-44^ Scs.iHi. IS6. SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY FOURTH SERIES VOLUME 20 A Scottish firm in Virginia IV. Cuninghame and Co. A Scottish firm in Virginia 1767-1777 IV. Cuninghame and Co. edited by T. M. Devine, ph.d. ★ ★ EDINBURGH printed for the Scottish History Society by CLARK CONSTABLE (1982) LTD 1984 © Scottish History Society 1984 ISBN o 906245 04 4 Printed in Great Britain L/j PREFACE My primary debt of gratitude is to Lady Catherine Henderson and her son, Mr Martin Henderson of Mosdale, Castle Douglas, Kirkcudbright, the owners of the Cuninghame letterbooks, for permission to allow their publication. I thank them also for their willingness to make the material available to me for study and transcription. Mr Richard Dell of the Strathclyde Regional Archives and Mr John Bates and Dr Frances Shaw of the Scottish Record Office helped in the transfer and supervision of the letterbooks when they were being transcribed and edited. I am particularly grateful to Dr Shaw who first drew my attention to the existence of a third Cuninghame letterbook in the care of Lady Henderson and her son. Professor Jacob M. Price of the University of Michigan kindly read and commented on my introduction. I am pleased to record my thanks also to my former student. Miss Elizabeth Gray, who assisted in the preparation of the material and to Miss Mary McHugh who helped with the index. Mrs J. Struthers transformed a difficult manuscript into typescript with speed and efficiency. My final debt is to Dr Thomas I. Rae for his patient attention and advice. T. M. DEVINE University of Strathclyde June, 1982 A generous contribution from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland towards the cost of producing this volume is gratefully acknowledged by the Council of the Society CONTENTS Preface v Introduction ix Correspondence of James Robinson with Virginia Factors of William Cuninghame and Co., 1767-1773 1 Correspondence of James Robinson with William Cuninghame and Co. in Glasgow, 1772-1777 77 Index 241 INTRODUCTION the rise of the Scottish tobacco trade to the American colonies of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina is one of the great success stories of Scottish economic history.1 By 1769 the Clyde ports of Greenock, Port Glasgow and Glasgow (because by that date almost all tobacco shipped to Scotland was landed there) imported as much colonial leaf as London and the English outports combined. While imports stood at about 2| million lbs in 1715, they had reached 10 million by 1743 and after a spectacular spurt from the early 1750s, topped 47 million lbs in 1771. In effect, Scotland had captured the major part of this trade with a share which rose from 20 per cent in 1744 to 52 per cent in 1769. As is well-known, however, this was an entrepot trade with the vast proportion of what was imported later re-exported without further processing to Dutch, German and, above all, French 1 This introduction has been kept to a minimum on the advice of the Council of the Scottish History Society because much secondary material is now available on the Scottish tobacco trade. The interested reader should consult the following, viz: T. C. Barker, ‘ Smuggling in the Eighteenth Century: the evidence of the Scottish tobacco trade’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (1954); B. Crispin, ‘Clyde Shipping and the American War’, Scottish Historical Review, xli (1962); Richard F. Dell, ‘The OperationalSocial History, Record ii (1982); of theT. M.Clyde Devine, Tobacco The TobaccoFleet, 1747-1775’, Lords (Edinburgh, Scottish 1975);Economic T. andM. Devine,Scottish Historical ‘Glasgow Review, Merchants hi (1973); and theT. M. Collapse Devine, of ‘ Sources the Tobacco of Capital Trade, for the1775-1783’, Glasgow Tobacco Trade, 1740-90’, Business History, xvi (1974); James Gourlay, A Glasgow Miscellany: the Tobacco Period in Glasgow, 1707-7$ (privately printed, n.d.); A. P. Middleton, Tobacco Coast: a Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (Newport News, Virginia, 1953) ;J. M. Price, ‘The Rise ofGlasgow in the Chesapeake Tobacco Trade, 1707-1775’, reprinted in Peter L. Payne (ed.), Studies in Scottish BusinessArbor, Michigan,History (London, 1973); J.1967);}. M. Price, M. Capital Price, Franceand Credit and inthe British Chesapeake, Overseas 2 vols. Trade: (Ann the View from the Chesapeake, 1700-1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); J. H. Soltow, (1959);‘Scottish Robert Traders C. Nash,in Virginia, ‘The English 1750-1775’, and Scottish Economic Tobacco History Trades Review, in the 2ndSeventeenth ser. xii xxxvand Eighteenth (1982) Centuries: Legal and Illegal Trade’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. A SCOTTISH FIRM IN VIRGINIA markets. Yet, the tobacco commerce, though not a decisive force in Scottish economic development, was nonetheless a powerful in- fluence on the rise of industry, banking, agrarian