Henry Laurens and the Enlightenment in the 18th Century Atlantic World

Henry Laurens and the Enlightenment in the 18th Century Atlantic World

Laurens’s intellectual trajectory also attracts the interest of historian Samuel Smith, although he focuses on pietism and its meaning to Laurens. He believes that Laurens belonged to the Pietistic strain rather than the Enlightenment Rationalism, because Laurens “cherished independence as deeply as any of those patriots and founding fathers who wavered little from their rationalistic foundations of liberty,” and there “existed a world just as real, a world that represented a deeper and enduring freedom, not necessarily the world beyond the grave, but the spiritual world he sought to experience each day.”

Laurens after all was a South Carolinian and his business and political activities in South Carolina naturally attract the attention by historians. Rather than focus on his own experiences, Daniel J. McDonough thinks a comparative approach could help us to understand the history of South Carolina in the 18th century. Through examining the parallel lives of Christopher Gadsden and Henry Laurens, Daniel J. McDonough discusses their great contributions in the 18th century America.