contrasted with the activity of the capital’s West Indies lobby on the matter. The agents for the Caribbean sugar colonies, planters on the islands, and merchants trading to the islands petitioned the king and Parliament to complain about the effects of impressment on the West Indies. Thanks to their efforts, an act “for the better Encouragement of the Trade of his Majesty’s Sugar Colonies in America” was passed in 1746 to prohibit impressment in the West Indies, making a distinction between the Caribbean and the North American mainland colonies. See Clark, “Impressment of Seamen.” 212–15.
  48. 48. RP to Pringle & Scott, 15 May 1742, LRP, I, 374.
  49. 49. JHC, XXIII, 284. Permission was granted for direct exports of sugar to European points south of Cape Finisterre but not for the other commodities (12 Geo. II c. 30, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VI, 115–20). However, the act had little effect since unlike rice, sugar exports to southern Europe remained very small (O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 61–62).
  50. 50. RP to Andrew Pringle, 5 July 1743, LRP, II, 577–78; Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, vol. 1746–47, 251, 336, 380–81; Parker’s Penny Post, 7 May 1725; Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer, 20 October 1759.
  51. 51. Page 201 →Britain did not automatically prohibit wartime trade with countries with which it was at war in the eighteenth century. On the theory and practicalities of trade with the enemy, see Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 394–468.
  52. 52. JHC, XXIII, 538–39, 542–43, 547, 551–52; “An Act to prohibit, for a Time therein limited, the Exportation of Corn, Grain, (Rice excepted), Meal, Malt, Flour, Bread, Biscuit, Starch, Beef, Pork, and Bacon” (14 Geo. II c. 3, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VI, 148).
  53. 53. The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle XII (1742): 233–35. See also Marion B. Smith, “South Carolina and the Gentleman’s Magazine,” SCHM 95.2 (1994): 119–20; Sedgwick, House of Commons, I.
  54. 54. 15 Geo. II c. 33, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VI, 196.
  55. 55. Among the extensive literature on the empire in mid-century British culture and political debate, see in particular on Britain’s conjoined imperial-maritime-commercial policies, Daniel A. Baugh, “Maritime Strength and Atlantic Commerce: The Uses of ‘A Grand Marine Empire,’” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 185–223; and on the commercial legislation of the late 1740s and early 1750s, Bob Harris, Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 240–65. Other works have placed differing emphases on the emergence of an imperial consciousness in Britain: Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon,” Past and Present 212 (1988): 74–109; Kathleen Wilson, “Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture, c. 1720–1785,” in An Imperial State at War, ed. Stone, 128–64; Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 53–71; Bob Harris, “‘American Idols’: Empire, War and the Middling Ranks in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” Past and Present 150 (1996): 111–41; Bob Harris, “War, Empire and the ‘National Interest’ in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” in Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare in Anglo-America, 1754–1815, ed. Stephen Conway and Julie Flavell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 13–40; Marie Peters, “Early Hanoverian Consciousness: Empire or Europe?,” English Historical Review 122 (2007): 632–68.
  56. 56. Harris, “Patriotic Commerce and National Revival,” 297; [Sir Matthew Decker], An Essay on the Causes of the Decline in Foreign Trade, consequently of the Value of the Lands in Britain, and on the Means to Restore both, 2nd ed. (London, 1750), 65.
  57. 57. Ralph Davis, “The Rise of Protection in England, 1689–1786,” Economic History Review 19.2 (1966): 313; John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Routledge, 1989), 95–99, 211–17.
  58. 58. JHC, XXIII, 682; XXV, 997–98, 1032–35; XXVI, 239–41, 267; Perceval, Manuscripts, III, 200.
  59. 59. HL to George Austin, 17 December 1748, PHL, I, 185. The petition itself has apparently not survived.
  60. 60. SCG, 5 and 19 February 1737.
  61. 61. [James Crokatt, ed.], Further observations intended for improving the culture and curing of indigo, &c. in South-Carolina (London, 1747), 10.
  62. 62. SCG, 23 March 1747, 15 August 1748. On proposals for agricultural diversification in the lower South, see also Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 134–59.
  63. 63. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1749–50, 18.
  64. 64. Gee, Trade and Navigation, 21.
  65. 65. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, 1749–50, 99. On the production of indigo, see John J. Winberry, “Indigo in South Carolina: A Historical Geography,” Southeastern Geographer 19.2 (1979): 91–102; Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 190–99.
  66. 66. Page 202 →In assessing the short- and long-term economic consequences of the indigo bounty, R. C. Nash has pointed out that it had an important immediate effect, giving enough of a price stimulus to sustain South Carolina’s fledgling indigo culture during the early 1750s, when its low price relative to that of rice led many planters to revert their entire operations to rice cultivation. He suggested that in the long term, however, the flat rate of the bounty had negative consequences, by encouraging the production of low-quality indigo: at a flat rate, the bounty was proportionately greater on low-grade than it was on higher-grade, more-expensive indigo. See Nash, “South Carolina Indigo,” 375–76.
  67. 67. [James Crokatt], Observations concerning indigo and cochineal (London, 1746); [Crokatt], Further Observations, 25. It is probable that Crokatt was also the anonymous London correspondent whose letter appeared in the Gazette in April 1745 informing Carolinians, “When you can in some measure supply the British Demand, we are persuaded, that on proper Application to Parliament, a Duty will be laid on Foreign Growth, for I am informed, that we pay for INDIGO to the French £200,000 per annum” (SCG, 1 April 1745).
  68. 68. [James Crokatt], Reasons for laying a Duty on French and Spanish Indico, and granting a Bounty on what is made in the British Plantations (London, 1748), CO5/372/15–18, National Archives, London.
  69. 69. As recorded in the Journal of the House of Commons, petitions were received from London’s Carolina traders; Bristol’s Carolina traders; “Merchants, Manufacturers and Traders of all Kinds” from Liverpool; South Carolinian planters; London dyers; and Southwark dyers; and other petitions came from dyers, clothiers, and dealers in the main textile-producing regions of England—Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the West Country: Exeter (Devon); Poole (Dorset); Manchester and Rochdale (Lancashire); Norwich (Norfolk); Nottingham (Nottinghamshire); Witney (Oxfordshire); Frome (Somerset); Bradford-on-Avon, Calne, Chippenham and surrounding villages, Heytesbury and Warminster, New Sarum and Trowbridge (all Wiltshire); and Halifax, Leeds, and Wakefield (Yorkshire). See JHC, XXV, 632–38, 643. The text of the petitions was summarized in the Journal of the House of Commons; the petitions themselves have not survived.
  70. 70. JHC, XXV, 634–35.
  71. 71. In deference to textile interests, a levy proposed on imported French and Spanish indigo was dropped (JHC, XXV, 658; 21 Geo. II c. 30, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VI, 411–13). Interestingly, the sole tract to be published against the proposed indigo bounty condemned it on grounds of patriotic commercialism. The bounty’s generosity, the tract argued, would incentivize South Carolina’s planters to concentrate exclusively on indigo production, drawing them all away from growing rice. Since rice required “fifty Times the Shipping and … twenty times the People than Indico can maintain.” the consequence of this would be to decimate Britain’s trading fleet with the colony, impoverishing merchants and, by implication, weakening the country’s marine defenses. See [Anon.], Ill-Judged Bounties tend to Beggary on both Sides or, Observations on a Paper intituled Reasons for laying a Duty on French and Spanish Indico, and granting a Bounty on what is made in the British Plantations (London, 1748), 6–7 (quote).
  72. 72. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, vol. 1749–50, 18–20, 52–54.
  73. 73. HL to Richard Grubb, 15 June 1748, PHL, I, 148. Laurens evidently bore Crokatt no ill will for failing to offer him partnership in his trading house.
  74. 74. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, vol. 1749–50, 276.
  75. 75. On the repeated efforts to encourage sericulture, see Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 158–65; Gray, History of Agriculture, I, 184–88; and, specifically on silk cultivation in Georgia, Ben Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 53–61.
  76. 76. JHC, XXV, 933, 996–97, 1024 (quote), 1063, 1114; 23 Geo. II c. 20, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VI, 469–70.
  77. 77. JHC, XXVI, 215–16.
  78. 78. Page 203 →JHC, XXVI, 239–41, 267 (quote), 278, 288–92; 24 Geo. II c. 51, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VI, 577–79.
  79. 79. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, vol. 1751–52, 18–20, 52–54.
  80. 80. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, vol. 1749–50, 318–19. Fury’s attempts to secure direct salt imports were recorded in Great Britain, Calendar of Treasury Books, V, 38. Charles II had allowed the New England colonies and Newfoundland to import salt directly from continental Europe because it was vital in the curing of fish. The rights were extended to Pennsylvania and New York in 1726 and 1730 respectively. See 13 Geo. I c. 5 and 3 Geo. II c. 12, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, V, 442, 530–31.
  81. 81. CO5/372/162, National Archives, London.
  82. 82. JHC, XXV, 942.
  83. 83. JHC, XXV, 1033.
  84. 84. JHC, XXV, 1032–35; J. C. Van Horne and G. Reese, eds., The Letterbook of James Abercromby, Colonial Agent, 1751–1773 (Richmond: Virginia State Library and Archives, 1991), 234n.
  85. 85. Easterby, Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, vol. 1752–54, 92.
  86. 86. Great Britain, Journal of the Commissioners for Trade, VIII, 273. The other appellants were William Baker, John Beswicke, Charles Crokatt (just seventeen years old at the time), Nathaniel Newberry, John Nickleson, Andrew Pringle, Richard Shubrick, and William Stone.
  87. 87. James Abercromby to James Glen, 6 April 1752, in Van Horne and Reese, Letterbook of James Abercromby, 32–34; Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, 301; Mercantini, Who Shall Rule at Home, 80, 91. For a thorough account of McNair and the so-called “Sphinx Company” controversy, see Edward J. Cashin, Guardians of the Valleys: Chickasaws in Colonial South Carolina and Georgia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 73–77. Glen’s hostility to Crokatt has typically been explained in reference to Crokatt’s stance on currency issuance and his intervention in the McNair case. Crokatt’s intervention in the case of the Vrow Dorothea no doubt compounded Glen’s antipathy. This Dutch ship was impounded in Charles Town in 1748 by the vice admiralty court on a charge of illegal trading in Jamaica. Crokatt pressed the case of the ship’s owners—the Hopes, a leading Amsterdam banking house—at the High Court of the Admiralty in London. It reversed the vice admiralty court’s decision, as a consequence of which Governor Glen lost the share of the ship’s cargo to which he would have been entitled. See HL to William Hopton and to George Austin, 27 December 1748, PHL, I, 198–200.
  88. 88. HL to Rawlinson & Davison, 24 September 1755, PHL, I, 344.
  89. 89. Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), 61–65, 268–71; Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina, 303–9; Mercantini, Who Shall Rule at Home, 92–117.

Chapter Three: “Cankers to the Riches of a Country”?

  1. 1. [Decker], Essay on the Causes of the Decline of the Foreign Trade, 65.
  2. 2. On absenteeism in Ireland, see A. P. W. Malcomson, “Absenteeism in Eighteenth Century Ireland,” Irish Economic and Social History 1 (1974): 15–35; articles in T. W. Moody, ed., A New History of Ireland: Eighteenth Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 172–74, 210–13. These argue that absentee landlordism was less prevalent in Ireland than many contemporaries assumed. Malcomson also identified owners of Irish lands who lived elsewhere in Ireland, either in or around Dublin or at other estates elsewhere in the country, as “internal absentees.” As many as half the absentee proprietors of Irish estates were estimated to fall into this group. See Malcomson, “Absenteeism,” 23–24, 35.
  3. 3. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language … (London, 1755).
  4. 4. Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse on Trade … (1693; 3rd ed., London, 1719), 157.
  5. 5. Gee, Trade and Navigation, 102.
  6. 6. Trevor Burnard, “Passengers Only: The Extent and Significance of Absenteeism in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Atlantic Studies 1.2 (2004): 178–95. Burnard has stressed the Page 204 →more limited extent and more variable nature of Jamaican absenteeism than has been traditionally portrayed and has observed the benefits the West Indies derived from absentees’ political agency in Britain. Likewise, B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 1750–1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008), has demonstrated the economic efficiency of absentee-owned plantations in Jamaica. For overviews of the historiography of absenteeism in its West Indian and Irish guises, see Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 22–29; Burnard, “Passengers Only,” 179–80.
