Page 71 →Chapter Three “Cankers to the Riches of a Country”?

Throughout the eighteenth century nonresidents owned tracts of lands in South Carolina. Absenteeism dated to the colony’s establishment, when several Barbadian merchants and planters bought lots in Charles Town and left them in the care of resident attorneys, while the family of only one of the original Lords Proprietors, the Colletons, settled permanently in the colony.⁸ Petitioning the Board of Trade in 1715 for military aid for the colony, twenty-one “Planters and merchants trading to South Carolina” in London had avowed that “Most of us have great Debts and Effects there, some of us large Plantations.”⁹ Absenteeism existed, however, in more than one form in eighteenth-century South Carolina, since it had both domestic and overseas guises. Unlike Virginia’s tobacco planters, who largely lived full-time on their estates, most of South Carolina’s planter elites spent much of the year in Charles Town.¹⁰ A range of factors lay behind their congregation. Charles Town was the colony’s commercial and social hub, while the chronically high mortality rates in the rice-growing lowcountry gave a strong epidemiological incentive to seek refuge in the town, particularly as the environmental influences on the spread of diseases were better understood from the mid-eighteenth century.¹¹ These planters might be defined as domestic or seasonal absentees, living in the colony but often physically remote from their lands and their cultivation of those lands. Many historians have considered the implications of this phenomenon for South Carolina’s political, social, and cultural development and how absenteeism affected plantation management.¹²

South Carolina’s overseas or transatlantic absentee landowners were owners of agricultural tracts, urban plots, or both who, except perhaps for occasional visits to South Carolina, were permanently absent not just from their lands but from the colony.¹³ The group is difficult to quantify and categorize, since it was not until after the American Revolution that any list or record of absentee land Page 73 →and property owners was made.¹⁴ This is not to say that opinion in South Carolina was wholly ambivalent toward nonresidency. Critiques of the practice were certainly more muted than in the British sugar islands, though fear of the consequences of absenteeism for managing and controlling slaves underlay responses to the phenomenon in both the West Indies and South Carolina. In the Caribbean absenteeism was publicly credited with heightening the risk of slave insurrection. Jamaica and Antigua imposed extra taxes on absentee-owned estates to deter proprietors from leaving the islands, and the Jamaica Assembly petitioned George II against absenteeism in 1749 explicitly on the grounds that slave revolts were more common on absentee-owned estates.¹⁵

In South Carolina disdain for absenteeism was expressed more tacitly, such as in the slave-patrolling laws passed after the Stono Rebellion in 1739. “All persons, as well women as men, who are … owners of settled plantations in any district, ought to contribute to the service and security of that district where their interest lyes,” the law stipulated, mandating plantation owners to join regular patrols to apprehend runaway slaves and deter slave revolts. Specific provisions for substitute service in the patrols, detailing how replacements could be hired and who was liable for defaults of service, were clearly aimed at nonresidents, whether they lived in Charles Town or farther afield.¹⁶ Critiques of absenteeism were also a subtext within South Carolina’s culture of celebrating the “active” or “attentive” planter. The laudatory rhetoric of letters and articles in this vein printed in the South Carolina Gazette, the foundation of such clubs as the Winyah Indigo Society with their prizes for high crop yields and technological innovations, and the circulating literature of agricultural “improvement”—exemplified in a transatlantic context by James Crokatt’s self-compiled pamphlets and models of machinery—were all emblematic of this culture. For its part, the South Carolina Assembly adjourned at vital points in the annual cycle of rice cultivation so that its members could supervise sowing, harvesting, and other key tasks on their lands.¹⁷ Hailing activism had an inverse of implied criticism of the nonattentive, nonresident planter whether he or, exceptionally, she was in Charles Town or abroad.

Until the 1770s, however, distinctions between the different forms that absenteeism took were not a matter of public debate. The prevalence of absenteeism was recognized in South Carolina’s laws, which stipulated the specific means for collecting taxes on the lands of “any person or persons living or residing out of the limits of this Province.” No additional rates, however, were levied on such lands, and they were to be taxed “rateably and proportionably, according to the quantity of acres, and as if the same were in the actual possession of some person or persons living or residing within this Province.”¹⁸ In neighboring Georgia statutes observed the commonness of landownership by nonresidents, noting that “there are Sundry Tracts of Land, Lots, houses and monies the Proprietors whereof are not resident in this Province” without placing any extra taxes or Page 74 →penalties on them.¹⁹ Nor did overseas absenteeism register as being politically deleterious. When Henry Laurens complained that when land monopolies “happen to fall into the hands of Non residents they are most pernicious to a Young Colony,” he referred not to absenteeism in South Carolina but to his fellow South Carolinians land banking in Georgia. “I have never been afraid to declare my sentiments freely to my friends in this place who hold idle Lands in our Neighborhood yonder,” he declared.²⁰

Only in the early 1770s, as political fissures between Britain and its American colonies widened, did absenteeism register as a political issue in South Carolina. British residents’ ownership of property in the colony had earlier suggested the depth of their stake in the colony’s development and prosperity as well as a consonance of interests with its resident merchant-planter elites. As political-economic divisions between Charles Town and London grew, however, this absentee ownership acquired a more sinister dimension. Staying in London in 1771, Laurens was struck by the political quietude of London’s Carolina merchants in the face of harsh ministerial policy toward America: “America has many powerful Enemies here, and not a few among them who triumph in Coaches raised by Spoils drawn from that Quarter. Such think themselves Friends to America, if they encourage Trade from thence, for their own Emoluments, but have no Idea of opposing Ministerial Attempts to deprive her of her most valuable priveleges. Others are Friends, because they wish Success to their Plantations and Estates there, but regard them as being only in a distant County of the Kingdom. Such are Enemies to our truest Interests, without knowing themselves to be so.”²¹

Still, the potentially malign consequences of transatlantic absenteeism were not recognized formally until conflict was imminent. Nonresidence, it was then concluded, was a strong guide to political loyalties. The Provincial Congress, which first met in January 1775 as the successor to the colonial assembly, called on absentee landowners to return to South Carolina in June 1775 “for the better defence of our liberties and properties,” linking residence in South Carolina with the defense of the colony. The call was formalized by a congressional resolution, though those who had left the colony on grounds of health or were over sixty or under twenty-one years of age were exempted.²² In Georgia moves in 1777 to strip absentees of uncultivated lands were more insidiously motivated—promoted by residents eager to get the land themselves. An act passed by the Georgia Assembly in June 1777 decreed that absentees had six months to settle or cultivate their land, after which time that land would be declared vacant, a move that would have allowed the state to profit by reselling the confiscated tracts. The confiscations would have hit residents of neighboring South Carolina hardest, as they were the most numerous absentee landowners in Georgia, and the act’s offending section was consequently repealed after three months.²³