improvement and new commercial structures in the western lowlands and particularly in Glasgow itself where most of the merchant houses which domi- nated tobacco importation had their headquarters.1 It is generally agreed among historians that the basis of the Scottish success lay in the development of chains of stores by Glasgow firms in the colonies which offered goods, money and credit to planter customers in exchange for tobacco.2 This ‘store system’ was a remarkably sophisticated and efficient form of commercial organisation for the time, and it gave the Scottish traders crucial advantages in both dealing with the American planters and in mobilising their shipping fleets to maximum cost advantage.3 By the 1760s, the Scottish tobacco trade to the American colonies was dominated by a small number of large merchant partnerships. Towering above the rest were three giant syndicates headed by Alexander Speirs, John Glassford and William Cuninghame. In the 1770s these groups imported over fifty per cent of the tobacco landed at the Clyde ports.4 The Cuninghame concerns comprised three firms, William Cuninghame and Co., Alexander Cuninghame and Co. (later Cuninghame, Findlay and Co.) and Cuninghame, Brown and Co. The latter two companies were concerned in the trade to Maryland, while William Cuninghame and Co., by far the most powerful part of the group (with a capitalisation of £72,000 in 1773 compared with ^15,000 in 1769 for Alexander Cuninghame and Co.), was the syndicate’s Virginia house.5 In the early 1770s its main partners were Andrew Cochrane, Robert Bogle, John Murdoch, Peter Murdoch and William 1 T. M. Devine, ‘The Colonial Trades and Industrial Investment in Scotland, 1700- 1815’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser. xxix (1976), and ‘Colonial Commerce and the Scottish Economy, c. 1730-1815’ in L. M. Cullen and T. C. Smout (eds.), Comparative Aspects of Irish and Scottish Economic and Social Development (Edinburgh, 21977) For a discussion of the Scottish store system see Soltow, ‘Scottish Traders’, and Devine,8 Tobacco Lords, pp.55-102 4 Dell, ‘Clyde Tobacco Fleet’, pp.1-6 5 sro, Customs Accounts, Port Glasgow, E. 504/28/28 Signet Library, Edinburgh, Sessional Papers, 162/23; SRO, Register of Deeds, 309/2, DUR, 58; pro, A.O. 12/56/292 INTRODUCTION xi Cuninghame, the managing partner. The capital stock of -£72,000 was divided among these men in shares of 240 parts. Cochrane held 40, Peter and John Murdoch 24 and 40 respectively. Bogle 48 and Cuninghame 64. The company brought together old Glasgow money and new commercial enterprise. The initial success of the firm was established in the 1720s and 1730s by Andrew Cochrane of Brighouse (1693-1777), six times Provost of Glasgow.1 He had married into the powerful Murdoch clan who had been active in the tobacco trade from the later seventeenth century. By the 1730s his closest associates in American commerce were John Murdoch (1709-1776) and Peter Murdoch (1670-1761), whose son Peter (1734-1817) was a prominent partner in the business in the 1770s.2 Robert Bogle was connected to a family which had been among the first to prosecute the Virginia trade both before and after the Union of Parliaments in 1707.3 William Cuninghame advanced within this pre-existing structure of wealth and business connections to a dominant position within the partnership by the 1770s. He was a kinsman of Provost Andrew Cochrane, the son of a Kilmarnock merchant who was also related to a cadet branch of the Cuninghames of Caprington, lairds in Ayrshire.4 Like so many young Scots of petty bourgeois origin, Cuninghame obtained a place as a factor in Virginia, in his kinsman’s firm of Cochrane, Murdoch and Co. In the year 1748 Glasgow tradition recalls that he exhibited such commercial acumen that he was given charge of the company’s business in North America at the early age of 21. It is clear also that in addition to directing the affairs of the firm in Falmouth, Virginia, Cuninghame quickly ventured into business on his own account. In 1759, together with John Doncastle of Maryland and Alexander Finnic of Virginia he entered into a partnership for supplying the British army stationed at Pittsburgh with ‘wines, sugars and other commodities of that kind’. Probably it was through such enterprise that he managed to accumulate enough personal capital to return to Glasgow in July, 1 James Dennistoun (ed.), Cochrane Correspondence regarding the Affairs of Glasgow (Glasgow2 1836), pp.ix-xi 8J. O. Mitchell, Old Glasgow Essays (Glasgow, 1905), p.285 4 Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Bogle MMS, MS Genealogy of the Bogle family Cuninghame’s early career is described in SRO, GD 247/140, Answers for W. Cuninghame . ., pp.1-16 Xll A SCOTTISH FIRM IN VIRGINIA 1762 and obtain a full partnership in the Cochrane company. An indication of his financial standing at the time is that he owned 2,000 acres of land in Virginia.