  7. 7. Historians have long connected the concerted and often influential advocacy on behalf of the Caribbean sugar colonies in eighteenth-century London with the prevalence of West Indian absenteeism, but no such linkage has been observed for either South Carolina or any other North American colony (Burnard, “Passengers Only,” passim; O’Shaughnessy, “Formation of a Commercial Lobby,” 71–95). The literature on lobbying by merchants in North American trade in Britain has overlooked the role of absenteeism, instead conceiving claimants’ interests primarily through their commercial, religious, ethnic, and kinship affiliations. See, for example, Olson, Making the Empire Work, 94–125; Price, “Who Cared about the Colonies,” 395–436. Jack Greene is alone in having explored the political implications of transatlantic absenteeism for South Carolina, linking the lower rate of absenteeism in South Carolina than that in the West Indies to the formation of an indigenous political elite in the colony and, ultimately, to its rejection of British imperial authority, though his analysis does not examine the absentees’ political role in London (Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” 209–10).
  8. 8. Waterhouse, “England, the Caribbean, and the Settlement of South Carolina,” 276; Henry A. M. Smith, “The Colleton Family in South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 1.4 (1900): 325–27. See also Russell R. Menard, “Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom: Capital and Growth in Early South Carolina,” WMQ 51.4 (1994): 664. The Colletons were among a number of families to settle in South Carolina from Barbados and who, by owning estates in the Caribbean, brought another dimension of absenteeism to the colony. Others included the Middletons and the Bulls. On South Carolina’s early connections with the West Indies, and in particular Barbados, see Dunn, “English Sugar Islands,” 81–89; Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” 192–210. On the absentee ownership of Caribbean estates by South Carolina residents, see O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 17.
  9. 9. CO5/1264/301, National Archives, London.
  10. 10. On residency on Virginia’s tobacco plantations, see T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 40–46.
  11. 11. H. Roy Merrens and George D. Terry, “Dying in Paradise: Malaria, Mortality and the Perceptual Environment in Colonial South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 50.4 (1984): 533–50.
  12. 12. Most influentially, Robert Weir identified the congregation of South Carolina’s landowning planters and merchants in Charles Town as a principal factor in their coalescence as a powerful and self-conscious indigenous political elite. Sharing common interests and values, the group’s harmoniousness characterized the colony’s pre-revolutionary politics. See Weir, “Harmony We Were Famous For,” 473–501. Inter alia, see also Richard Waterhouse, “The Development of Elite Culture in the Colonial American South: A Study of Charles Town, 1670–1770,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 28 (1982): 391–404; Richard Waterhouse, “Merchants, Planters and Lawyers: Political Culture and Leadership in Colonial South Carolina, 1721–1775,” in Power and Status: Officeholding in Colonial America, ed. Bruce C. Daniels (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986), 146–72. On how nonresidency influenced agricultural productivity and shaped plantation labor regimes, see Laura Sandy, “Between Planter and Slave: The Social and Economic Role of Plantation Overseers in Colonial Virginia and South Carolina” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 2006).
  13. 13. Page 205 →This group has largely escaped historians’ attention, though for exceptions, see—on the experiences of South Carolinian visitors to Britain and how these influenced identity formation among the colonial elites—Max Edelson, “Carolinians Abroad: Cultivating English Identities from the Colonial Lower South,” in Britain and the American South: From Colonialism to Rock and Roll, ed. Joseph P. Ward (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 81–105; Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” 209–10; Roe Coker, “Absentees as Loyalists,” 119–34. Roe Coker offered a partial listing of Loyalist absentees whose assets were seized by the state of South Carolina after the war.
  14. 14. In 1782 South Carolina’s General Assembly passed Confiscation Acts that identified some sixty British subjects as owners of land in South Carolina in absentia: “Confiscated Estates belonging to British Subjects Lying and being in the State of South Carolina” (Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 516–23). The list was printed in the Royal Gazette, 20 March 1782.
  15. 15. Frank W. Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1917), 35–38; O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 34. If absenteeism did indeed increase the risk of slave revolts in the Caribbean, it is perhaps ironic since many estate owners left precisely because of this anxiety; B. W. Higman has observed that “fear for their [planters’] own lives was a vital driver of absenteeism” in Jamaica (Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 7, 22). Conversely, despite constant anxiety of slave rebellion in South Carolina, particularly after the Stono Rebellion in September 1739, this does not seem to have been an important factor in motivating relocations from Carolina to Britain.
  16. 16. “An Act for the better establishing and regulating patrols” (1740), in Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 23–24, 73 (quote).
  17. 17. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, esp. 134–57; S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. 172–76, 196–99.
  18. 18. 1758 Tax Act (South Carolina), in Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 56.
  19. 19. 1769 Tax Act (Georgia), in Allen D. Candler and Lucian Lamar Knights, eds., Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, 26 vols. (Atlanta, 1904–16), XIX, pt. I, 109.
  20. 20. HL to Jonathan Bryan, 4 September 1767, PHL, V, 291. On South Carolinians’ landownership in Georgia, see David R. Chesnutt, “South Carolina’s Penetration of Georgia in the 1760s: Henry Laurens as a Case Study,” SCHM 73.4 (1972): 194–208; Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women, 99–102; Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 91–93.
  21. 21. HL to James Laurens, 26 December 1771, PHL, VIII, 130.
  22. 22. R. W. Gibbes, ed., Documentary History of the American Revolution …, 1764–1776 (New York, 1855), 110; William E. Hemphill and Wylma A. Wates, eds., Extracts from the Journals of the Provincial Congresses of South Carolina, 1775–1776 (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Department, 1960), 67.
  23. 23. “An Act for opening a land-office, and for better settling and strengthening this state” and “An Act to amend and repeal part of ‘An Act for opening a land-office, and for better settling and strengthening this state,’” 7 June and 16 September 1777, in Candler and Knights, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, XIX, pt. II, 53–58, 70–72; Lachlan McIntosh to HL and Joseph Clay to HL, 15 July and 16 October 1777, PHL, XI, 396–97, 557–58.
  24. 24. Margaret Colleton to Robert Raper and Francis Kinloch, 13 July 1778, Margaret Colleton Papers, SCL.
  25. 25. On the unsuccessful attempt to introduce a double tax on absentees in June 1775, see HL to John Laurens, 23 June 1775 and 22 March 1777; HL to John Lloyd, 11 February 1777, PHL, X, 192; XI, 299, 313. On its imposition in 1778 and its renewal in 1779, see Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 414–16, 487–88; Candler and Knights, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, XIX, pt. II, 96.
  26. 26. Page 206 →Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vols. A, 220; B, 153; E, 313; F, 153; Y, 379, 386, SCDAH; Miscellaneous Records, vol. EE, 30 June 1742, SCDAH.
  27. 27. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. VV, 510, 512, SCDAH; Memorials of South Carolina Land Titles, 1731–75, vi, 455, SCDAH; South Carolina Society, The Rules of the South Carolina Society: Established at Charlestown A.D. 1736, chartered 17th May 1751 (Baltimore, 1937), 36.
  28. 28. RP to Andrew Pringle, 30 May 1744, LRP, II, 708; Robert Raper to John Beswicke, 24 July 1759, LRR.
  29. 29. James Glen Papers, 1738–77, SCL; E. Stanly Godbold Jr., “James Glen (1701–1777),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2004).
  30. 30. Roe Coker, “Absentees as Loyalists,” 131–32.
  31. 31. Glyn Williams, The Prize of All the Oceans: The Triumph and Tragedy of Anson’s Round the World Voyage (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 9; Julian Gwyn, The Enterprising Admiral: The Personal Fortune of Sir Peter Warren (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 119–26; Mabel L. Webber, ed., “Josiah Smith’s Diary,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 34.4 (1933): 194–95. On land grants across the North American colonies to British military officers, see John Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 357–58.
  32. 32. Historians have long been aware of absentee acquisition of estates in the West Indies through mortgage foreclosure. See notably work on the Lascelles family: Pares, “London West India Merchant House,” 221; S. D. Smith, “Merchants and Planters Revisited,” Economic History Review 55.3 (2002): 441–42, 450; Hancock, Citizens of the World, 146. Smith, “Merchants and Planters Revisited,” 434–65, has argued that mortgage-backed credit was more significant in the West Indies trade than Pares allows. For an analysis of South Carolina’s mortgage market in the first four decades of the eighteenth century, see Menard, “Financing the Lowcountry Export Boom,” 659–76.
  33. 33. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. T, 113, 117, SCDAH. These were 540 acres on the Stono River, held against a payment of £763.5s. sterling by William Wilkins, a planter of James Island, and 200 acres in Christ Church Parish, held against a payment of £409 sterling by Daniel Crawford, a planter of that parish. After Wilkins’s death in c. 1744, without having repaid the debt, Crokatt appointed Simmons and Smith, and George Seaman, George Austin, and Robert Raper, all in Charles Town, as his attorneys, “giving unto them or any two of them full power & authority” to foreclose and dispose of the property, including “any lands, houses, tenements & Negroes whatsoever.” The land was sold in July 1747. See Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. CC, 507, SCDAH.
  34. 34. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vols. BB, 120; X, 314, SCDAH.
  35. 35. Robert Raper to Joseph & Henry Guinand, 7 July 1763 and 15 April 1765, LRR.
  36. 36. T79/43/172–78, National Archives, London.
  37. 37. “Certificate by William Bull, Lt-Gov. of South Carolina of the lands owned by Charles Ogilvie and his losses,” 25 November 1782; Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 17 September 1783, OFP. See also http://south-Carolina-plantations.com/beaufort/richfield.html; http://south-Carolina-plantations.com/beaufort/mount-alexander.html (accessed 7 November 2016).
  38. 38. Sometimes, however, the tensions inherent in the devolved management of family landholdings led to the breakdown of fraternal relations: Samuel Wragg revoked his brother’s power of attorney in the colony in 1742 after a dispute; Drayton’s apparent tardiness with remittances from his brother-in-law’s plantation led to his falling out with Glen, who charged him with having “ruined my credit both here [London] and Scotland” (James Glen to John Drayton, May 1775, James Glen Papers, SCL).
  39. 39. Page 207 →Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 200–254; Alan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 84–108.
  40. 40. Robert Raper to Thomas Boone, 2 July 1769, LRR.
  41. 41. Henry Middleton to William Middleton, 8 February 1770, Middleton Family Papers, HA93: 722/121, microfilm, SCDAH. Henry Middleton’s acquisition and development of lands in Georgia south of the Altamaha River—the so-called Altamaha Grants, which caused a long-running dispute between authorities in South Carolina and Georgia—has been discussed in Chesnutt, “South Carolina’s Penetration of Georgia,” 194–208.
  42. 42. “Certificate by William Bull, Lt-Gov. of South Carolina of the lands owned by Charles Ogilvie and his losses,” 25 November 1782, OFP; AO12/48/32–47, National Archives, London. George Ogilvie recounted his miserable experience at Myrtle Grove in letters to his sister (George Ogilvie to Margaret “Peggy’ Ogilvie, 25 June 1774 and 22 November 1774, OFP). See also Edelson, “Plantation Enterprise,” 144–46.
  43. 43. “Certificate by William Bull, Lt-Gov. of South Carolina of the lands owned by Charles Ogilvie and his losses,” 25 November 1782, OFP; AO12/48/32–47, National Archives, London.
  44. 44. Robert Raper to John Colleton, 27 April 1761, LRR.
  45. 45. Robert Raper to Margaret Colleton, 24 February 1767, LRR. Henry Laurens also acquired land contiguous to his existing holdings while away from South Carolina; see HL to James Laurens, 27 November 1773, PHL, IX, 177.
  46. 46. Thomas Smith to Peter Taylor, 16 December 1769 and 14 July 1773; Matthias Rast to Taylor, 12 March 1773 (quote), Taylor Family Papers, SCL.
  47. 47. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1986), 356; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 179.
  48. 48. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 430–74; Hancock, Citizens of the World, 153–71. At least two London merchants with interests in the Carolina trade, George Udney and Samuel Touchet, joined this land rush (PHL, V, 166n).
  49. 49. SCG, 27 April 1767. Despite the sale of some lands, Baker and Linwood retained vast landholdings in the colony until the American Revolution. When the lands were confiscated by the state of South Carolina in 1782, Baker’s son and heir, William Baker Jr., and Linwood’s widow, Jane, in 1782 together owned at least 47,000 acres in South Carolina, including Purrysburgh Barony of 12,600 acres, Black River Barony of 11,528 acres, Saltcatchers Barony of 11,679 acres, and Peedee Barony of 12,000 acres. See also Roe Coker, “Absentees as Loyalists,” 123.
  50. 50. Devine, Tobacco Lords, 83–87; Price and Clemens, “Revolution of Scale,” 7–8.
  51. 51. Kenneth Scott, “Sufferers in the Charleston Fire of 1740,” SCHM 64.4 (1963): 203–11. Population estimate is from Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 113–14, table 4–3.
  52. 52. Walter L. Robins, trans. and ed., “John Tobler’s Description of South Carolina (1753),” SCHM 71.3 (1970): 145. Tobler’s comments featured in his promotional pamphlet Beschreibung von Carolina (Description of Carolina). Although designed to encourage others from Switzerland to settle in South Carolina, it avoids the hyperbole and excessive “boosting” often found in the genre.