Conversely, in South Carolina a proposal for a double tax on land, urban lots, and slaves owned by absentees was rejected by the Provincial Congress in Page 75 →June 1775, and it was not until March 1778, more than two years into the Revolutionary War, that this fiscal disincentive was finally imposed. News of the tax caused understandable alarm among absentee landowners in Britain. “I have been a good deal alarmed at a report which has prevailed here, that the Proprietors of Estates in Carolina without distinction are required to appear there, within a given time upon pain of confiscation of their Property, or some other grievous Penalty,” wrote Margaret Colleton, who lived in London and owned two lowcountry plantations, to her agents in Charles Town. She continued, “I firmly trust that a helpless woman in the 76th year of her age, not native, nor even an Inhabitant, and therefore certainly as little obnoxious, as she can be serviceable, will [not] be exposed to the loss of the whole, or any part of her Property, or to any Penalty whatever, for not performing a voyage, which the Infirmities of her time of life would render impossible, even in a Season of profound tranquility.”²⁴ The terms of the law’s renewal the following year might have eased Colleton’s fears. It specified that the double tax applied to all males over the age of twenty-two who held land in South Carolina but did not live in the by-then United States; the earlier statute had applied regardless of gender to “all persons” over twenty-two who lived abroad. With both statutes noting that “there are divers tracts of land, slaves and monies at interest in this State, held, owned, or claimed by persons not residents here, who pay no taxes or other charges toward the support of the Government of this State,” the double tax was a device to bolster the war effort and tease out absentees’ true loyalties. Failure to pay within two years incurred confiscation of lands by the state. Georgia followed suit with a nearly identical law in May 1778.²⁵

Across the eighteenth century British residents came to own property in South Carolina in four principal ways, though these differed in importance over time. First, property was bought in Charles Town by merchants, imperial officials, and naval personnel who later relocated to Britain. Second, it was acquired in lieu of debts. Third, it was received through marriage and inheritance. Fourth, British residents bought plantation land and urban properties in South Carolina either to augment existing holdings in the colony or as new speculative ventures.

Absentee landholding in South Carolina was closely connected to patterns of movement within the British Empire. Commercial mobility, with merchants relocating from Charles Town to London, predominantly for business reasons, was the largest single factor behind transatlantic absenteeism. The largest and most politically active group of absentee landowners was made up of merchants who had accrued real estate in South Carolina before transferring their businesses from Charles Town to Britain. Settling mostly in London, where they became the city’s principal traders to South Carolina in the middle quarters of the eighteenth century, these included the likes of John Watkinson, Samuel Wragg, Page 76 →James Crokatt, John Beswicke, and Richard Shubrick. Each had spent several years in Charles Town honing their business acumen and building a network of contacts in South Carolina. Watkinson invested in several residential and commercial plots during his time in Charles Town in the 1720s. Having returned to London about 1729, he became a prominent merchant in the Carolina trade and regularly petitioned the British government on issues concerning the colony. He retained “messuages, lands and tenements … lying and being in Charles Town” until his death in 1742, when Richard and Thomas Shubrick were appointed his attorneys in the town. They were entrusted to claim the rents from Watkinson’s Charles Town properties and then dispose of his estate in South Carolina.²⁶ Richard Shubrick too held on to his Charles Town and lowcountry landholdings after returning to London in 1747. He retained the four town lots he had bought in 1746 in Ansonborough, on Charles Town’s northern fringe, eventually selling them in December 1759. He also kept Quenby, his plantation on the Cooper River, along with a stake in five hundred acres of land on the Port Royal River, southwest of Charles Town.²⁷ John Beswicke, who had been “Considerably Concern’d in Trade” in Charles Town, held on to a house in Charles Town after he moved to London in 1747.²⁸

Imperial officials and military and naval personnel were another group who acquired land while stationed in South Carolina and retained it after returning to Britain. James Glen, South Carolina’s governor between 1743 and 1756, invested in land in the colony, buying a small plantation and nineteen African slaves. He retained the plantation and slaves after leaving the colony for Britain in 1761.²⁹ Thomas Boone, governor between 1761 and 1764, retained some 8,815 acres in South Carolina after his departure and by the American Revolution had as many as 184 slaves on his plantations in the colony.³⁰ The naval careers of British admirals George Anson and Peter Warren took them to Charles Town, where they accumulated landholdings in the colony. Warren received two grants in 1733 and 1736 of nearly 2,000 acres of undeveloped land to the north and west of Charles Town. Anson, later famous for circumnavigating the world, had accrued 12,000 acres of land by the time he left South Carolina in 1735. These included a Charles Town lot and valuable land to the north of the town that took his name in becoming its first suburb, Ansonborough. A further six British naval or military officers would have their lands confiscated by the state in 1782.³¹

Not all absentee landholdings in South Carolina were acquired deliberately. With commercial debts often secured through mortgages, defaults led to the securities—plantations or urban property—passing to the creditor, as frequently happened in the West Indies.³² James Crokatt acquired two plantations in this way as he settled his affairs in the colony before returning to Britain.³³ He then augmented his landholdings by assuming joint ownership of two other plantations in the 1740s with his commercial partners in Charles Town, in both cases apparently through mortgage foreclosures. In January 1742, the partners took Page 77 →ownership of some four hundred acres in Berkeley County and in June 1745 came into possession of one hundred acres on Wadmalaw Island, Colleton County.³⁴ London merchants Joseph and Henry Guinand similarly took control of a plantation in South Carolina, Walnut Hill, in 1763 following the bankruptcy of correspondents in Charles Town. Uninterested in keeping “an old worn out Plantation,” they instructed their attorneys to sell it and its resident slaves within two years.³⁵ Charles Ogilvie acquired a house in Savannah valued at £552 in payment for debts from a failed merchant partnership in the town.³⁶

Marriages and inheritances were other common ways for land to fall into the hands of nonresidents. By the Revolutionary War, Ogilvie had a diversified land empire in South Carolina and Georgia that he reckoned to be worth some forty thousand pounds. His first and most valuable holdings came through his wife, Mary, whom he had married in London in November 1762 after transferring his business from Charles Town the year before. She had inherited two plantations, Richfield and Mount Alexander, each of around one thousand acres on the Combahee River near the border with Georgia, in 1761 from her father, James Michie, formerly chief justice of South Carolina.³⁷ Members of the Colleton family living in Britain, having inherited their lands in South Carolina from the original proprietors, maintained estates in the colony throughout the colonial era.

