Henry Laurens and the Transatlantic Networks in South Carolina, 1740-1792

Henry Laurens and the Transatlantic Networks in South Carolina, 1740-1792


M. C. Tyler in his Literary History of the American Revolution, in commenting on Henry Laurens’ narrative of his imprisonment in the Tower, a relatively self-conscious piece probably composed for publication, says that Laurens wrote with “simplicity, sprightliness, and grace, also with a sureness of intellectual movement born of the splendid sincerity, virility, wholesomeness, and competence of this man -----himself the noblest Roman of them all---- the unsurpassed embodiment of the proudest, finest, wittiest, most efficient, and most chivalrous Americanism of his time.”

On August 14, 1776, in a letter to John, he asserted that the Declaration of Independence had been foreseen by many of the American people because of “the Rashness Impolicy & Cruelty of the British Administration.” He confessed to his son “even at this Moment I feel a Tear of affection for the good old Country & for the People in it whom in general I dearly Love.” Anticipating the loss of crops and other property during the Revolution, he called such loss “no small sacrifice at the shrine of Liberty, & yet very small compared with that which I am willing to make— not only Crops, but Land Life & All must follow, in preference to sacrificing Liberty to Mammon.”

In Laurens’s life, he experienced three important periods. From the 1740s to 1760s, he was a slave planter and businessman who accumulated his fortune through transatlantic slave trades in the 18th century Atlantic world. From 1760s to early 1770s, he became an important local politician in Charleston and participated in revolutionary activities, although his political view was still conservative. When he came back to America in 1774, he became a radical and devoted himself to the creation of a new nation. From 1780 to 1784, Laurens went to Europe to negotiate commercial loan and make peaceful treaty