  53. 53. Glen, “Attempt towards an Estimate of the Value of South Carolina,” 180.
  54. 54. Robins, “John Tobler’s Description of South Carolina,” 145; Glen, “Attempt towards an Estimate of the Value of South Carolina,” 189–91; Peter Manigault to Anne Manigault, 8 December 1753, Manigault Family Papers, SCHS.
  55. 55. Hart, Building Charleston, 84–88.
  56. 56. Robert Raper to John Colleton, 10 May 1759; to James Crokatt, 20 April 1762, LRR.
  57. 57. Robert Raper to Charles Crokatt, 23 January 1768; to Joseph Stephenson, 11 September 1768; to William Greenwood, 12 September 1768, LRR. Like other imperial officials who were Page 208 →absentee property owners in South Carolina, Stephenson had probably bought the property while living in the colony.
  58. 58. Robert Raper to James Crokatt, 17 January 1767, LRR; SCG, 23 March 1767; Walter Mansell to the Committee of Warehouses of the East India Company, undated, 1773, in Francis S. Drake, ed., Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents Relating to the Shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the Year 1773, by the East India Company (Boston, 1884), 229–30.
  59. 59. Henry Laurens’s letters from London to his brother James in Charles Town in 1772–73 offer valuable insights into the levels and arrangement of insurance premiums on Charles Town properties and, more broadly, on the development of insurance brokerage among the capital’s merchants. “Every Man at the Coffee House writes policies now a days,” Laurens reported, but he advised that “you may think it better to give 25/ per Cent 1¼ at the Royal Exchange than 20/ at the Carolina or Lloyd’s Coffee House.” Given the “precarious state of Commercial Fortunes in this City”—a reference to the credit crisis that had brought down many London firms—he suggested paying the higher premium, 1.25 percent, brokered by the specialist insurance companies, rather than the lower 1 percent premium commonly offered by individual traders, who were more likely to go out of business. See HL to James Laurens, 19 August, 26 September, and 5 October 1772; 11 March 1773, PHL, VIII, 422–29, 478–79, 490–96, 605–13.
  60. 60. Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 190, 214, 239.
  61. 61. Miscellaneous Records, 1749–51, 92–94, SCDAH; Robert Raper to James Crokatt, 20 April 1762; 2 March and 18 August 1763, LRR.
  62. 62. Robert Raper to Benjamin Bushnell, 28 March and 23 May 1760 (quotes), 29 April 1761, 30 March 1766, LRR; Elizabeth Bushnell account, 1777, Robert Raper Account Book, SCL.
  63. 63. On the relationship between planter and overseer, and in particular the importance of overseers’ managerial and commercial acumen, see Sandy, “Between Planter and Slave,” 65–66. On the recruitment of and responsibility vested in local agents, see also Hancock, Citizens of the World, 150–52.
  64. 64. Margaret Colleton account, 29 October 1779, Robert Raper Account Book, SCL.
  65. 65. SCG, 28 March 1761; Robert Raper to John Colleton, 27 February 1762, LRR; HL to Richard Oswald, 27 October 1768, PHL, V, 668; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 203–4, 240–44.
  66. 66. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 173–74; Burnard, “Passengers Only,” 178–95; Higman, Plantation Jamaica, 22–29.
  67. 67. HL to Richard Oswald, 27 April 1768, PHL, V, 668.
  68. 68. James Laurens to HL, 6 January 1773, PHL, VIII, 523.
  69. 69. PHL, VIII, xiii, 106.
  70. 70. Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 44–45.
  71. 71. Robert Raper to John Colleton, 25 March 1759, 16 December 1760, 23 May 1761, LRR; Thomas Boone to Margaret Colleton, 29 September 1773, Margaret Colleton Papers, SCL. If Mepshew had thirty working slaves, it would also have had a number of enslaved residents who were not able to work—the very young, the infirm, and the elderly.
  72. 72. Margaret Colleton to Robert Raper and Francis Kinloch, 13 July 1778, Margaret Colleton Papers, SCL.
  73. 73. AO12/48/32–47, National Archives, London; “Certificate by William Bull, Lt-Gov. of South Carolina of the lands owned by Charles Ogilvie and his losses,” 25 November 1782, OFP.
  74. 74. HL to William Cowles, 29 October 1771; to James Laurens, 5 December 1771, PHL, VIII, 22, 70.
  75. 75. Price, “Transatlantic Economy,” 26.
  76. 76. HL to Benjamin Addison, 26 May 1768, PHL, V, 702.
  77. 77. John Martin to John Bold, 20 June 1791, John Martin Papers, SCHS.
  78. 78. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vols. E, 313; Y, 379, 386, SCDAH.
  79. 79. Page 209 →South Carolina interest rates were legally set at 10 percent until 1748, when they were reduced to 8 percent. They remained at this level until 1777, when they were cut to 7 percent. See Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 105–6.
  80. 80. PHL, IV, 343–45. Laurens’s forecast that Gray would soon come back to South Carolina was prescient, since by late 1767 the Grays had returned to live on a plantation in St. James Goose Creek Parish. See Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 291–92.
  81. 81. Peter G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 471; Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 266n.
  82. 82. John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 420; Gauci, Emporium of the World, 86.
  83. 83. Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System, 422.
  84. 84. Peter Manigault to Anne Manigault, 20 February 1751, Manigault Family Papers, SCHS.
  85. 85. Public Advertiser, 9 March 1767.
  86. 86. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. HH, 87, SCDAH.
  87. 87. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. K, 361, SCDAH.
  88. 88. Crokatt sold the land to Governor Robert Johnson, who already owned land abutting it. As such it was presumably more valuable to him than to Crokatt, explaining the price differential. See Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. M, 163–81, SCDAH.
  89. 89. Crokatt had bought the forty-six-acre tract on Charles Town Neck for £1,380 in July 1732 and sold it for £2,000 in September 1735, an annualized increase of just over 13 percent. What, if any, improvements he had made to the land or its buildings is unknown, however. See Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vols. I, 640; K, 223; Q, 102; Memorial Books, 1731–78, III, 175, 13 March 1733, SCDAH; SCG, 14 October 1732 (quote), 14 June 1735.
  90. 90. Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. T, 110, 119, SCDAH.
  91. 91. See, inter alia, SCG, 16 July 1763, 10 August 1765, 16 June 1766, 8 December 1766, 23 March 1767; Public Register, South Carolina, Conveyance books [Charleston Deeds], vol. GGG, 178. Collection of rents from these properties was entrusted to Crokatt’s Charles Town attorney, Robert Raper. See Miscellaneous Records, 1749–51, 92–94, SCDAH.
  92. 92. JHC, XXV, 933–1114; XXVI, 215–92.
  93. 93. Great Britain, Journal of the Commissioners for Trade, VIII, 273. The nine appellants were James Crokatt, Charles Crokatt, Sir William Baker, John Beswicke, John Nickleson, Richard Shubrick, Andrew Pringle, Nathaniel Newberry, and William Stone.
  94. 94. “Petition from the Agents for the Council & Assembly of South Carolina, other gentlemen & principal merchants to Edmond Atkin asking him to accept the post of Indian Agent.” The petition was signed by James Crokatt, John Beswicke, Richard Shubrick, and John Watsone, all merchants who had relocated from Charles Town to London; and by William Middleton, Charles Pinckney, and Thomas Drayton, all former residents of South Carolina, though not directly involved in trade in London. See LO 893, Loudon Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; Mercantini, Who Shall Rule at Home, 74, 78.
  95. 95. CO5/651/22, National Archives, London. Illustrating the overlap between London’s Carolina and Georgia trades, the nine signatories all had interests in or were primarily involved in trade to South Carolina.
  96. 96. Peter J. Marshall, “Who Cared about the Thirteen Colonies? Some Evidence from Philanthropy,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth Studies 27.2 (1999): 54.
  97. 97. SCG, 7 April 1741; Committee Appointed for Relieving the Poor Germans, Proceedings of the committee appointed for relieving the poor Germans, who were brought to London and Page 210 →there left destitute in the month of August 1764 (London, 1765), 35; George W. Williams, St. Michael’s, Charleston, 1751–1951 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951), 234–48. A parallel can be found in Gedney Clarke, a wealthy merchant in Barbados who used conspicuous acts of philanthropy to demonstrate his affiliations to New England, where he had begun in trade and with which he maintained an active commerce. These included donating a peal of bells to a Boston church and raising a fund for the widows and children of New England men killed in action against the French at Louisbourg. See Smith, “Gedney Clarke,” 524–25.
  98. 98. Olson, Making the Empire Work, 104.
  99. 99. T1/425/215–16, National Archives, London.
  100. 100. JHC, XXIX, 605–6.
  101. 101. Lewis B. Namier and John Brooke, eds., The House of Commons, 1754–1790, 3 vols. (London: H.M.S.O, 1964), I, 154.
  102. 102. HL to James Laurens, 26 December 1771, PHL, VIII, 130.

Chapter Four: “From Humble & Moderate Fortunes to Great Affluence”

  1. 1. SCG, 21 November 1749, quoted in Rogers, Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 14.
  2. 2. Clowse, Measuring Charleston’s Overseas Commerce, 63, table B-26; 70, table B-41; Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2001), 88–89. On London’s continued dominance of Britain’s colonial trade during the third quarter of the eighteenth century, see French, “Crowded with Traders and a Great Commerce,” 29–32.
  3. 3. Between 1769 and 1774 Liverpool ships made forty-seven slaving voyages to Charles Town and Bristol ships made twenty (Richardson, “British Slave Trade,” 139, 161).
  4. 4. Evidence for this comes from the small collection of ships’ manifests that recorded the identities of the exporters of rice on board seventeen vessels that cleared Charles Town for Cowes between January and April 1764 and the British merchants to whom it was sent. Nine of these ships contained cargoes of rice consigned to London firms, which presumably employed agents in Cowes: John Beswicke & Co.; Sarah Nickleson & Co.; Grubb & Watson; Charles Crokatt; Richard & Thomas Shubrick; John Watsone; and Benjamin Stead. See CO5/511/2–63, National Archives, London. On London merchants’ activity in the reexport trade from south coast ports to northern European destinations, see also HL to John Nutt, 26 March and 9 April 1756, 15 February and 29 March 1763; to Grubb & Watson, 24 and 30 March 1763, PHL, II, 516–17; III, 259, 379–80, 368–67, 394. Ownership of transatlantic shipping further extended London merchants’ commercial reach—their ships often carried rice between South Carolina and British outports, then on to continental markets. For details of London Carolina traders’ extensive shipping interests, see Board of Trade and Secretaries of State: America and West Indies, Original Correspondence, Shipping Returns, South Carolina, 1721–65, CO5/509–11, National Archives, London.
  5. 5. Olson, “Virginia Merchants of London,” 378–80. See also, on the West Indies interest in London during the 1760s and 1770s, O’Shaughnessy, “Formation of a Commercial Lobby,” 71–95.
  6. 6. Committee of Correspondence (hereafter CoC) to Charles Garth, 4 September 1764, in Gibbes, Documentary History of the American Revolution, 4.
  7. 7. CoC to Charles Garth, 2 July 1766, Letterbook of Charles Garth, 1766–75, microfilm, SCDAH.
  8. 8. CoC to Charles Garth, 4 September 1764, in Gibbes, Documentary History of the American Revolution, 4.
  9. 9. For differing interpretations of attitudes toward the Navigation Acts in colonial America, see Matson and Onuf, Union of Interests, 3–25; John E. Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 29. Free trade and republican ideology evolved in tandem in late colonial America, Matson and Onuf argued, as Americans challenged the subordinateness and dependence Page 211 →imposed by the imperial mercantile system. Conversely, John Crowley posited that Americans never really challenged mercantilist precepts: “right through to their declaration of independence, American patriots expressed a prevailing, and explicit, desire to maintain commercial dependence on Britain.”
  10. 10. On the role of agricultural production, improvement, and exchange in shaping a confident self-image among South Carolina’s late colonial elites as they transformed barren lands into profitable plantations and built multilocational, integrated enterprises, see Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 166–99.
  11. 11. Weir, “Harmony We Were Famous For,” esp. 498; Robert M. Weir, “Who Shall Rule at Home: The American Revolution as a Crisis for Legitimacy for the Colonial Elite,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6.4 (1976): 679–80.
  12. 12. CoC to Charles Garth, 5 June 1762, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH. Garth replaced James Wright, a former attorney general of South Carolina and future governor of Georgia, who had replaced James Crokatt as agent.
  13. 13. On the measures introduced in 1763–64 to promote colonial commodity production, see Sosin, Agents and Merchants, 20–21. On the political economy of Grenville’s legislative program, see Crowley, Privileges of Independence, 14–20.