Such was the appeal of property in South Carolina that absentee landowners continued to add to their assets there after relocating to Britain. They were attracted by the availability of land, its remunerative potential, and the economies of efficiency and scale to be derived from augmenting existing holdings. Familial—often fraternal—ties facilitated such ventures and made for reassuring supervision of existing land. Having moved to London, Samuel Wragg coordinated his acquisitions through his brother Joseph, who remained in Charles Town; Henry Middleton performed the same role for his brother William. For his part, Thomas Shubrick kept an eye on his brother Richard’s Quenby plantation, while former governor James Glen entrusted his brother-in-law, John Drayton, with supervising the running of his lowcountry plantation, reciprocating in England by overseeing the education of Drayton’s sons. Just as blood connections built trust into transatlantic commercial partnerships, they also offered security in buying and owning land four thousand miles away. They mitigated the risks inherent in long-distance management, particularly of fraud and of inefficient or incompetent oversight.³⁸

As the zone of rice production expanded north and south through South Carolina and Georgia’s coastal lowcountry and, from mid-century, as grain farming became established further inland, opportunities abounded for buying land and emulating the diversified and integrated “plantation empires” developed most elaborately by Henry Laurens and Jonathan Bryan, one of Georgia’s leading planter-statesmen.³⁹ Absentees in Britain joined the rush to seek grants of newly surveyed land on the agricultural frontiers from South Carolina’s Page 78 →governor and council. Samuel Wragg was an early exponent. After returning to London, he augmented his already extensive landholdings in South Carolina during the 1730s, including grants of three thousand acres in Granville County in 1734 and fifty-five hundred acres in Craven County four years later. The Granville County grant, at least, neighbored lands already owned by his brother, signaling how Wragg understood the practical benefits of fraternal oversight. Thirty years later William Middleton and former governor Thomas Boone, both of whom had relocated permanently to Britain, extended their plantation interests in the region, recognizing the potential returns on offer as the pace of expansionism quickened and risiculture took off across Georgia’s coastal plain in the 1760s. Boone acquired new lands that his local agent judged would “make a good plantation for about thirty-five hands” and spent some £5,200 currency on slaves to labor on it.⁴⁰ Middleton capitalized on his brother’s presence in South Carolina and his ability to extend and supervise their landholdings in the region. A local agent was deputed to get a survey made of lands that Middleton had recently purchased and he agreed to make visits to Middleton’s plantation in Georgia once or twice a year. Eager to join the land bonanza taking place across South Carolina’s southern border, the brothers instructed their agent to make a list of the “taskable Hands at the Euhaws and the River May,” two of their South Carolina plantations, so that Henry Middleton—controlling his and his brother’s land interests in the region—might “be able to judge how many [slaves] can be spared from these Plantations in order to make another settlement or two in Georgia.”⁴¹

No British resident took advantage of the dramatic speed of expansion across South Carolina and Georgia—and the investment opportunities it provided—more prodigiously than Charles Ogilvie. Making periodic visits from London, he installed his nephew George as itinerant manager of his many land ventures located from one end of South Carolina to the other. For a further degree of oversight, he made his friend Alexander Garden his attorney and agent in Charles Town, where he was charged with the “care and direction” of Ogilvie’s estates. Ogilvie’s portfolio had begun with the two Combahee River plantations that his wife had inherited, Richfield and Mount Alexander. To these he added an isolated tidal rice plantation, Myrtle Grove, on an island in the mouth of the Santee River fifty miles northeast of Charles Town. Near Camden in the fast-developing backcountry, some one hundred miles inland from Charles Town, he bought Belmont, an 813-acre grain-producing plantation on the Wateree River that was notable for the “extream fertility of its Soil which often times produced fifty, sixty and seventy Bushels of Grain per acre,” together with an adjoining tract, Camden Mead. Among Camden Mead’s 7,359 acres were 1,350 acres of “River Swamp of very superior Quality.” Unlike the desolate Myrtle Grove, Belmont had “a good dwelling House and all other necessary Buildings.”⁴²

Besides these, Ogilvie acquired multiple and mostly undeveloped tracts across South Carolina’s agricultural frontiers in a speculative land-buying spree Page 79 →of huge ambition. It was a clear vote of confidence in the colony’s productive capacity. In the western backcountry, he bought a further 360 acres near Belmont and a 100-acre tract near Camden Mead along with “a Tract on Colonel’s Creek, Wateree River,” which he let out for a term of seven years at seventy pounds currency annually, together with “five other Tracts on Wateree River containing 1,435 acres” and a 500-acre grant “on the South Side of Wateree River near Cockey Mount.” Scattered on the frontier northwest of Charles Town were “Two Tracts on Peedee River containing 885 acres … One Valuable Tract on the High Hills of Santee … 697 acres … Half of 800 acres St. Steven’s Parish, Santee,” and one tract of unspecified size “in Amelia Township adjoining Santee River near McCords Ferry supposed to contain Mines.” In addition, well to the south on the Savannah River were two tracts “containing 1,890 acres Swamp in St. Peter’s Parish.” That Ogilvie acquired several of these tracts during the early 1770s suggests that he, for one, did not foresee an imminent threat to the current imperial polity and consequently to his tenure on his lands. As late as April or May 1775 he further added to his landholdings by purchasing, sight unseen, tracts in Georgia, which his nephew bought on his behalf at a Savannah auction.⁴³

While the potential returns offered by plantations on the frontiers of the region’s expanding cultivated zone tempted some investors, another favored means by which absentees in Britain extended their planting concerns was by securing land that adjoined their existing properties. As a relatively “known commodity” with which the absentee owner might be familiar or whose “fit” with the owner’s current landholdings an agent in South Carolina could easily assess, contiguous land carried a lower risk than did remoter acquisitions. Contiguity also promised economies of scale in commodity production, particularly in the tasking and oversight of an enlarged slave workforce on a single site, though this might be tempered by concerns about the risks of greater congregations of slaves. A further advantage of adding adjoining lands lay in their potential for agricultural complementarity. John Colleton, who lived in London, inherited town lots and buildings in Charles Town and three plantations in the South Carolina lowcountry: Mepkin, a tract of some three thousand acres on the Cooper River; Mepshew, a two-thousand-acre tract on the Cooper River; and Watboo, a vast barony of some twelve thousand acres at the headwaters of the same river. Colleton, who appears never to have set foot in South Carolina, employed Robert Raper as a local agent to oversee his property holdings in the colony. Raper sought to improve the lands’ agricultural yield and in 1761 acquired fifty acres of rice swamp adjoining Colleton’s Mepshew plantation on his employer’s behalf. It was, he explained to Colleton, a good bargain: “I have exchanged 50 acres of dry land at Mepshew with one Singleton for 50 acres of Swamp tideland which is worth near Twenty pounds an acre, & the other is not worth more than Three or Four pounds. The reason of this good Exchange is that Mr. Singleton has no dry land to put a house on near his Swamp.”⁴⁴ It took nearly six years to integrate Page 80 →the new swampland into the operations at Mepshew, during which time John Colleton died and bequeathed the plantation to his wife, Margaret, but by 1767 Raper could confidently report that the additional fifty acres were ready to clear and plant for the next rice crop. The new acreage, he told his employer, would make Mepshew “a Compleat Plantation in 2 years time,” indicating the higher revenues it should yield as a result of scale and complementarity.⁴⁵

