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Slavery and Revolution

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Slavery and Revolution TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………….3 Chapter 1: Henry Laurens’s Involvement in Slavery…………………………………..8 Chapter 2: Henry Laurens’s Attitudes toward Slavery and the Slave Trade in South Carolina……………………………………………………………………19 Chapter 3: Henry Laurens’s Changing Views toward Slavery..………………………33 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..43 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...46 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank Dr. John Sensbach for being my advisor. He was one of the first history professors I had when I transferred to the University of Florida, and his class about religion in colonial America sparked my interest in American history again. He encouraged me to frame the project the way I wanted, yet never hesitated to remind me to be realistic about my ambitions for this project. I also would like to thank Dr. Andrea Sterk for helping me to choose an advisor and for facilitating the Honors Seminar, which helped me to gain a better understanding of the technicalities that go into thesis writing and research. Thank you, Jonathan Scholl for being there to answer my questions and for giving great advice about research. I also want to thank Dr. David Geggus—who probably knows more about the slave trade and slavery than humanly possible—for his writing and grammar advice, which helped me to communicate my thoughts in a more concise manner. Research librarian Shelly Arlen was also a great help to me in the beginning of my research, as she introduced me to the wonders of online and digital resources available through the University of Florida’s database. I thank her as well. I am also very grateful to the Phillips family for creating a scholarship in memory of their daughter Bridget Phillips, which I received through the University of Florida’s history department in spring of 2013. The scholarship helped me fund my research trip to Charleston, South Carolina in September of that same year. Next, I would like to thank the South Carolina Historical Society for working hard to preserve American history for public use so that students like me can use just a piece of it to build a project. The librarians assisted me in my research and it was a great experience overall. I also want to show my gratitude to Smathers Library Special Collections, which houses several volumes of Henry Laurens’s published papers. I easily 1 continued my research in Gainesville. I cannot forget how special the library’s U-Borrow Service was for me, as well. Thanks to you all who make this service work so wonderfully. To my fellow honors students, it was great to get to know many of you through this process. I am so glad that I found people my age to talk to about history with and to befriend. Good luck to you all on your endeavors. Above all, I am eternally grateful to my family for all that they have done for me. My mother has instilled in me values of hard-work, persistence, and resilience that were foundational to my success in everything I have accomplished so far. She is a woman of faith and has supported me from the beginning. I love her and I am thankful to her no matter what. I also want to thank my sisters Kaydene and Trevina for their love and support, particularly through this thesis project. Thank you for listening to me ramble on and on about Henry Laurens and his plantations. Thank you for that extra help that made my trip to Charleston a success. I love you both. 2 INTRODUCTION Among the portraits and statues of prominent historical figures that adorn the interior of the South Carolina Historical Society, more than one has the likeness of a man often neglected in American history. Born on March 6, 1724 in Charleston, South Carolina to a Huguenot family, Henry Laurens achieved a high level of recognition during the American colonial and revolutionary period before his death on December 8, 1792. He is best known for being a partner in the largest slave trading company—Austin and Laurens—in North America.1 He owned a grand total of seven plantations and about three-hundred slaves in both South Carolina and Georgia and was one of the wealthiest men on the continent.2 After he married Eleanor Ball in 1750 and garnered success as merchant during this time, Henry Laurens quickly pursued other interests. He served in the militia during the French Indian War and eventually became actively involved in politics. First, in 1757, he became a representative for South Carolina in the Commons House of the Assembly, where he served for almost twenty years. Later, he became a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1777, and ultimately served as second President of the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1778. During the last eighteen years of his life, Laurens became heavily involved in the American revolutionary movement. Most of his contributions to the movement involved negotiations with foreign powers including the French and most notably the Dutch. In 1780, on his way to negotiate with the Dutch for aid in the American Revolutionary war, Henry Laurens was captured at sea by the British, accused of treason, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was eventually released 1 Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, Slavery and Justice: Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice (Providence: Brown University, 2006), 14. 2 Leila Sellers, Charleston Business on the Eve of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), 61. 3 in 1782, in exchange for British General Lord Cornwallis. The harsh treatment Laurens endured during his captivity elevated him to a symbol of bravery for the cause of American independence. Some historians credited Laurens for abandoning the slave trade for humanitarian reasons,3 and have stated that he abandoned it in order to soothe his conscience. Although Laurens no longer advertised, bought, and sold slaves, he did not opt out of slavery entirely. He still owned and put slaves to work on his plantations in Georgia and South Carolina after he formally left the slave trade. Others who have written about Laurens often use a specific quote from an August 14, 1776 letter he wrote to his son, John Laurens. In this letter, he confessed that he abhorred slavery and pitied the Africans who were stolen and sold into slavery in the British West Indies where “tenfold worse slavery” awaited them.4 This quote was made popular by a short anti-slavery publication in 1861 by the Zenger Club based in New York. The publication’s intention was to demonstrate evidence against “the Southern theory that the same antagonism that now prevails between the North and South on the subject of Slavery, existed at the time of the American Revolution.”5 What the author of the pamphlet and other historians have not explored is how Laurens arrived at this conclusion and what factors influenced his statement. Anti-slavery sentiment was not common among the planters and merchants of South Carolina. The colony was filled with merchants and slave owners who felt little to no remorse for their engagement in the slave trade and did not question their practices. In fact, as technology for rice cultivation improved, more planters were reluctant to let go of the African descendants 3 Ibid. 4 Zenger Club, “Henry Laurens to John Laurens, August 14th, 1776”, A South Carolina Protest Against Slavery (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1861), 20. 5 Zenger Club, A South Carolina Protest, 5. 4 they enslaved, even if it involved planters relinquishing more responsibilities to their slaves.6 It was a peculiar time in American history because slavery, an Old World institution, incongruently co-existed with the New World’s modern and enlightened period of American Revolution. However, few planters in colonial America questioned the paradox of fighting for their own freedom while denying it to others. Laurens often acknowledged this paradox in correspondences between him and his son, but it is too simplistic to conclude that this was due to humanitarian reasons. Several of Laurens’s other letters demonstrated a more complex perception of the slave trade and slavery, as Laurens often expressed feelings of both sympathy and repulsion toward his slaves. He referred to them as human creatures, but also saw them as commodities to be bought and sold alongside deerskins, indigo, rice, and pitch. This image of Laurens as a well-educated, free- thinking American revolutionary called for reconciliation with his image as a perpetrator of the slave trade. For this thesis, I observed the change in Henry Laurens’s perception of the slave trade by reading his papers. By examining how the slave trade operated in South Carolina during the eighteenth century, I gained insight into why many of its inhabitants viewed slavery as a necessary institution. Through chronicling this change, one can further understand how over time practices and beliefs about slavery once agreeable and accepted in society soon became antiquated, barbaric, and unacceptable. Instead of making a sweeping generalization about Laurens and his contemporaries’ views of slavery, this thesis will provide a brief yet comprehensive view of slavery and how it affected the lives of those involved. This approach 6 Joyce E. Chaplin, “Tidal Rice Cultivation and the Problem of Slavery in South Carolina and Georgia” in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992), 30. 5 will clarify whether Laurens saw slavery as good, evil, or essential, and whether he challenged the institution explicitly. In Chapter one, I chronicled his involvement in the slave trading business, his absence from it, and other factors that contributed to his subsequent change in perception.
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