  14. 14. Great Britain, Journal of the Commissioners for Trade, IX, 371.
  15. 15. Charles Garth to CoC, 29 October and 15 November 1762, 19 February and 30 April 1763, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH; CO5/377/161, National Archives, London; JHC, XXIX, 537.
  16. 16. CO5/371/78–83, 92, National Archives, London; Andrews, Colonial Period of American History, IV, 97.
  17. 17. Charles Garth to CoC, 19 February 1763, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH. Garth was not exaggerating: among the thirty-six signatories were James and Charles Crokatt, John Beswicke, John Nutt, Richard Shubrick and Richard Shubrick Jr., Greenwood & Higginson, Grubb & Watson, Charles Ogilvie, Benjamin Stead, Christopher Rolleston, and John Clark. The petition was also signed by several merchants associated with American trade more generally, including David Barclay & Sons, Mildred & Roberts, and Bartholomew Pomeroy, all linen drapers who exported principally to the middle colonies. See T1/425/215–16, National Archives, London.
  18. 18. T1/425/215–16, National Archives, London; JHC, XXIX, 526–27.
  19. 19. Charles Garth to CoC, 19 February 1763, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH; JHC, XXIX, 541.
  20. 20. JHC, XXIX, 605–6.
  21. 21. JHC, XXIX, 605–6.
  22. 22. Charles Garth to CoC, 30 April 1763, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH; CO323/17/57, National Archives, London.
  23. 23. JHC, XXIX, 958–59.
  24. 24. JHC, XXIX, 982. Customs records valued total British exports to South Carolina and Georgia in 1763 at £305,089, somewhat less than the £400,000 estimated by Greenwood and Nutt in their testimony to Parliament. Even if their estimation of their annual exports to the lower southern colonies was exaggerated, it was still indicative of their dominant share of the export trade to the region. See Carter et al., Historical Statistics, V, 710–13, 714–16.
  25. 25. JHC, XXIX, 1002, 1014, 1018, 1024, 1039, 1056; 4 Geo. III c. 27, Rice Act, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VII, 479–81. Permission was extended to North Carolina the following year (5 Geo. III c. 45, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VII, 543–44).
  26. 26. James Abercromby to John Blair, 15 December 1759, in Van Horne and Reese, Letterbook of James Abercromby, 327–29.
  27. 27. Charles Garth to CoC, 20 November 1763, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH.
  28. 28. Page 212 →At least fourteen of the signatories were primarily involved in the Carolina trade. Their signatures feature near the top of the petition, suggesting their early involvement in the campaign and that the names were collected together, perhaps at the Carolina walk of the Royal Exchange or the Carolina Coffee House. They were James Crokatt, Charles Crokatt, John Beswicke, Richard Shubrick, John Nutt, William Greenwood, Sarah Nickleson & Isaac King, Christopher Rolleston, Alexander Watson, Richard Grubb, Charles Ogilvie, and William Thompson; the two visiting Carolinians were Arthur Middleton—later to sign the Declaration of Independence—and Alexander Peronneau. See Charles Garth to CoC, 20 November 1763, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH; CO323/17/54, 120, National Archives, London; JHC, XXIX, 995.
  29. 29. CO65/201–10, National Archives, London; JHC, XXIX, 1011, 1025, 1035, 1040–41, 1056.
  30. 30. Robert Raper to James Crokatt, 23 November 1765, LRR.
  31. 31. Robert Raper to Greenwood & Higginson, 8 November and 18 December 1765, LRR. On resistance to the Stamp Act in South Carolina, see Maurice A. Crouse, “Cautious Rebellion: South Carolina’s Opposition to the Stamp Act,” SCHM 73.2 (1972): 59–71.
  32. 32. London’s Carolina traders also dominated the capital’s trade to Georgia, as was made clear in contemporary petitions, in evidence to Parliament, and in postwar claims for debts in the two states. See, for example, the 1772 petition to the Board of Trade urging its approval of a cession of land to Georgia by local Indians; this was signed by nine “Merchants trading to Georgia,” each of whom had interests in or was primarily involved in the Carolina trade: John Clark, Basil Cowper, James Graham, William Greenwood, William Higginson, John Nutt, Charles Ogilvie, William Thomson, and Alexander Watson (CO5/651/22, National Archives, London).
  33. 33. South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 11 and 25 March 1765. The South Carolina Gazette had suspended publication in October 1765 in the absence of the stamped paper and with its “numerous subscribers,” it reported, having declared “almost to a man, that they will not take ONE stampt news-paper, if stamps could be obtained” (SCG, 31 October 1765). Other colonial newspapers that named the London merchants in the anti–Stamp Act delegation included the Newport Mercury (Newport, Rhode Island), 17 February 1766; New-York Gazette, 18 February 1766; Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), 27 February 1766.
  34. 34. Charles Garth to CoC, 5 April and 25 May 1765, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH; Lewis B. Namier, “Charles Garth and His Connexions,” English Historical Review 54 (1939): 641–42; Sosin, Agents and Merchants, 33–36.
  35. 35. Charles Garth to CoC, 23 December 1765, 19 January 1766, Letterbook of James Wright and Charles Garth, 1758–66, microfilm, SCDAH.
  36. 36. Charles Garth to CoC, 22 February 1766, Letterbook of Charles Garth, 1766–75, microfilm, SCDAH; PHL, V, 50n. While London’s merchants were the preeminent commercial force behind the repeal campaign, as befitted the scale of the capital’s trade to America and their physical proximity to Westminster, Bristol’s merchants too lobbied hard for repeal, as detailed in Starr, School for Politics, 51–57.
  37. 37. South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 25 March and 8 April 1766.
  38. 38. CoC to Charles Garth, 13 May 1766, Letterbook of Charles Garth, 1766–75, microfilm, SCDAH; PHL, IX, 128n; Mercantini, Who Shall Rule at Home, 229–33.
  39. 39. South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 3 June 1766.
  40. 40. CoC to Charles Garth, 2 July 1766, Letterbook of Charles Garth, 1766–75, microfilm, SCDAH. The assistance of British merchants in the repeal of the Stamp Act was also appreciated by Benjamin Franklin, who would have applauded the committee’s expression of gratitude. As Pennsylvania’s London agent, Franklin had informed his colonial employers that the “British Merchants trading to America have been extremely zealous and hearty in our cause; I hope they will receive the thanks of the several Assemblies”; see Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Fox, 24 February 1766 (quote); and to Pennsylvania Assembly Committee of Correspondence, Page 213 →12 April 1766, in William B. Willcox, Leonard W. Labaree, et al., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 42 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959–2017, XII, 168, 239.
  41. 41. Robert Raper to John Beswicke, 3 June (quote) and 18 July 1762, 15 February 1763; to Charles Crokatt, 16 February 1763, LRR.
  42. 42. Robert Raper to Charles Crokatt, 8 November 1765; to Greenwood & Higginson, 1 August 1767 (quote), LRR.
  43. 43. HL to Isaac King, 6 September 1764, PHL, IV, 399–400.
  44. 44. On contemporary fears in Britain and America of political combination and conspiracy, particularly concerning the influence of Lord Bute in British politics, see Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 352–57; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 144–48.
  45. 45. HL to Isaac King, 6 September 1764, PHL, IV, 401.
  46. 46. 5 Geo. II c. 7, Colonial Debt Recovery Act, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, V, 583.
  47. 47. HL to Isaac King, 6 September 1764, PHL, IV, 400–401.
  48. 48. Crokatt v. Hicks, C11/200/23, National Archives, London; Will of James Crokatt, Prob. 11/1029, National Archives, London; Maurie D. McInnes, ed., In Pursuit of Refinement: Charlestonians Abroad, 1740–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 91–93. The original painting, Portrait of Peter Darnell Muilman, Charles Crokatt and William Keable in a Landscape, is jointly owned by the Gainsborough’s House museum, Sudbury, Suffolk, and Tate Britain, London.
  49. 49. Peter Manigault to Gabriel Manigault, 6 August 1754; to Anne Manigault, 30 August 1754, Peter Manigault Papers, SCHS; Will of John Nickleson, Prob. 11/810, National Archives, London; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 13 October 1770.
  50. 50. Robert Raper to John Beswicke, 11 August 1760, 23 May 1761, LRR; J. S. Cockburn and T. F. T. Baker, eds., The Victoria History of the County of Middlesex (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 57, 62; Will of John Beswicke, Prob. 11/900, National Archives, London.
  51. 51. World, 5 April 1792; Will of William Greenwood, Prob. 11/1142, National Archives, London.
  52. 52. Guillery, Small House in Eighteenth-Century London, 161–77, 194–97.
  53. 53. Peter Manigault to Ann Manigault, 20 February 1751, Peter Manigault Papers, SCHS; Will of Richard Shubrick, Prob. 11/912, National Archives, London; St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 3 September 1765; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 4 September 1765; Public Advertiser, 6 April 1784.
  54. 54. All figures are pounds sterling. In a sample of 919 decedents in 1774 across the North American colonies, 9 of the 10 wealthiest were South Carolinians. See Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 171, table 6.3; 176, table 6.6. Jones’s probate data are not a perfect guide to wealth: the small sample size might easily miss the wealthiest individuals, while the data provide only a snapshot from a single given year and cannot reveal the fortunes of the richest living Carolinians. They nonetheless offer valuable indicative comparison. For detailed discussion of the merits of comparative probate data in socioeconomic analysis, see Coclanis, Shadow of a Dream, 83, which concludes that despite its limitations, it is a useful descriptive tool in assessing elites’ wealth.
  55. 55. City of London Land Tax Assessments, MS.11316/132–97, Guildhall Library, London.
  56. 56. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 8 February 1787.
  57. 57. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 2 September 1777. For a vivid description of Fludyer Street, where Henry Laurens was also a resident in the early 1770s, see Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 16–17.
  58. 58. Besides Ogilvie, the only other London Carolina trader to be an MP in the period was Sir William Baker, one of London’s foremost merchants, who had interests across the North Page 214 →American and West Indies trades. His sizable landholdings in South Carolina are discussed in chapter 3 of this book. Baker sat as MP for Plympton Erle in Devon between 1747 and 1768. Ogilvie’s own spell as MP for West Looe in Cornwall between 1774 and 1775 was brief and undistinguished; he does not appear to have taken part in any of the important debates on America in this period. See Sedgwick, House of Commons, 1715–1754, I, 429; Namier and Brooke, House of Commons, III, 223–24.
  59. 59. Quoted in John J. Winberry, “Reputation of Carolina Indigo,” SCHM 80.3 (1979): 247.
  60. 60. SCG, 29 November 1773.
  61. 61. On the poor reputation and “serviceability” of Carolinian indigo, see Nash, “South Carolina Indigo.” 383–84; S. Max Edelson, “The Character of Commodities: The Reputations of South Carolina Rice and Indigo in the Atlantic World,” in The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, Personnel, ed. Peter A. Coclanis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 349–55.
  62. 62. On planters’ self-identification with both rice and indigo, see Edelson, “Character of Commodities,” 344–55; Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, esp. ch. 6. Edelson’s characterization of the reputational connection between South Carolina’s planters and their crops echoed T. H. Breen’s analysis of Virginia’s tobacco planters, whose crops were similarly evoked as being expressions of their character and skills. Breen termed the process “the expression of ego through a crop” (Breen, Tobacco Culture, 59).
  63. 63. HL to Isaac King, 6 September 1764, PHL, IV, 268n, 398–99.
  64. 64. As described in HL to Babut, Fils & Labouchère, 25 February 1786, PHL, XVI, 636.
  65. 65. Between 1768 and 1772, for example, the average annual values of deerskin and naval stores exports from Charles Town were £15,000 and £5,000 respectively, against average annual exports of £284,000 of rice and £119,000 of indigo. Rice and indigo exports thus accounted for 65.3 percent and 27.4 percent respectively of South Carolina’s total exports by value. See Nash, “Urbanization in the Colonial South,” 7, table 1.
  66. 66. [James Crokatt], Observations concerning indigo and cochineal; [Crokatt], Further observations, 4, 9.
  67. 67. Some 40 percent of England’s imports of British colonial indigo was reexported in the period 1756–76 with the remainder retained in England; see Nash, “South Carolina Indigo,” 373, table 4.
  68. 68. On the marketing of indigo and the organizational contrasts with the rice trade, see Nash, “Organization of Trade and Finance” (2005), 109–10; Nash, “South Carolina Indigo,” 386. For examples of indigo being exported on its producers’ account, see Greenwood & Higginson to Alexander Rose, 10 August 1768, Alexander Rose Papers, SCL; Austin & Laurens to John Nutt, 23 December 1755, and to Richard Shubrick, 17 January 1756; invoices, 22 March and 30 August 1760, PHL, II, 52–53, 72; III, 29, 44.