More ambitious absentees in Britain bought entire established plantations, further testament to the returns anticipated from lowcountry South Carolina. Peter Taylor, a merchant in Whitehaven on England’s northwest coast, had inherited land in South Carolina from his uncle and relied on trusted family connections in the colony to supervise his plantation affairs. He added to his landholdings by buying another plantation, Charleywood, on the Wando River, about twenty miles northeast of Charles Town. His cousins, who lived in South Carolina, posted a bond of £24,000 in provincial currency—about £3,430 sterling—as security. The plantation contained, his overseer reported, “good Negroe houses, a good Dwelling house … a good corn House, Kitchen & Sick House … [and] two good river Dambs.” The arrangement Taylor struck with his cousins points to the mutual advantages to be derived from absentee land management. In return for their financial brokerage and four or five annual visits to check on his plantation, Taylor employed the Charles Town firm run by his cousins’ sons to export his plantation’s rice.⁴⁶

Land also attracted more speculative investments in South Carolina. Because all land in the colony was taxed at the same rate, there were no acquisitions in South Carolina on the scale of some in North Carolina and Virginia, such as by John Carteret, Earl of Granville, who received some twenty million acres of northern North Carolina, or Lord Fairfax, who received five million acres in Virginia’s Northern Neck in 1745, both on the basis of inherited claims. Instead most landholdings in the undeveloped backcountry were smaller than three hundred acres.⁴⁷ Nor was there anything comparable to the land grab that took place in Florida during the 1760s. After Britain was ceded East and West Florida by Spain in 1763, absentee investors bought hundreds of thousands of acres in the new provinces, though most attempts at settling the land failed.⁴⁸ But acquisitions of this type did take place in South Carolina, albeit on a less dramatic scale, and shared a common motive with the larger and more publicized ventures. Speculative investors bought land in the colony, as elsewhere in North America, in the hope of making huge profits. Most investors of this type had only a limited or no direct connection to South Carolina; nor did most ever intend to reside on or actively manage their lands. The partnership of Sir William Baker, Nicholas Linwood, and Brice Fisher, three MPs who clubbed together to buy large tracts of land in South Carolina, is illustrative. All three were important London merchants, though only Baker had an interest in trade to South Carolina. Rather than actively manage their forty thousand acres of land themselves or through Page 81 →appointed agents, the partners instead hired two local agents to subdivide and sell the land in smaller tracts. In an advertisement for their lands in April 1767, the three partners noted that “we have received information that several persons have committed trespass on the said Barony, by making Settlements thereon,” further suggesting that the lands were not under management but were being land banked for windfall profits on resale.⁴⁹

Merchants in Charles Town had many different reasons for buying town lots and properties. Owning a town house that doubled as commercial premises and living space saved rent payments to a landlord, though capital was needed to buy the property in the first place. For some, buying additional urban properties had greater appeal than purchasing agricultural land. In owning nearby premises, a merchant could keep a close eye on his urban assets, unlike more distant and inaccessible plantation landholdings. He could more easily bring his commercial judgment to bear in urban property management, observing market conditions firsthand and either collecting rent himself or deputing a clerk to do so. For other merchants, the greater financial rewards of plantation ownership—not to mention the status and political authority it brought—compensated for the greater risks involved and the different skills required, as the number of Charles Town traders who moved from commerce into planting made evident. The intrinsic but differing appeals of owning urban property and plantation lands were significant as well to merchants who left the colony for Great Britain.

Once back in London, these merchants had compelling financial reasons to hold on to fixed assets in South Carolina. Part of the appeal of urban lots and properties was the steady and reliable yield they offered through rents that could be collected and regularly remitted by agents based in Charles Town. In its consistency, this rental income contrasted with the inherently unpredictable returns generated by the transatlantic trading ventures that formed the basis and the greatest share of their revenues. Rental returns also contrasted with plantation revenues, which, though potentially more remunerative, carried higher risk through their greater exposure to the vicissitudes of climate, harvests, slave welfare, and elastic and exogenous—mostly European—demand for produce. Some absentees may have preferred town property assets as those seem to have been more easily liquidated than agricultural lands, sales of which were complicated by hard-to-monetize factors such as the value of crops growing on a plantation and of the slaves working on it.

In this financial basis for their property investments in South Carolina, British merchant absentees differed from their counterparts in the Chesapeake tobacco trade, in which it was common for British—mostly Scottish—trading firms to own country stores in Virginia tobacco country. In the tobacco trade, these premises were commercially integral to operations, serving as a base from Page 82 →which the firms’ representatives on the ground bought tobacco directly from producers and stocked European goods for part or whole exchange.⁵⁰ In contrast, it was not necessary for purely commercial reasons for British merchants trading to South Carolina to maintain fixed assets in the colony. The London merchants who dominated Britain’s export trade to South Carolina sold goods on commission to local traders or sent their wares to formal commercial partners. These Charles Town-based merchants kept the goods in their own stores for sale to consumers. Warehousing for rice, naval stores, deerskins, and indigo for shipment to Europe was similarly locally owned. Urban properties in Charles Town were stand-alone financial investments for British owners, rather than being integral to their owners’ commercial operations. Having bought properties during early-career spells in Charles Town, merchants who relocated to Britain retained them for the predictability of the income those properties delivered.

Property in Charles Town was a steady and lucrative investment. By the 1750s the town had been largely rebuilt following a devastating fire in November 1740 that had destroyed many properties and an estimated £200,000 worth of merchandise. With a population of about nine thousand, Charles Town was the fourth largest settlement in British North America, and visitors were struck by the grandeur of its buildings.⁵¹ “Houses are all neat and fine, handsome and large and built of brick,” observed the Swiss immigrant Johannes Tobler in 1753, “but the plots for them, especially on the side of the street toward the sea, are very expensive, since one of them, 50 feet wide and 100 feet long, costs over five thousand Gulden [about £750].”⁵² In extolling South Carolina’s productivity and value in a report to the Board of Trade two years earlier, Governor James Glen had noted the “many houses that have cost a thousand and twelve hundred pounds sterling,” leaving aside the most desirable properties “on the Bay” that were closest to the Cooper River and its wharves.⁵³

Rental income from these urban properties was at the heart of their appeal. “The houses are very lucrative, since some bring in up to one thousand Gulden [about £150] annually in rent,” Tobler noted. In surveying rents on one hundred houses and lots “fronting the River on the Bay of Charlestown,” Glen found that annual rents of £700 in currency—about £100 sterling—were common. To put these rents in a transatlantic context, Charles Pinckney, a wealthy Charles Town lawyer, paid only a little more in annual rent—£120—for a furnished house in London’s fashionable West End while living in the capital in the early 1750s, a sum another Carolinian visitor to London judged a “Tip-Top Rent.”⁵⁴ Located on a prime commercial thoroughfare and within touching distance of the town’s wharves, the properties commanding the highest rents in Glen’s sample were most often occupied by merchants. The rental yields that British absentees made from their Charles Town properties bear out Tobler’s impressions and Glen’s assessment, and they support a recent analysis of the profitability and dynamism of Charles Town’s property rental market that suggests that during the 1750s Page 83 →and 1760s urban rental returns could rival the profits from most plantations.⁵⁵ Moreover, arguably the greatest appeal of urban property compared to plantation lands was not the absolute return to be made from town rents but the lower capital barriers to entry. For example, a Charles Town house bought for £100 could deliver a regular income starting within a month of tenants taking residence there. For every £100 invested in developed plantation land producing rice and indigo, much more would have to be spent on buying slaves and equipment to work it; the costs of improving undeveloped land—of clearing woods, building dwellings, and setting up irrigation—were far higher. No agricultural land could pay such a quick return on capital invested.