  69. 69. Charles Town Naval Office, ships’ manifests, January–April 1764, CO5/511/2–63, National Archives, London.
  70. 70. Annual total from Nash, “South Carolina Indigo,” 371, table 3.
  71. 71. The sale and exchange of indigo, rice, and other imports by London’s Carolina traders were documented in the ledgers of Rawlinson, Davison & Newman, leading London wholesale grocers. The ledgers covered the mid-1750s and contained accounts with, among others, the principal London Carolina trading houses: James Crokatt, John Nutt, John Beswicke, Sarah Nickleson, and Richard & Thomas Shubrick. They also revealed the firm’s direct trade with independent Charles Town houses, including Austin & Laurens. See Rawlinson, Davison & Newman Account Book, esp. 77, 455, 498, Guildhall Library, London.
  72. 72. Quoted in Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 60.
  73. 73. HL to George Appleby, 2 April 1771, PHL, VII, 469.
  74. 74. HL to Thomas Corbett, 4 April 1771; to John Hopton, 6 April 1771, PHL, VII, 475, 479.
  75. 75. Page 215 →The suspension of duty on rice was continued until May 1773. See JHC, XXXI, 337–74, 423–72; 7 Geo. III c. 30 and 8 Geo. III c. 2, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VIII, 12, 53; HL to James Grant, 11 February 1767, PHL, V, 233. On the role of the suspension in stimulating British demand for rice and Carolinian output, see Nash, “South Carolina and the Atlantic Economy.” 692.
  76. 76. The eighteen London merchant petitioners were Edward Bridgen, Samuel Carne, William Davis, William Greenwood, Richard Grubb, Isaac King, James Mill, Joseph Nicholson, John Nutt, Joseph Nutt, Charles Ogilvie, James Poyas, William Roberts & Co., Christopher Rolleston, Gilbert Ross, Richard Shubrick, William Thompson, and Alexander Watson. Bristol merchants Basil Cowper and Edward Neufville too added their names. See T1/424/298–99, T1/480/354–55, National Archives, London.
  77. 77. Besides Garth, the petition was signed by London merchants Samuel Carne, John Clark, William Greenwood, Richard Grubb, William Higginson, Isaac King, Joseph Nicholson, John Nutt, Joseph Nutt, Charles Ogilvie, George Ogilvie, James Poyas, Christopher Rolleston, William Thompson, and Alexander Watson and by two Bristol-based traders, Basil Cowper and Edward Neufville (CO5/379/73, T1/424/298–99, National Archives, London).
  78. 78. Charles Garth to CoC, 5 February, 23 March, and 11 April 1770, Letterbook of Charles Garth, 1766–75, microfilm, SCDAH.
  79. 79. HL to James Grant, 11 February 1767, PHL, V, 233.
  80. 80. Weir, Colonial South Carolina, 299–301; Mercantini, Who Shall Rule at Home, 234–36; Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 216–18.
  81. 81. For Garth’s unsuccessful petitions to the Treasury against the rigid enforcement of the Navigation Laws in respect of South Carolina’s coastal trade, see T1/449/379–80, T1/453/127–33, National Archives, London.
  82. 82. HL to Ross & Mill, 2 September 1768, PHL, VI, 87.
  83. 83. HL to William Cowles & Co. and William Freeman, 2 March 1769, PHL, VI, 393–94.
  84. 84. HL to Richard Grubb, 4 March 1769, PHL, VI, 399.
  85. 85. HL to Ross & Mill, 10 March 1769, PHL, VI, 404–5.
  86. 86. HL to John Tarleton, 22 March 1769, PHL, VI, 417.
  87. 87. The Merchants of Charleston to Charles Garth, 8 October 1767, PHL, V, 341, 396–402.
  88. 88. Charles Garth to CoC, 5 February and 6 March 1770, Letterbook of Charles Garth, 1766–75, microfilm, SCDAH; Sosin, Agents and Merchants, 108–24.
  89. 89. HL to James Laurens, 5 February 1774, PHL, IX, 266.
  90. 90. Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, ed., “Josiah Quincy Jr., London Journal 1774–5,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 50 (1916–17): 466–67; Paul Langford, “The British Business Community and the Later Nonimportation Movements, 1768–76,” in Resistance, Politics and the American Struggle for Independence, ed. Walter H. Conser Jr. (Boulder: L. Rienner, 1986), 309–10.
  91. 91. William Lee to Richard Henry Lee, 25 February 1775, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., Letters of William Lee: Sheriff and Alderman of London; Commercial Agent of the Continental Congress in France; and Minister to the Courts of Vienna and Berlin, 1766–1783, 3 vols. (Brooklyn, 1891,), I, 130–31.
  92. 92. Watson v. Crokatt [1760], C12/907/77, Crokatt v. Muilman [1770], C12/540/24, National Archives, London; Public Advertiser, 2 January 1760; SCG, 3 May 1760. John Nutt married Crokatt’s daughter, Mary, in 1755 (London Evening Post, 15 April 1755).
  93. 93. Royal Society of Arts, Museum rusticum et commerciale: or Select papers on agriculture, commerce, arts and manufactures. Drawn from experience, and communicated by gentlemen engaged in these pursuits … Volume the Fifth (London, 1765), 133–37, 281–88.
  94. 94. Robert Raper to James Crokatt, 11 June 1759, 8 July 1762 (quote), 2 March and 26 November 1763, LRR.
  95. 95. Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 60.
  96. 96. Page 216 →HL to James Crokatt, and to William Cowles, 3 March, 26 March, and 20 April 1772, PHL, VIII, 208, 231, 277.
  97. 97. HL to John Lewis Gervais, 4 March 1774, PHL, IX, 336.
  98. 98. Inter alia, Public Advertiser, 8 March 1777.
  99. 99. HL to Thomas Savage, 20 April 1772, PHL, VIII, 280.
  100. 100. London Evening Post, 14 October 1775, cited in Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 171–93; Will of Joseph Nicholson, Prob. 11/1105, National Archives, London; [Osborn], Complete Guide to … London, 1768–77, 11th–15th eds.; London Directory, 1776, 9th ed.; T79/37/250, 289 [Joseph Nicholson compensation claim], National Archives, London.
  101. 101. Olson, “Virginia Merchants of London,” 386; Alison G. Olson, “The London Mercantile Lobby and the Coming of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 69.1 (1982): 26–27, 31, 41n; Langford, “British Business Community,” 309.
  102. 102. John Nutt to John Jones, 8 January 1774, T79/5/35, National Archives, London.
  103. 103. James Habersham to John Clark, 15 June 1771, in Habersham, Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, 141.
  104. 104. Greenwood & Higginson to the East India Company (E.I.C.), 4 May and 22 December 1773; John Nutt to E.I.C., 14 July and 22 December 1773, in Drake, Tea Leaves, 208, 232–33, 267–68. Andrew Lord and William & George Ancrum apparently declined Greenwood & Higginson’s nomination as tea commissioners, however, with the Charles Town trading house of Greenwood & Leger being appointed in their place.
  105. 105. SCG, 29 November 1773 (quote); South Carolina Gazette and Country Journal, 30 November 1773.
  106. 106. William Bull to the Earl of Dartmouth, 24 December 1773, in Drake, Tea Leaves, 339–41; SCG, 27 December 1773; George C. Rogers Jr., “The Charleston Tea Party: The Significance of December 3, 1773,” SCHM 75.3 (1974): 153–68; Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 219. The tea was eventually auctioned off three years later to raise funds for the Patriot war effort.
  107. 107. Ralph Izard to Thomas Lynch, 14 February 1775, in Anne Izard Deas, ed., Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard, of South Carolina, from the Year 1774 to 1804; with a Short Memoir, 3 vols. (New York, 1844), I, 47–48. Izard was also involved in attempts to broker conciliatory talks between leaders in the Continental Congress and the British government in 1774 and 1775. See Julie Flavell, “American Patriots in London and the Quest for Talks, 1774–1775,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20.3 (1992): 350–59.
  108. 108. Ralph Izard to HL, 18 October 1774, PHL, IX, 593–94.
  109. 109. On the prewar failure of traders in America to retaliate selectively against particularly resented British merchants, see Olson, “London Mercantile Lobby,” 30–31. The article did not consider the postwar reaction, however.
  110. 110. The London Carolina traders’ political inactivity was typical of London’s American merchants in general. See Kim, “Merchants, Politics and Imperial Crisis,” 192. Only one London merchant with an interest in the Carolina trade, the slave trader John Shoolbred, publicly endorsed a policy of coercion toward America. He signed a progovernment petition to George III in October 1775 that expressed “Disapprobation and Abhorrence” toward the “unjustifiable Proceedings of some of your Majesty’s Colonies in America” (London Gazette, 10 October 1775).
  111. 111. HL to James Air, 21 March 1774, PHL, IX, 362.
  112. 112. The merchants who did sign the petition were American natives: the noted radicals Stephen Sayre and William and Arthur Lee; Laurens, though he was no longer active in trade; former Boston merchant John Boylston; New England trader Thomas Bromfield; and Maryland trader Joshua Johnson (PHL, IX, 372n–74n).
  113. 113. SCG, 6 June 1774. No original copy of the petition to the House of Commons, which was drawn up at the Thatched House Tavern on 24 March 1774, survives. It was, however, reprinted in the Public Advertiser on 26 March 1774, albeit without the names of the signatories. However, a petition to the House of Lords drawn up at the same venue two days later Page 217 →has survived, and since the texts of the two petitions were virtually identical and both were signed by twenty-nine men, it seems probable that the same men signed both petitions. The eleven Carolinians to sign the Lords petition, and probably that to the Commons as well, were William Blake, Edward Fenwicke, William Hazell Gibbs, Ralph Izard, Henry Laurens, William Middleton, William Middleton Jr., Isaac Motte, Philip Neyle, John Peronneau, and Thomas Pinckney. See PHL, IX, 368–75; JHC, XXXIV, 595–96; Lords Journals, XXXIV, 98.
  114. 114. PHL, IX, 375–77.
  115. 115. PHL, IX, 445–49; Lords Journals, XXXIV, 182.
  116. 116. Merchant quietude in response to the Coercive Acts has been discussed in Olson, “London Mercantile Lobby,” 35; Langford, “British Business Community,” 281–82; Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 69–73.
  117. 117. Ralph Izard to George Dempsey, 31 May 1775, in Deas, Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard, I, 79; PHL, IX, passim, esp. 435n.
  118. 118. Daily Advertiser, 5 January 1775.
  119. 119. Ralph Izard to Thomas Lynch, 14 February 1775, in Deas, Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard, I, 47.
  120. 120. On the caution and commercial emphasis of the merchants’ petitions, see Bradley, Popular Politics, 27–29; Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 75.
  121. 121. Ralph Izard to Thomas Lynch, 14 February 1775, in Deas, Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard, I, 47.

Chapter Five: The Voyage of the Lord North

  1. 1. The town officially became Charleston in 1783 and is hereafter referred to by its new name.
  2. 2. South Carolina Gazette & General Advertiser, 2 and 31 May, 3 and 7 June 1783. Reflecting the maritime superstition that to change the name of a ship courts disaster, the Financier was shipwrecked off the Scilly Isles on its way back. The ship, according to reports, “went to pieces in 15 minutes,” with the loss of three members of its crew—its mate, one sailor, and a black servant—and its entire cargo. The story of the ship’s travails was reported in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 19 September 1783, and news of its wreck appeared in the General Evening Post, 17 September 1783. On ship-naming practices in the prewar Carolina trade, see Rogers, Charleston Tea Party, 157.
  3. 3. Historians have broadly construed the 1780s as a period of structural continuity in the American economy. For an overview of the literature, see David Hancock, “Transatlantic Trade in the Era of the American Revolution.” in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, ed. Fred M. Leventhal and Roland E. Quinault (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 38–43. The most comprehensive study of early American economic history noted that, with Britain dominating its external trade, the American economy retained a colonial character and that the 1780s represented a pregnant pause in the new nation’s economic development: “the decade immediately following the end of the war looked, economically, much the same as the decade preceding it, in basic structure if not in detail” (McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 367). Essential studies of Britain’s postwar relations with the United States are Peter J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy towards the United States, 1783–1795 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969). See also the extensive recent literature on Loyalists in the postwar Atlantic: Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: How the Loss of America Made the British Empire (London: Harper, 2011); Maya Jasanoff, “The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire,” WMQ 65.2 (2008): 205–32; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Diaspora and the Reconfiguration of the British Atlantic World.” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Peter Onuf and Eliga H. Gould (Baltimore: Page 218 →Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 239–59; Mary Beth Norton, The British-Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774–1789 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972).
  4. 4. W. Lowndes, ed., A London Directory or Alphabetical Arrangement … Embellished with a Plan of the Royal Exchange (London, 1795).
  5. 5. While Carolina’s imports from England approached absolute prewar levels during the 1780s, the import and export trade with England lagged behind in per capita terms. This was chiefly attributable to the state’s rapid population growth in the 1780s, principally through massive immigration to the backcountry. South Carolina’s population grew from about 124,000 in 1770 to 249,000 in 1790, when the first federal census was taken, meaning that per capita imports from England approximately halved, from f3.5s.8d. in 1771 to £1.8s.8d. in 1790. The decline in exports to England was even more pronounced, from an average £438,379 per year between 1768 and 1774 (again excluding 1770 as anomalous) to £220,141 per year between 1784 and 1791. In per capita terms, this fall was from £3.7s.6d. in 1771 to £1.0s.4d. in 1790. For further detail, see James F. Shepherd and Gary M. Walton, “Economic Change after the American Revolution: Pre- and Post-War Comparisons of Maritime Shipping and Trade.” Explorations in Economic History 13.4 (1976): 11–12.
  6. 6. CO391/82/157, National Archives, London.
  7. 7. 16 Geo. III c. 5, American Prohibitory Act, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, VIII, 458.
  8. 8. CO5/79/5–6, CO5/116/49, National Archives, London.
  9. 9. CO5/181/65–74, National Archives, London. Clark & Milligan was a successor firm to Graham, Clark & Co., leading London merchants in the prewar Georgia trade. After James Graham withdrew from the firm, John Clark went into partnership with his brother-in-law, Daniel Milligan. See James Habersham to Mary Bagwith, 7 January 1774, in Habersham, Collections of the Georgia Historical Society, 233.
  10. 10. CO5/181/192–93, CO5/80/134–35, National Archives, London. The petitioning efforts also reflected how London’s American traders, with their direct trade to the colonies curtailed, soon lost the insights and intelligence into American affairs that had defined and built their Atlantic commerce. For example, seven merchants with interests in the Georgia trade, including Greenwood & Higginson, Richard Shubrick, and John Nutt, petitioned the Earl of Carlisle and his peace commissioners in March 1779 for the restoration of civil government in Georgia. The commissioners had just returned from an abortive trip to America, where their peace proposals had been comprehensively rebuffed.
  11. 11. 20 Geo. III c. 46, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, IX, 101. The law was renewed in 1781 and 1782 as 21 Geo. III c. 29 and 22 Geo. III c. 13 respectively.
  12. 12. CO5/397/357–58, National Archives, London. The petition was signed by (in the order that their names appeared) John Nutt; Greenwood & Higginson; Richard Shubrick; John Shoolbred; Champion & Dickason; Lane, Son & Fraser; and George Bague.
  13. 13. CO5/652/34–38, CO5/397/374–75, National Archives, London.
  14. 14. Figures do not include the comparatively insignificant trade between South Carolina/ Georgia and Scotland. Unknown quantities of British goods entered American ports indirectly, by way of Caribbean entrepôts such as St. Eustatius. With documentary evidence on wartime overseas commerce in Charleston understandably limited, the organization of this trade has received relatively little attention from historians. See Clarence L. Ver Steeg, “Stacy Hepburn and Company: Enterprisers in the American Revolution,” SCHM 55.1 (1954): 1–6; G. Terry Sharrer, “Indigo in Carolina, 1671–1796,” SCHM 72.2 (1971): 99–102. For anecdotal accounts of the revival of trade links with Britain during the May 1780 to December 1782 occupation, see Philip Porcher correspondence with William Manning, 1781–82, SCL; William Ancrum to Greenwood & Higginson, 14 May 1780, William Ancrum Letterbook, SCL.
  15. 15. CO5/397/406–7, 409–10, 436–37, National Archives, London.
  16. 16. CO5/8/268–69, National Archives, London. The seven Carolina and Georgia trading houses to sign the April 1782 petition to Shelburne, with prewar losses in South Carolina and Page 219 →Georgia as self-estimated in 1790 in brackets, were Greenwood & Higginson (£269,760), John Nutt (£103,680), Neufville & Rolleston (£81,600), Clark & Milligan (£60,284), Richard Shubrick (£48,113), Davis, Strachan & Co. (£47,040), and Graham & Simpson (£36,380 claimed by its successor firm, Graham & Johnson).
  17. 17. They repeated this claim in their August 1782 petition, CO5/8/268–69, 286–87, National Archives, London.
  18. 18. Kim, “Merchants, Politics and the Atlantic Imperial Crisis,” 195–96.
  19. 19. CO5/8/363–66, 417–18, National Archives, London. The Shelburne quote is from Kim, “Merchants, Politics and the Atlantic Imperial Crisis,” 244–45.
  20. 20. CO5/8/363–64, National Archives, London.
  21. 21. HL to Robert Livingston, 15 March 1783, PHL, XVI, 163.
  22. 22. Parliamentary History of England, XXIII, 602–15, 640–46.
  23. 23. PHL, XVI, 165n, 174n.
  24. 24. Kim, “Merchants, Politics and the Atlantic Imperial Crisis,” 246.
  25. 25. Those who signed the petition and had involvement in trade to South Carolina included partners Henry Merrtens Bird and Benjamin Savage, Adam Tunno, John Shoolbred, and James Strachan (London Gazette, 1 April 1783; Crowley, Privileges of Independence, 70–72).
  26. 26. See John Baker Holroyd, 1st Earl of Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the American States with Europe and the West Indies (London, 1783). Sheffield’s tract was the leading articulation of postwar mercantilism. See also HL to Charles Thomson, 28 March 1784 (Bourdieu quote), PHL, XVI, 423; Kim, “Merchants, Politics and the Atlantic Imperial Community,” 133–37; Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 596.
  27. 27. HL to Robert Livingston, 17 June 1783, PHL, XVI, 211; London Chronicle, 6 February 1783; South Carolina Gazette & General Advertiser, 18 April 1783; South Carolina Weekly Gazette, 26 April 1783. Evidence from London newspapers in fact indicated that ships were arriving only sporadically into the capital from American ports during May and June 1783; in these same months, however, numerous ships left Charleston for Great Britain, no doubt encouraged by the favorable press reports of American shipping arriving in the former mother country (PHL, XVI, 211n; South Carolina Gazette & General Advertiser, 27 and 31 May, 3 and 14 June 1783).
  28. 28. Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1775–1789, 26 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1976–2000), XX, 175–76, 235, 713.
  29. 29. 23 Geo. III c. 9 and c. 56, in Great Britain, Statutes at Large, IX, 286, 319;
  30. 30. The July Order was renewed in December 1783. See HL to John Mathews, 9 March 1784, PHL, XVI, 412; Thompson and Lumpkin, Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783–1784, 428–29, 594; Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 596. For a detailed narrative of postwar British orders and legislation relating to American commerce, see Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 3–21, 126–27.
  31. 31. “Peace” by the pseudonymous “Crito,” South Carolina Weekly Gazette, 21 June 1783.
  32. 32. South Carolina Gazette & General Advertiser, 10, 20, and 31 May 1783; London Courant and Daily Advertiser, 27 January 1783. On ships’ arrivals, see inter alia, Public Advertiser, 30 August 1783; General Evening Post, 11 October 1783; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 31 October 1783. On the arrival of some of the first ships in London from South Carolina after the peace but before the final peace terms had been settled, see also HL to Mary Laurens, 27 November 1783, PHL, XVI, 355.
  33. 33. HL to James Bourdieu, 30 August 1783, PHL, XVI, 275; XVI, 458n. On American merchants’ tours to Britain before and after the American Revolution, see Kenneth Morgan, “Business Networks in the British Export Trade to North America, 1750–1800,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 41–46.
  34. 34. HL to John Owen, 15 August 1783, PHL, XVI, 261.
  35. 35. Page 220 →Public Advertiser, 1 August 1783.
  36. 36. Public Advertiser, 6 September 1783.
  37. 37. Quoted in Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 101.
  38. 38. RP to William Freeman Sr., undated (quote), Pringle–Freeman Correspondence, SCHS. The letter’s contents indicated that it was sent in the first months of 1784. Bankruptcy notices in the London press are a good source in documenting the formation (and failure) of transatlantic partnerships between merchants in Charleston and Britain. See, for example, London Gazette, 14 October 1786; General Evening Post, 29 July 1788.
  39. 39. Articles of Agreement between William Freeman Jr. and Robert Pringle Jr., June 1783, William Freeman Sr. to RP, 13 and 17 November 1783, 20 February 1784 (quote), Pringle-Freeman Correspondence, SCHS; South Carolina Weekly Gazette, 19 July 1783.
  40. 40. Inter alia, William & James Carson, Cooke & Webb, Dutarque & Smith, Graham & Burt, Kershaw & Riddle, Wayne & Jervey. See South Carolina & American General Gazette, 16 and 27 September 1780, 22 November 1780; Royal South Carolina Gazette, 8 December 1780, 10 May 1781.
  41. 41. Olson, Making the Empire Work, 182–83; Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 242–45.
  42. 42. James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 213–32; Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 57–60.
  43. 43. Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts,” 141–43.
  44. 44. Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 103.
  45. 45. RP to William Freeman Sr., undated [early 1784], Pringle-Freeman Correspondence, SCHS.
  46. 46. Thompson and Lumpkin, Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783–1784, 253–54; Nadelhaft, Disorders of War, 92–94, 150–51.
  47. 47. “Arrangements between English and Southern Merchants,” [c. June 1790], in Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 42 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950–2017, XVI, 528–30.
  48. 48. Thomas Jefferson to Samuel House, 18 August 1785, in Boyd et al., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, VIII, 402.
  49. 49. Brailsford & Morris to Thomas Jefferson, 31 October 1787, in Boyd et al., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XII, 299.
  50. 50. George Abbot Hall, 31 December 1784, in Boyd et al., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, VIII, 201.
  51. 51. RP to William Freeman Sr., undated [early 1784], Pringle-Freeman Correspondence, SCHS.
  52. 52. William Cumine to George Ogilvie, 29 May 1786, OFP.
  53. 53. William Nicholson to Alexander Fraser, 18 October 1788, Alexander Fraser Papers, SCHS.
  54. 54. South Carolina Weekly Gazette, 19 July 1783.
  55. 55. Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 24 June 1784.
  56. 56. Proclamation of Governor Benjamin Guerard, South Carolina Gazette & General Advertiser, 12 July 1783.
  57. 57. “A Patriot,” South Carolina Gazette & General Advertiser, 15 July 1783. According to the writer, some twelve hundred copies of his pamphlet had been distributed, leading it to be reprinted in the Gazette.
  58. 58. South Carolina Gazette & General Advertiser, 10 July 1784.
  59. 59. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 11 September 1783; London Chronicle, 9 December 1783 (“darling independence”). Reports of anti-Tory sentiment and protests were also carried Page 221 →in the British press during the following two years. See, inter alia, St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 19 August 1784; Whitehall Evening Post, 4 September 1784; London Recorder or Sunday Gazette, 8 May 1785 (“appellation of Tory”); St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 22 November 1785; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 23 December 1785. See also John Lewis Gervais to HL, 12 February and 17 April 1784, PHL, XVI, 391, 431. On the turbulence and partisanship of Charleston politics during the 1780s, see John A. Hall, “Quieting the Storm: The Establishment of Order in Post-Revolutionary South Carolina” (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1989), esp. 44–49; Nadelhaft, Disorders of War, 71–124; Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 97–158; E. Stanly Godbold Jr. and Robert H. Woody, Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 225–46.
  60. 60. Aedanus Burke, A Few Salutary Hints, Pointing out the Policy and Consequences of Admitting British Subjects to Engross our Trade and Become our Citizens (Charleston and New York, 1786), quoted in George C. Rogers Jr., “Aedanus Burke, Nathanael Greene, Anthony Wayne, and the British Merchants of Charleston,” SCHM 67.1 (1966): 79–80.
  61. 61. Holton, Forced Founders, 216.
  62. 62. Brailsford & Morris to Thomas Jefferson, 31 October 1787, in Boyd et al., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XII, 301. Their comments anticipated the commercial rationale for federal union expounded just days later in Federalist XI (Hamilton). See also Federalists III and IV (Jay) and VII and XXII (Hamilton) on the necessity of the U.S. Constitution to regulate commerce. See James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1987), 95–96, 98–99, 106–8, 129–33, 177. On the federalist movement in 1780s South Carolina and its opponents, see Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 124–58; Carl J. Vipperman, The Rise of Rawlins Lowndes, 1721–1800 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 240–57; Mark D. Kaplanoff, “How Federalist Was South Carolina in 1787–88?,” in Chesnutt and Wilson, Meaning of South Carolina History, 67–103.