The two Charles Town properties belonging to London resident John Colleton illustrated the good yields that urban property could deliver. Each was being let for £75 a year when they were sold for £1,000 apiece in 1762, a rise from £71.8s.9d. annually three years earlier. The purchaser then raised the rent to £80 a year, eight percent of the property’s sale price.⁵⁶ Robert Raper, agent in Charles Town for several absentee property owners and the port’s deputy naval officer, was himself a tenant to an absentee who lived in Middlesex, England. His landlord, Joseph Stephenson, was also his boss—Charles Town’s naval officer, despite his permanent residence in Britain—who thus profited doubly from South Carolina, drawing a salary for his commission and rent from his locum tenens and deputy. Raper paid Stephenson an annual rent of £100 for his Charles Town house, which was prestigiously located next to the governor’s residence, remitting the money twice a year.⁵⁷ James Crokatt’s annual rental returns on his several Charles Town properties amounted in 1767 to £1,390 in currency, or some £180 sterling, while Walter Mansell, a merchant who relocated to London in 1770, estimated the returns on the land and property he retained in Charles Town at “upwards of £500 sterling pr. an.” in 1773.⁵⁸

Rental returns did not translate into pure profit for property owners, however. Fire insurance at around one percent of the property’s value, legal fees at the beginning and end of contracts, and maintenance costs were all outlays to be reckoned with.⁵⁹ Landlords also incurred property taxes. Rates fluctuated annually according to the colonial government’s revenue needs; in the mid-1760s, for example, tax ranged between 3s.6d. and 20s. for every £100 of a property’s assessed value.⁶⁰ In 1762 property tax amounted to £10.9s. on each of Colleton’s bay houses, some 14 percent of the rent they produced annually, while Crokatt’s tax assessment was a “very large” £204.8s.2d. currency, or about £29 sterling, around 16 percent of their rent. Unsurprisingly, Crokatt was keen for his agent in Charles Town to find tenants who would pay his property taxes as well as their rent.⁶¹

For absentees, employing a Charles Town-based agent to arrange essential maintenance, find tenants, collect rent, and arrange the sale of properties was an extra cost. The wear and tear caused by tenants was a further unpredictable Page 84 →expense. Landlords who lived in Charles Town found this a problem, but nonresidents, and especially those without a reliable agent on the ground, were at greater risk through being less able to monitor disorderly tenants. Such occupants could prove more trouble than they were worth, as another absentee in Britain, Benjamin Bushnell, discovered to his cost. Having tried to manage his rental property in Charles Town without a local agent, he found that his tenants had—ostensibly to his benefit—“paid for many Repairs without Charging and often caused their own Negroes to do something to the House & kept no Account thereof.” On closer inspection, the tenants’ attempts at home renovation had done more harm than good: Bushnell’s failure to employ an agent had been a false economy. He eventually appointed as his agent Robert Raper, who found the house “in a bad Condition in want of Repair,” because of which he could charge the next tenant only £250 currency, or about £36 sterling, a year.⁶²

If urban properties were easier in theory for absentee owners to manage from afar and through rents could provide regular and predictable revenue, plantations in South Carolina offered absentees riskier but potentially more lucrative sources of income. Successful returns depended on a greater number of variables: principally astute management by local agents; the reliability and judgment of resident overseers; technological investment; and the productivity of the slave labor force.⁶³ Plantation profits were also more subject to the vagaries of climate, with its implications for crop yields and prices, while absentees had to reckon with the expense of paying agents to make periodic visits to their estates. Robert Raper received five hundred pounds currency a year from Margaret Colleton to organize provisions and maintenance for the two lowcountry plantations she inherited on the death of her husband, John, in 1766.⁶⁴ Compared to even the good income to be made from urban properties, however, a well-managed and productive plantation could yield greater returns on capital invested. During the 1750s and 1760s resident planters considered an annual return of between 10 and 15 percent on invested capital—in slaves, land, equipment, and provisions—to be a good profit. Henry Laurens’s 3,100 acre Mepkin plantation, which he bought from John Colleton in 1762, was the jewel of his plantation empire. When Laurens acquired it, Mepkin was a monocultural rice plantation delivering an annual return of about 10 percent; after diversifying into corn, firewood, and lumber to meet growing demand in Charles Town, it realized annual profits of more than 20 percent from the mid-1760s.⁶⁵

The historian Max Edelson has argued that estates in South Carolina run by absentee planters in Britain were less profitable than those closely attended by their owners, echoing an assessment long made, though recently challenged, with respect to the British West Indies.⁶⁶ It has been assumed that in both regions the extended lines of oversight and decision making inherent in absenteeism Page 85 →diminished plantation efficiency, though planters who spent most of their time in Charles Town—the domestic or seasonal absentees—were able to attend to plantation affairs at crucial moments in the agricultural cycle, such as personally overseeing planting or harvesting, making immediate decisions on the marketing of crops or the next season’s planting, and enforcing their personal authority.

Contemporaries certainly believed that absentee-owned estates were less productive. Henry Laurens predicted a “great prospect of success” at his newly bought Broughton Island rice plantation in Georgia in 1768, “if my affairs would admit of residence upon the spot.” Had he been in residence, he would have expected annual returns of at least £2,000, clear of charges, on invested capital of £7,500, “but under the management of Hirelings the Lord knows what I may make.”⁶⁷ It was a view shared by his brother James, one of several agents whom Laurens entrusted to keep an eye on his plantations during his sojourn in Europe from 1771 to 1774. “You might easily put that Plantation on better footing were you on the Spott,” James Laurens told him as he reported on his underperforming Wright’s Savannah plantation in Georgia.⁶⁸

Whether or not absentee-owned plantations had lower productivity and delivered smaller profits than those owned by South Carolina residents—and insufficient evidence survives to make a clear judgment—such plantations clearly still delivered enough profits to make them desirable investments. Laurens relied on the income from his South Carolina and Georgia plantations in the early 1770s while living in Europe, where he oversaw his sons’ education.⁶⁹ The willingness of absentees to retain lands after leaving the colony permanently and the fact that some absentees amassed further lands in South Carolina after they had left testify to the appeal of a diversified landholding portfolio. The plantation empires that Samuel Wragg and Charles Ogilvie constructed in South Carolina and then retained after leaving the colony are cases in point. George Austin too falls into this category. After a merchant career in Charles Town, he retired to his native England in 1763. Though he never returned to South Carolina, he kept his plantations, which on his death in 1774 totaled 6,305 acres and 176 slaves.⁷⁰

Evidence from plantations owned by British residents confirms their profitability. Watboo and Mepshew, John and Margaret Colleton’s two remaining lowcountry plantations after the sale of Mepkin, were some twenty-five miles north of Charles Town in South Carolina’s core planting zone. Originally part of the twelve-thousand-acre Watboo Barony granted to the Colleton family in the late seventeenth century, both plantations by the 1760s were agriculturally diversified, producing rice, indigo, and lumber. They also benefited from a navigable river connection to Charles Town, which reduced transportation costs. Mepshew had about thirty working slaves and produced about one hundred barrels of rice a year in the early 1760s. Though its estimated value then is not known, a decade later it was reckoned to be worth more than six thousand pounds.⁷¹ Together Watboo and Mepshew delivered a profit of about one thousand pounds Page 86 →in 1764–65, a sum that would have been higher but for several unusually large deductions. These included a doctor’s bill for three years, two years’ worth of taxes, “several charges for Accidents that may not happen again,” and repairs to a boat that took rice and lumber from the plantation for sale in Charles Town.

Margaret Colleton later told her Charles Town attorneys that she had been bequeathed Watboo and Mepshew, “together with all the Negroes, Stock &c … for my support and maintenance.” The revenue they produced was such that she had been persuaded to divest her property holdings in Britain. “Relying upon the income of these Estates [Watboo and Mepshew], which by the Care of my Attorneys for some years I duly received,” she informed her attorneys, “I have been liberal with my property in this Country to my Relations and Connexions.”⁷² Charles Ogilvie estimated that between 1763 and 1774 his two Combahee River plantations yielded “Crops to the annual value of £1,100 Sterling or thereabouts, clear of all deductions,” and he reckoned that his more remote Myrtle Grove plantation, settled in 1774, “would have been exceedingly profitable in a few years.” Myrtle Grove had, Ogilvie later reported, broken even just a year after being established, in 1775 producing “189 Barrels or Tierces of Rice … besides Indico and Corn more than sufficient to pay all charges.”⁷³ Absentees either sold their plantation rice to traders in Charles Town or shipped it to Britain on their own account, according to which they believed would be most profitable.⁷⁴

Besides regular returns on invested capital, two other incentives encouraged British residents to own land and property in South Carolina. Both were based on the embedded value of the assets. In observing how some of the wealthiest residents of the plantation colonies combined landowning and trade, the historian Jacob Price noted that “undeveloped land held for appreciation might still be valuable enough to support some credit and thus indirectly be productive.”⁷⁵ If this were true for absentee owners of land in South Carolina, it would connect their landholdings, particularly in the case of merchant absentees, to their commercial concerns. Regardless of whether their tracts were developed and produced revenue or were undeveloped, they might have been used to bolster their owners’ credit. As such, they could increase their owners’ ability to raise capital for other ventures and investments. Investors also bought plantation land and urban properties because these were expected to rise in value over time. This was the case in the more explicitly speculative ventures, such as those of the London merchants Baker, Linwood, and Fisher, who purchased undeveloped land because it had development and resale value. Windfall gains were also possible on land with potential for urban development. Anticipating Charles Town’s expansion, the South Carolina Society, a gentlemen’s club in the town, bought Richard Shubrick’s four Ansonborough lots on its northern edge for five hundred pounds in 1759. As Charles Town grew and Ansonborough became one of its most desirable residential quarters, the land rose in value to an estimated five thousand pounds in 1768.⁷⁶

Page 87 →Drawing conclusions from the values of specific urban properties is harder. On inheriting an established plantation, undeveloped tracts, and town lots in Georgetown after the war, British resident John Martin chose to sell the land but retain the lots, since “they might improve [in value] in time.”⁷⁷ It is unclear whether Martin’s hope was realistic. While deeds of sale and newspaper advertisements often recorded the sale prices of lots and buildings, it is impossible to know how they were altered over time. For example, John Watkinson bought part of a Charles Town lot in 1726 for £1,500 currency. After he moved to London and then died, it was sold in 1743 for £1,800 currency.⁷⁸ James Crokatt sold a plot of ground and a brick house in Charles Town for £1,260 currency in 1765, exactly double the price he had paid for them in 1731. Nothing is known of how either Watkinson’s or Crokatt’s property changed between purchase and sale—whether improvements were made or whether years of tenant occupation took their toll. Even with this caveat, rises in value of 20 percent over seventeen years in Watkinson’s case—just over one percent annually—and three percent annually in Crokatt’s seem meager, particularly when set against expected yields from commerce and planting and when interest on loans contracted in Charles Town delivered returns at between eight and ten percent.⁷⁹ Given the evidence on rental returns, it seems likely that the annual yields delivered by urban properties were a stronger motivation for absentees to retain them than was the hope of long-term appreciation and windfalls.

How did all these returns—agricultural, rental, and appreciative—compare with what absentee owners could get on investments in Britain? If Henry Laurens’s comments on fellow planter Henry Gray’s relocation to Britain in 1764 are typical, South Carolina’s merchant-planters held the more pedestrian returns made in Britain in a certain disdain. Noting Gray’s plan to “fix in some cheap country in the West of England & to do a great many fine things in the farming way & dabble a little now & then in commerce,” Laurens compared Gray’s annual returns of ten to twelve percent on his South Carolina lands, which were advertised for sale before Gray left, with the three to four percent he expected him to make yearly in England. To Laurens, this equated to “leaving good Wheat Bread to take up with Rye,” and he predicted that Gray would “probably return to us after a year or two of fruitless & vexatious toil.”⁸⁰ Annual returns on British securities supported Laurens’s estimates: during the 1750s yields on East Indies stock and bonds and on government stock hovered around three percent—well below the profits on staple agriculture that might be expected in the South Carolina lowcountry.⁸¹ The commercial profits of London’s overseas merchants were higher, sometimes reaching the levels associated with plantation returns. Adam Smith considered a return of double the interest rate—between six and ten percent—as a “good, moderate reasonable profit”; well-established merchants counted on a return of ten to fifteen percent from a successful year’s trading.⁸²