  63. 63. Brailsford & Morris to Nathaniel Barrett, and to J. J. Berards & Co., October 1787 (enclosures to letter to Thomas Jefferson, 31 October 1787), in Richard Walsh, ed., “The Letters of Morris & Brailsford to Thomas Jefferson,” SCHM 58.3 (1957): 138–41. The letters appear in heavily edited form in Boyd et al., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XII, 302–3.
  64. 64. On the prewar reputation of Carolinian indigo and colonial suspicions of a metropolitan bias against it, see Edelson, “Character of Commodities,” 352–55.
  65. 65. HL to Babut, Fils & Labouchère, 25 February 1786, PHL, XVI, 636.
  66. 66. HL to Bridgen & Waller, 31 March 1785, 7 January 1786, PHL, XVI, 550n, 626.
  67. 67. HL to Bridgen & Waller, 14 June 1784, 7 January and 1–2 February 1786, PHL, XVI, 469–70, 625–28, 628–31.
  68. 68. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, II, 237.
  69. 69. Inter alia, General Evening Post, 11 September 1784; St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 5 July 1785.
  70. 70. HL to John Woddrop, 29 June 1783, PHL, XVI, 220–21. See also John Woddrop to Benjamin Franklin, 17 February 1783 (unpublished), http://www.franklinpapers.org (accessed 2 November 2016).
  71. 71. On Philadelphia’s postwar economic crisis, see Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 245–50.
  72. 72. George Abbot Hall, 31 December 1784, in Boyd et al., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, VIII, 199.
  73. 73. Joseph W. Barnwell, ed., “Diary of Timothy Ford, 1785–1786,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 13.4 (1912): 194–95.
  74. 74. Robert Pringle Jr. to William Freeman Jr., 7 September 1783, Pringle-Freeman Correspondence, SCHS.
  75. 75. See, for example, William Cumine (Jamaica) to George Ogilvie (Charleston), 29 May 1786, OFP.
  76. 76. Page 222 →HL to James Bloy, 9 August 1783; and to James Bourdieu, 9 June 1785, PHL, XVI, 255n, 568–69. Laurens also feared the renewal of the slave trade for its social implications. Slave imports had resumed within months of British forces leaving Charleston, leading Laurens to complain that “if continued this will keep them [lowcountry planters] a weak defenceless People, & may one day prove the destruction of the Sea Coast Inhabitants.” He continued to express no remorse for his personal involvement in the slave trade as one of Charleston’s largest prewar slave importers. See HL to Mary Laurens, 27 November 1783, PHL, XVI, 355. On the evolution of Laurens’s attitude toward slavery, see Kelly, “Henry Laurens,” 82–123.
  77. 77. Statistics compiled using the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, searching “total slaves disembarked” for slave voyages between 1783 and 1787 when South Carolina was the “principal region of slave landing”: http://slavevoyages.org/voyages/RAyNL3HL (accessed 31 October 2016). The figure of more than 8,300 slaves therefore excludes slaves brought overland into South Carolina or returned following the British evacuation of Charleston in December 1782. On the suspension of slave imports in 1787, see Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 127–28, 131–32.
  78. 78. South Carolina’s direct balance of trade with England in 1784 was favorable to that of any other American state except Georgia and remained so throughout the 1780s. In Virginia and Maryland exports to England in 1784 were 32.1 percent of the value of imports, in Pennsylvania 10.5 percent, in New York 6.6 percent, and in New England 9.6 percent. Statistics do not include trade between the United States and Scotland. See Carter et al., Historical Statistics, V, 710–13.
  79. 79. Nash, “South Carolina Indigo,” 379; Winberry, “Indigo in South Carolina,” 98–99; Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 205–20.
  80. 80. David Ramsay to John Kean, 13 September 1785, in Michael A. Stevens, ed., “‘To be a Member of Congress hereafter will be like a Profession’: New Letters from David Ramsay, 1785–1793,” SCHM 116.1 (2015): 62.
  81. 81. Ramsay, History of South Carolina, II, 237.
  82. 82. Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 127–28, 131–32; Edgar, South Carolina: A History, 247.
  83. 83. HL to Mannings & Vaughan, 6 January 1787, PHL, XVI, 684. Christopher Gadsen to Thomas Jefferson, 29 October 1781. Boyd, “Papers of Thomas Jefferson,” XII, 295.
  84. 84. Public Advertiser, 16 July 1787.
  85. 85. Langford, “British Business Community”; Olson, “London Mercantile Lobby.”
  86. 86. Oscar J. P. Tapper, “The Brailsford Debt,” Guildhall Miscellany 2 (1961): 82–83; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 8 January 1772; William Lee to Samuel Brailsford, 19 August 1775, in Ford, Letters of William Lee, I, 169–71; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 3 October 1775; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 93.
  87. 87. PHL, X, 136n; XVI, 685n; Elias Ball (in Bristol) to his cousin Elias Ball (in South Carolina), 9 July 1785, Ball Family Papers, SCL; Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 273–75.
  88. 88. HL to Bridgen & Waller, 7 January 1786, PHL, XVI, 625–28.
  89. 89. Mortimer, Universal Director [Mortimer’s Directory]; PHL, II, III, passim; XVI, 104–5n; Public Advertiser, 14 April 1772; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 23 July 1776; Olson, “London Mercantile Lobby,” 26–27; CO5/65/220: 1764, National Archives, London. A Samuel Chollet had traveled in 1779 to St. Eustatius, where he continued to transact business with South Carolina, though it is unclear if the Chollet in question was the partner in Bourdieu & Chollet or his son. See William Ancrum to Samuel Chollet, 27 September 1779, William Ancrum Letterbook, SCL.
  90. 90. Manning’s connections to Laurens preceded the war. He had become Laurens’s principal London correspondent after Laurens returned to South Carolina in late 1774 following a spell in Europe. Laurens shipped his plantation rice to Manning before rice exports were banned by the Provincial Congress in June 1775. Links between the two were reinforced by Page 223 →the marriage of Laurens’s son John to Manning’s daughter Martha in London in October 1776. Manning continued to look after Laurens’s interests in Britain during the war, effectively acting as his banker and keeping an eye on his younger son, Henry Jr., during his schooling in Britain. See HL to William Manning, 9 May, 26 May, and 8 June 1775; William Manning to HL, 8 July and 3 August 1775, 11 April 1778, PHL, X, 117, 147, 166, 211, 275; XII, 105.
  91. 91. Manning’s political sensibilities did not preclude him from continuing to trade with South Carolina during the British wartime occupation of Charleston, however. See Philip Porcher to Manning, 12 November and 7 December 1781; Manning to Porcher, 6 February and 6 March 1782, Philip Porcher correspondence with William Manning, 1781–82, SCL; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 534–35.
  92. 92. Manning’s prewar sympathy for American grievances was suggested in his correspondence with Laurens in 1775. See Manning to HL, 17 February and 22 May 1775, PHL, X, 68–69, 125–31; “Benjamin Vaughan,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
  93. 93. HL to Benjamin Franklin, 7 April 1783, PHL, XV, 551; Bourdieu & Chollet to East India Company, 15 and 23 July 1773, in Drake, Tea Leaves, 233–34, 236–37.
  94. 94. London Evening Post, 17 October 1775, cited in Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 173–91. Joseph Nicholson, Charles Ogilvie, and Benjamin Stead were the only other London merchants with interests in the Carolina trade to sign this petition.
  95. 95. For Bridgen’s links with Americans and American sympathizers in Britain, see Edward Bridgen to Benjamin Franklin, 19 June 1777 and 19 November 1779, in Willcox et al., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, XII, 422n; XXIV, 200–201; XXXI, 129–30. On the fund for American prisoners of war, see Public Advertiser, 7 January 1778; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 13 January 1778. The fund for prisoners of war is discussed briefly in Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 141–42. On how the defeat at Saratoga influenced British opinion toward America, see Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, c. 1739–1783,” WMQ 59.1 (2002): 93–94.
  96. 96. PHL, XV, 512n; Edward Bridgen to Benjamin Franklin, 23 October 1782, in Willcox et al., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, XXXVIII, 243–44; Edward Bridgen to Benjamin Franklin, 2 and 4 August 1785 (quotes) (unpublished), http://www.franklinpapers.org (accessed 2 November 2016).
  97. 97. “An Act for confiscating the property of all such persons as are inimical to this or the United States …,” 18 October 1779; “An Act directing the sale of Confiscated Property,” 13 April 1782, in Walter Clark, ed., State Records of North Carolina (Goldsboro, N.C., 1899), XXIV, 264, 424.
  98. 98. Benjamin Franklin to Alexander Martin, 5 August 1782, in Willcox et al., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, XXXVII, 703; Edward Bridgen to Benjamin Franklin, April 1786 (unpublished), http://www.franklinpapers.org (accessed 2 November 2016); PHL, XV, 531n; “An Act to Restore to Edward Bridgen, His Heirs and Assigns, all His Property, Real and Personal, in This State,” 29 December 1785, in Clark, State Records of North Carolina, XXIV, 762.
  99. 99. Edward Bridgen to Benjamin Franklin, 4 August 1785 (unpublished), http://www.franklinpapers.org (accessed 2 November 2016). In particular, Bridgen suspected the state’s chief justice of seeking to annex his lands since they were contiguous to the justice’s own tracts.
  100. 100. Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 758; Thompson and Lumpkin, Journals of the House of Representatives, 1783–1784, 82–83; Roe Coker, “Absentees as Loyalists,” 123–24. Baker and his father, the major London merchant Sir William Baker, had been prominent advocates for American rights throughout the 1760s and 1770s. See Bradley, Popular Politics, 54, 148; Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots, 66, 75.
  101. 101. General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer, 21 February 1782.
  102. 102. Brewer, Sinews of Power, 114–16. Forty-six men held government contracts to supply provisions and munitions to the British armed forces during the war. Most were London merchants, and a dozen were either involved in the West Indies trade or owned plantations in Page 224 →the Caribbean. See Norman Baker, Government and Contractors: The British Treasury and War Supplies (London: Athlone, 1971), 216–40.
  103. 103. London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, 6 April 1780, 17 March 1781.
  104. 104. HL to Bridgen & Waller, 14 June 1784, PHL, XVI, 470. Laurens claimed that, because of a dispute over a prewar debt, Nutt had used his influence with Lord Hillsborough (according to Laurens, Nutt “had His Lordship’s Ear at Command”) to prolong his imprisonment in the Tower of London so that “my breath and his debt might be extinguished at the same time” (PHL, XV, 371).
  105. 105. T79/5/133, National Archives, London; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 212. Nutt’s assistance to Dupont further exemplified the interplay of interpersonal commerce and politics during the war. Dupont had been one of Nutt’s principal prewar correspondents in Charleston and had owed him large debts. Nutt therefore had had a strong vested interest in delivering Dupont from jail and for him to return to productive commerce in South Carolina to enable him to pay off his debts. The plan backfired. Dupont’s renunciation of his former Patriot convictions and his loyalism in occupied Charleston led to his estate being confiscated after the war, preventing him from repaying his debt to Nutt.
  106. 106. PHL, VI, 406n; Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 98–99.
  107. 107. For newspaper reports on the bankruptcy, see London Chronicle, 27 December 1785; London Gazette, 14 February 1786; Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts,” 142–43.
  108. 108. Charles Ogilvie to John Chesnut, 25 November 1780, Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers, SCL.
  109. 109. On St. Eustatius’s role as an entrepôt for Anglo-American trade during the war and the island’s capture by the British, see O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 214–27. On British merchants’ wartime commerce through St. Eustatius, see George Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 21 August 1778, and to Peggie Ogilvie, 30 August 1778, OFP; William Ancrum to Greenwood & Higginson, 16 August 1779, and to Samuel Chollet, 27 September 1779, William Ancrum Letterbook, SCL.
  110. 110. London Evening Post, 17 October 1775; Willcox et al., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, XXVIII, 55–57, 76, 166; XXIX, 108.
  111. 111. Charles Ogilvie to George Ogilvie, 4 February 1779, OFP.
  112. 112. AO12/48/32–47, National Archives, London.
  113. 113. Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 516–23; London Chronicle, 6 July 1782.
  114. 114. Charles Ogilvie to Alexander Ogilvie, 17 September 1783, OFP.
  115. 115. AO12/47/148, National Archives, London; PHL, VIII, 141n; Edgar and Bailey, Biographical Directory, II, 141–42.
  116. 116. AO12/47/148–50, National Archives, London; Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 27 December 1780; Royal Gazette, 9 January 1782; London Chronicle, 6 July 1782.
  117. 117. Norton, British-Americans, 178–84, 216.
  118. 118. William M. Malloy, ed., Treaties, Conventions, International Acts, Protocols and Agreements between the United States and Other Powers, 1776–1909 (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of State, 1910), 586–90; Francis Kinloch to Thomas Boone, 27 June 1783, in Felix Gilbert, ed., “Letters of Francis Kinloch to Thomas Boone, 1782–1788,” Journal of Southern History 7 (1942): 95. On legal obstructions in the southern states, see Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 63–64; Holton, Forced Founders, 216.