Page 88 →London’s Carolina merchants also bought estate land in Britain, though social considerations were a stronger motivation than the land’s productive capacity or its long-term investment value. Several acquired sizable estates within twenty miles of London, in keeping with the many other City of London merchants who acquired country properties on the capital’s fringes: John Beswicke in Hillingdon; John and Sarah Nickleson in Stanmore; Richard Shubrick in Greenwich and his son, also Richard Shubrick, in Enfield. William Baker bought the Bayfordbury estate in Hertfordshire, which totaled around 3,900 acres, for £21,000 in 1756.⁸³ Like his colleagues, James Crokatt similarly diverted commercial capital into land. He bought Luxborough Hall in Essex, a grand country estate about eleven miles northeast of London, for £19,500 in 1750 and spent a further £10,000 repairing and furnishing the house. “I think he has Grandour enough for his Money,” one visitor from South Carolina drily observed.⁸⁴ As well as the neoclassical mansion and 18 acres of garden, the estate included the freehold of six farms, two meadows, and glebe lands covering some 520 acres, which together generated an estimated annual return of £870.⁸⁵

James Crokatt exemplified the political consequences of absenteeism for the relationship between South Carolina and Great Britain. The land and property he bought while living and working in Charles Town were important both to his commercial rise and to his assiduous service to South Carolina in London, whether officially as the colony’s agent in the capital or in his private advocacy for South Carolina in political circles and his encouragement of its agriculture and commerce. His real estate purchases can be grouped into three categories: those for immediate personal use; short-term speculations; and longer-term investments. In February 1731 he paid Joseph Wragg £2,450 currency for part of two Charles Town lots on the north side of Broad Street.⁸⁶ Here, on Charles Town’s main thoroughfare, Crokatt had his countinghouse and store. In October 1731 he bought an adjoining “brick messuage”—perhaps another store—for £630 currency from Samuel Wragg, who was by then living in London.⁸⁷ Crokatt expanded his facilities as his business grew, and these sites were central to his commercial operations in the town. Other purchases bore the hallmarks of short- and medium-term speculation. These included commercial property in Charles Town and two tracts of land on Charles Town Neck, on the peninsula north of the town. In one deal Crokatt bought part of a town lot for £1,535 currency before selling it two weeks later for £1,750—a quick profit of £215.⁸⁸ Covering just seventy and forty-six acres respectively, the two tracts on Charles Town Neck were relatively small and were probably country retreats rather than working plantations: one contained a “good Dwelling-House, Kitchen, Garden and Orchard of Fruit Trees,” with no mention made of crops or resident slaves. He sold both a little over three years after buying them, the smaller tract having appreciated in value by some 45 percent.⁸⁹

Page 89 →Some of Crokatt’s other acquisitions were longer-term investments. Shortly before his long-planned departure from the colony in June 1739, he bought two tracts of land from colleagues on the Royal Council. Both were adjacent to land in the colony’s interior that had been set aside for the development of townships—new, planned settlements designed to attract white settlers into inland areas in a government-backed plan to ameliorate South Carolina’s worrying racial imbalance and to buffer the lowcountry from French, Spanish, and Indian threats. Crokatt’s purchase of these tracts so close to the time of his departure suggests that he hoped they would yield long-term windfall gains. They consisted of twelve hundred acres in Granville County, to the north of Purrysburgh Township, and one thousand acres in Craven County, part of the land set aside for Queensborough Township.⁹⁰ Though South Carolina’s projected townships ultimately failed to attract settlers in the numbers hoped for, in the late 1730s they were seen to offer strong financial prospects for investors, whose land was expected to increase in value as the townships expanded. That Crokatt retained property in Charles Town after returning to Britain further suggests a long-term investment strategy, as well as the appeal of urban rental yields. He retained three houses and a “low water lot” in Unity Alley and five tenement houses “on the Bay,” which he had bought for £4,000 in 1732. These properties brought in some £1,390 currency, or about £180 sterling, in rent annually by 1767, when they were finally sold, and included both retail and residential space.⁹¹

Crokatt’s property holdings in South Carolina reinforced his commercial connections with the colony. In his advocacy for South Carolina during his time in London before, during, and after being official agent, his efforts reflected broad personal interest in the colony. Whether giving evidence on salt imports to South Carolina, on indigo growing, or on sericulture, Crokatt was informed by an interest that went beyond his trading concerns, extensive though they were. The commercial, economic, social, familial, and territorial interconnections of his motives made him an assiduous appellant for the colony. His concern for South Carolina’s economic vitality and its inhabitants’ well-being was a product of his deep personal links to the colony and his commercial interest in South Carolina’s trade: more than ten years spent living there; a wife and two children born in South Carolina; and extensive property and landholdings there. Becoming the colony’s agent in London in 1749 simply formalized the representative role that Crokatt had already been playing. He can hardly have been motivated by the post’s salary; the two-hundred-pound annual wage constituted loose change for a man who spent nearly thirty thousand pounds buying and renovating a country estate. This multiplicity of interests in South Carolina, in which landholdings played a significant part, was embodied as well in the Carolina lobby in London in which Crokatt played the leading mid-century role but whose advocacy for the colony stretched back twenty-five years before his return to Britain in 1739. Between its first sustained activity in 1715 and the early 1770s, the British Page 90 →merchants trading to South Carolina who were at the forefront of the lobby were also the largest group of absentee owners of land and property in South Carolina. Within Parliament MPs with landholding connections in South Carolina helped usher favorable bills through their legislative stages. James Edward Colleton, the elder brother of absentee estate-owner John Colleton, introduced the legislation to assist colonial silk production in 1750, and Sir Peter Warren, the former admiral with tracts north and west of Charles Town, helped to steer the potash legislation through parliamentary waters the following year.⁹²

Absentee owners of property and land in South Carolina formed the core of the colony’s most regular advocates in London: John Watkinson, Samuel Wragg, John Beswicke, Richard Shubrick, Sir William Baker, and Charles Ogilvie. The intersection of landowning and political advocacy was apparent throughout their lobbying campaigns across the middle decades of the eighteenth century. In February 1748 the Board of Trade received a delegation of nine merchants trading to South Carolina who appealed against the issuance of currency in South Carolina, which they feared would depreciate debts owed to them and harm the colony’s economic health. At least six of them owned land or property in the colony.⁹³ In 1756 seven London residents petitioned to urge Edmund Atkin, a long-serving member of South Carolina’s Royal Council and head of the council’s committee on Indian affairs, to accept the post of “Agent & Superintendant for Indian Affairs in the Southern parts of North America,” the Crown’s official diplomat with the region’s Native American tribes. His expertise in Indian negotiations, they argued, was essential, as Anglo-French hostilities in North America threatened to unleash warfare on South Carolina’s frontiers and endanger the whole colony. All seven petitioners on this matter of strategic, rather than specifically commercial, importance to South Carolina had territorial investments in the colony.⁹⁴ Similarly, when nine London merchants petitioned the Board of Trade in March 1772 to approve a cession of land made to Georgia by local Indians, they made their ownership of land in that colony central to their appeal. “Your Memorialists are considerably interested in the welfare and prosperity of the Province of Georgia,” they argued, “having large sums of Money and great Property there, not only as Merchants, but also from having purchased valuable Tracts of Land and settled many Plantations.”⁹⁵ Land and property holdings deepened British residents’ interests in the region and strengthened their advocacy on its behalf. The absentees also used their landholdings to convey a symbolic message, suggesting to their correspondents in South Carolina a continuing loyalty to the colony that went deeper than commerce or profit.