  119. 119. Joshua Ward to Isaac King, 14 May 1785, IKL.
  120. 120. Stevens, “To be a Member of Congress,” 59; Nadelhaft, Disorders of War, 155–72.
  121. 121. Compensation claim of Strachan & Davis, T79/36/237–38, National Archives, London; Isaac King to Joshua Ward, 8 June 1784 and 2 July 1789, and Joshua Ward to Isaac King, 14 May 1785, IKL.
  122. 122. Page 225 →T79/37/250, 289.
  123. 123. HL to Christopher Rolleston, 12 December 1785, and to Edward Neufville, 8 December 1787, PHL, XVI, 613–22, 748.
  124. 124. Charles Ogilvie to George Ogilvie, 27 January 1788, OFP; HL to Edward Neufville, 8 December 1787, PHL, XVI, 613n, 748; Isaac King to William Greenwood, 15 March 1790, IKL; Elias Ball (Bristol) to Elias Ball (South Carolina), 14 July 1791, Ball Family Papers, SCL (quote).
  125. 125. Isaac King to Robert Smyth, 30 August 1785, IKL.
  126. 126. Joshua Ward to Isaac King, 2 January 1789, IKL.
  127. 127. Cited in Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts,” 139.
  128. 128. Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 121–22, 250–52.
  129. 129. John Bassett Moore, ed., International Adjudications Ancient and Modern, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929–33), III, 53–54; Tapper, “Brailsford Debt,” 82–83; Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts,” 142–43.
  130. 130. Public Advertiser, 11 December 1786.
  131. 131. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic, 46, n55.
  132. 132. The success of an appeal by prewar Indian traders for government compensation further illustrates how significant the balance of power equation in British policy was toward the commercial debtors: where Parliament accepted that responsibility for repayment fell on the British side, it was willing to provide funds. In 1788 a group of former Cherokee traders in South Carolina and Georgia lobbied Parliament for recompense for land in Georgia ceded by the Indians to the Crown in 1773 in lieu of debts owed to the traders. In this case Parliament accepted that compensation to the traders for their losses was its responsibility, and it duly voted in May 1790 to pay them £49,500 in compensation. See JHC, XLIII, 179–80, 312; XLV, 458; Parliamentary Register 1780–1796, 1788, 136–37.
  133. 133. Jasanoff, “Other Side of Revolution,” 215–16.
  134. 134. Isaac King to Nathaniel Russell, 7 March 1784, IKL.
  135. 135. On Lord Cornwallis’s aid to Carolinian Loyalists in Britain, see Elias Ball (Bristol) to Elias Ball (South Carolina), 30 January and 6 June 1785, Ball Family Papers, SCL. The former’s experience as an exile in Britain is discussed in Ball, Slaves in the Family, 236–37.
  136. 136. “Petition of the Committee of Merchants trading to North America,” 13 April 1787, Add MSS 38221, f. 334, British Library, London; Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 57–58; Norton, British-Americans, 208.
  137. 137. Nadelhaft, Disorders of War, 89; Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts,” 113–14; Coclanis, “Hydra Head,” 11–12. Jacob Price has highlighted the limitations of the debt claims as a guide to the relative share of debt by colony and British port, since the different organization of different trades affected creditors’ ability to reclaim prewar debts. The nature of the Glaswegian retail tobacco trade with planters in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, he suggested, made these debts harder to collect, therefore inflating the Glaswegian share, and by implication tobacco colonies’ share, of total debts. If this is correct, it suggests that debts in South Carolina may have been a still higher proportion of the “real” prewar total. See Price, “Who Cared about the Colonies,” 410–11.
  138. 138. Langford, “British Business Community,” 299–305. On the role of nonimportation and the bumper tobacco exports of 1775 in reducing Virginian planters’ debts, see also Holton, Forced Founders, 119–29.
  139. 139. Commercial claims are filed in the T79 American Loyalist Claims Commission records at the National Archives, London. For examples of debts on account, in bond and through loans, see in particular the compensation claims of David & Strachan, T79/36/237–38; Charles Ogilvie, T79/43/177; Thomas Binford, T79/20/285–86.
  140. 140. Powell & Hopton’s claim was dismissed on the grounds that they had resided in Charleston rather than Britain before the American Revolution and that the claim was Page 226 →therefore outside the commission’s purview (Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts,” 141–43).
  141. 141. On methods of calculating interest on the debt claims, see in particular T79/5/142–44, National Archives, London: petitions in support of John Nutt’s compensation claims, 22 June and 17 August 1804.
  142. 142. CO391/82/157, National Archives, London.
  143. 143. William Manning to HL, 17 April 1778, PHL, XII, 128; London Gazette and Westminster Chronicle, 6 April 1780 and 17 March 1781.
  144. 144. Greenwood died “after a lingering illness, at his house in Budge-Row [London], in the 53rd year of his age … an eminent merchant” (General Evening Post, 20 April 1786; Will of William Greenwood, Prob. 11/1142, National Archives, London).
  145. 145. Will of Richard Shubrick, Prob. 11/1289, National Archives, London.
  146. 146. Will of James Poyas, Prob. 11/1326, National Archives, London; Will of Christopher Rolleston, Prob. 11/1467, National Archives, London.
  147. 147. For newspaper reports on the dispute between the government and Richard Atkinson, see Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 30 March 1784; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 6 April 1784. The dispute and its eventual resolution are discussed in Baker, Government and Contractors, 165–75.
  148. 148. General Evening Post, 4 July 1786; Oracle Bell’s New World, 10 July 1789; Oracle and Public Advertiser, 9 July 1795.
  149. 149. For example, Nutt sat on a committee in 1794 managing an appeal for the relief of widows and children of seamen killed during the Anglo-French warfare, and he was one of the numerous city merchants who in an advert placed in the press by the Bank of England pledged to accept bank notes in all payments in order to support the public credit (London Chronicle, 23 June 1794; Morning Chronicle, 31 July 1794; Oracle and Public Advertiser, 3 March 1797).
  150. 150. Campbell and Molleson claimed in 1791 for debts, respectively, of £38,134 in Virginia and Maryland, and £71,038 in Maryland and Pennsylvania. See Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts”; Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 20 March 1783; Olson, Making the Empire Work, 179–80.
  151. 151. Ralph Izard to Thomas Lynch, 14 February 1775, in Deas, Correspondence of Mr. Ralph Izard, I, 47–48.
  152. 152. Brailsford & Morris to Thomas Jefferson, 31 October 1787, in Boyd et al., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XII, 298.
  153. 153. Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 16 February 1785; William Bailey, List of Bankrupts, Dividends and Certificates, from the Year 1772, to 1793, 3 vols. (London, 1794), II, 81; Will of Samuel Carne, Prob. 11/1149, National Archives, London.
  154. 154. Isaac King to Joshua Ward, 9 October 1790, IKL.
  155. 155. South Carolina Court of Common Pleas, Judgement Rolls: 71A, 72A, 276A, 392A, SCDAH; HL to Isaac King, 30 September 1767, PHL, V, 320, and IX, 289n; Maurice A. Crouse, ed., “Papers of Gabriel Manigault, 1771–1784,” SCHM 64.1 (1963): 7.
  156. 156. Isaac King to James Fisher, 16 June 1783, IKL.
  157. 157. Isaac King to Joshua Ward, 16 June 1783, and to Nathaniel Russell, 8 June 1784 and 2 September 1785, IKL.
  158. 158. Walter E. Minchinton, “Richard Champion, Nicholas Pocock, and the Carolina Trade,” SCHM 65.2 (1964): 89–91; N. L. Bailey and Elizabeth Ivey Cooper, Biographical Directory of the South Carolina House of Representatives, vol. III, 1775–90 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), 136–38.
  159. 159. Isaac King to Nathaniel Russell, 23 February 1785, IKL.

Page 227 →Conclusion

  1. 1. Memorials of 17th and 18th Century South Carolina Land Titles, 1731–75, II, 473, SCDAH; Isaac King to Joshua Ward, 16 June 1783, 4 March 1786, 18 May 1787; and to Nathaniel Russell, 2 September 1785 (quote), IKL.
  2. 2. Isaac King to Joshua Ward, 12 March 1788 and 19 April 1791, IKL.
  3. 3. Margaret Colleton to Robert Raper and Francis Kinloch, 13 July 1778, Margaret Colleton Papers, SCL.
  4. 4. Will of Margaret Colleton, Prob. 11/1058, National Archives, London.
  5. 5. James Nassau Colleton to Benjamin Franklin, 8 November 1782 (unpublished), http://www.franklinpapers.org (accessed 2 November 2016). Whether Franklin replied or forwarded on Nassau Colleton’s plea is unknown.
  6. 6. William Ancrum to James Edward Colleton, 14 July 1780, Margaret Colleton Papers, SCL.
  7. 7. Thomas Boone to Allen Swainston, 19 March 1783, and to James Edward Colleton, 27 July 1783, Margaret Colleton Papers, SCL.
  8. 8. Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 624–66; VI, 634. Nassau Colleton’s struggle to regain his plantations has been described in Kathryn Roe Coker, “The Case of James Nassau Colleton before the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates,” SCHM 87.2 (1986): 106–16.
  9. 9. Aaron Loocock to Allen Swainston, 12 July 1786, Margaret Colleton Papers, SCL. See also Roe Coker, “Absentees as Loyalists,” 132.
  10. 10. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 9 February 1788; http://south-Carolina-plantations.com/beaufort/richfield.html (accessed 7 November 2016).
  11. 11. T/79/43/142–48, 177, National Archives, London; Charles Ogilvie to George Ogilvie, 27 January 1788, OFP.
  12. 12. John Martin Sr. to John Martin Jr., 1 July 1788 (quote) and 26 April 1789, John Martin Papers, SCHS.
  13. 13. HL to Bourdieu, Chollet & Bourdieu, 20 October 1785, PHL, XVI, 566–67n, 603–4.
  14. 14. HL to Mannings & Vaughan, 30 June 1787, PHL, XVI, 718; Public Advertiser, 7 September 1787. On war damage to New Hope and Broughton Island, see Edelson, Plantation Enterprise, 247.
  15. 15. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 7 March 1789; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 20 April 1789.
  16. 16. Morning Chronice and London Advertiser, 14 February 1789; Public Advertiser, 30 April 1789.
  17. 17. “An Act for raising and paying into the Public Treasury of this State the Tax therein mentioned, for the use and service thereof,” 10 March 1783, in Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 528–37.
  18. 18. “An Act for the making of Aliens free of this part of the Province,” 4 November 1704, repealed in “An Act to confer the rights of Citizenship on Aliens,” 26 March 1784, in Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, II, 251–53; IV, 600–601.
  19. 19. Hugh Williamson to Thomas Ruston, 12 February 1784, in Smith, Letters of Delegates to Congress, XXI, 352–53. On North Carolina’s citizenship requirements, see Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 214.
  20. 20. “An Ordinance to encourage subjects of Foreign States to lend money at interest on real estates within this state,” 26 March 1784, in Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, IV, 642–43.
  21. 21. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic, 269.
  22. 22. Page 228 →“An Act for the Security of Foreigners who May lend Money at Interest, or on real Estates,” 21 February 1785, in Candler and Knights, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, XIX, pt. II, 417–18; HL to Champion & Dickason, 6 October 1785, PHL, XVI, 598–99.
  23. 23. “An Act for ascertaining the rights of aliens and pointing out a mode for the admission of Citizens” and “An Act for imposing a Tax on the Inhabitants of the State of Georgia and other Persons holding Property real or Personal therein,” 7 and 21 February 1785, in Candler and Knights, Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, XIX, pt. II, 375–78, 398–416.
  24. 24. On the experiences of Loyalists returning to the postwar United States, see Norton, British-Americans, 242–49.
  25. 25. Elias Ball (Bristol) to Elias Ball (South Carolina), 20 October 1788, Ball Family Papers, SCL.
  26. 26. Elias Ball (Bristol) to Elias Ball (South Carolina), 22 November 1784, Ball Family Papers, SCL.
  27. 27. Isaac Darnford to John Martin Jr., 10 October 1790; John Martin Jr. to John Bold, 20 June 1791; and Bold to Martin Jr., 6 January 1792, John Martin Papers, SCHS.
  28. 28. St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, 17 April 1790.
  29. 29. Price, “What Did Merchants Do,” 274.
  30. 30. On the reception of the Jay-Grenville Treaty in South Carolina, see Rogers, Evolution of a Federalist, 275–80; Klein, Unification of a Slave State, 218–21; Godbold and Woody, Christopher Gadsden, 246–47.
  31. 31. Kellock, “London Merchants and the Pre-1776 American Debts,” 116.

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