Philanthropic gestures signaled absentees’ ongoing commitment to South Carolina alongside their property investments. The historian Peter Marshall has suggested that studying British philanthropy toward American causes helps to answer the question of “who cared about the thirteen colonies” in Britain by showing the breadth of interest in America among residents of Page 91 →mid-eighteenth-century Britain.⁹⁶ Charitable giving was certainly used by London merchants to demonstrate personal interest in and attachment to Carolinian causes. In April 1741 James Crokatt donated £1,000 currency, or about £140 sterling, to be given to residents of Charles Town who had lost homes and goods in the fire that had wracked the town the previous November. During the 1760s Carolina traders in London gave to causes in South Carolina ranging from a subscription to resettle German Protestants in the colony to a fund-raising effort organized by Charles Crokatt to pay for a peal of bells for St. Michael’s Church in Charles Town. The bells appeal achieved a “very Liberal” subscription from the capital’s Carolina merchants.⁹⁷

In looking at lobbying in Britain for North American causes, historians have emphasized lobbyists’ commercial interests as the motivating force in their advocacy. Thus “leading merchants might work disproportionately hard to get bounties for particular colonial exports but then they stood to gain disproportionately by transporting the goods involved.”⁹⁸ While commercial interests were certainly vital, London’s Carolina merchants’ interests in the colony did not begin and end with its trade. The breadth and depth of their connections to South Carolina—personal, familial, commercial, financial, territorial, and philanthropic—explain the particular activism that distinguished London’s Carolina lobby from other North American lobbies in the capital during much of the eighteenth century. These connections made the Carolina lobby closer in form to the capital’s West Indies lobby, many of whose members had also lived, worked, married into, and owned land in the colonies whose interests they sought to represent. Whether they were deliberately or inadvertently acquired, property and landholdings in Charles Town and across its fertile hinterland entrenched the merchants’ interest in South Carolina’s economic, demographic, and social well-being. Nonmerchant absentees—those who did not have explicitly commercial links with South Carolina—were active too in signing petitions and lobbying Parliament on the colony’s behalf. A petition to the British Treasury in February 1763 that appealed for liberty to export rice directly from South Carolina to foreign colonies in the Americas and to Madeira and the Canary Isles specifically distinguished its signatories—all British residents—as “several Merchants in London, Planters of So. Carolina, and owners of Ships trading to his Majesty’s said Province in America.”⁹⁹ When a consequent proposal came before a Commons committee, William Middleton—not a merchant but a major landowner on both sides of the Atlantic—was one of the main witnesses to give evidence, telling MPs of his birth and longtime residence in South Carolina, and describing how plantations in the colony were managed.¹⁰⁰

For London’s leading Carolina merchants, at least until the 1760s, the ownership and remote management of plantations, urban properties, or both were central to the intricate bonds that connected them to South Carolina, entwined with their commercial, personal, and familial connections spanning the Atlantic. Page 92 →That British residents came to own lands in South Carolina and Georgia was a function of the Carolina trade’s distinct features. Chief among these was the high proportion of London’s Carolina merchants, relative to their counterparts in other branches of North American trade in the capital, who had spent the early part of their careers in South Carolina before transferring their businesses across the Atlantic. In Charles Town they had acquired land and property, which was often augmented in lieu of debts owed to them in the colony. As astute merchants, they grasped the economic logic of having a diversified portfolio of investments. Reliable rental returns and the potential for high profits on plantation enterprises encouraged them to retain these holdings when living in Britain, even if these investments were subsidiary, rather than integral, to their commercial operations. These investments also had symbolic value, publicly signaling an ongoing commitment to the land that furnished the bulk of their trade and where friends and family remained.

In contemporary British discourse, absentee land and property ownership in South Carolina attracted little of the public attention and none of the abuse that were heaped on its “cankerous” guises in Ireland and the West Indies. This was partly a consequence of scale, with fewer absentee owners of property in South Carolina than of property in Ireland or the West Indies living in Britain, and partly a result of the South Carolina absentees’ lower profile in British society. While a number bought large estates in Britain, chiefly within a short distance of London, none of these matched the size or opulence of some of the lavish country estates of absentee West Indian planter dynasties, such as Fonthill in Wiltshire or Harewood House in Yorkshire, which became bywords for nouveau riche ostentation. In addition, for all their significance for relations between Great Britain and South Carolina, no owners of property in South Carolina matched the political influence in Britain of leading West Indian absentees such as William Beckford, lord mayor of London, a leading supporter of John Wilkes, and one of some seventy West Indies merchants who were MPs in the second half of the eighteenth century.¹⁰¹ This helps explain why the importance of the South Carolina absentees has been overlooked from a “metropolitan” perspective: absentee owners of land in South Carolina did not make the splash or court the controversy in British society that their West Indian counterparts did.

Just as Carolinian absentees slipped under the radar of mainstream political, social, and satirical attention in Britain, absentee landowners living overseas were small enough in number relative to the total number of landowners in South Carolina and had small enough landholdings that they escaped the kind of attention in the colony that their counterparts in the Caribbean received in the West Indies as well as in Britain. Additionally, plantation owners’ custom of relocating seasonally to Charles Town to escape the worst of the lowcountry’s heat and fevers meant that nonresidence on a plantation was an established cultural and economic norm in South Carolina. Critiques of absenteeism in the Page 93 →colony were more subtle than those in the West Indies, though fear of slave rebellion and dereliction of civic duty were present in both. Until the 1770s at least, such critiques did not distinguish between absenteeism’s different domestic/seasonal and transatlantic/permanent forms in South Carolina. Only when political relations between Britain and America reached a crisis point were distinctions drawn between the different forms that absenteeism took. It was at this point that British owners of property in South Carolina became, in Henry Laurens’s words, “Enemies to our truest Interests, without knowing themselves to be so.”¹⁰² Ironically, the political agency of absentees in Britain had worked largely to South Carolina’s benefit, their landholdings reinforcing their commercial, familial, and social ties to the colony and strengthening their activism. The importance of absenteeism and its political consequences to South Carolina accentuates the colony’s developmental parallels with the West Indies. As with the Caribbean, absenteeism helped construct and maintain an assertive lobby in London on South Carolina’s behalf: far from being “cankers” to the colony’s riches, absentees helped amplify its voice in the metropolitan corridors of power.