Laurens, Henry

LAURENS, HENRY. (1724–1792). Continental Congress president. South Carolina. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, on 24 February 1724, Laurens was clerk first in a Charleston counting house and then in London. Returning to South Carolina, he became a wealthy man, acting as an agent for English land investors. In 1763 Laurens became disgusted that his fortune came from selling and exploiting the labor of slaves, and he quit the slave trade entirely, often expressing his repugnance for the institution. His son John Laurens became an advocate for manumission during the Revolution, but Henry Laurens continued to own slaves the rest of his life, holding title to some 300 people at the time of his death. The popular Memoirs of Lauren's daughter Martha (1759–1811), wife of the historian David Ramsay, recorded the family's struggle with the guilt of the slave trade. The Stamp Act made him an avid although not radical agitator; he wrote several pamphlets against the customs service. Retiring from business, he returned to England in 1771, after the death of his wife, to supervise his sons' education and to travel. In 1774 he was one of thirty-eight Americans in England signing a petition to Parliament against the Boston Port Bill, and he returned to America the same year.

Sent to the Provincial Congress in 1775, he was president of both it and the Council of Safety. The following year he helped draft the state's constitution and became vice president of South Carolina. He was active in the defense of Charleston in June 1776 and worked to prevent civil war in the Carolinas. In 1777 he was sent to the Continental Congress and was elected its president on 1 November 1777, succeeding John Hancock. During his term, Congress was split by bitterness and factions, and Laurens was not always nonpartisan, siding occasionally with the Adams-Lee group. He helped suspend the Saratoga Convention on 8 January 1778 and exposed part of the so-called Conway Cabal, strongly supporting Washington. In the Lee-Deane dispute, he was extremely unfair toward Silas Deane, which led to the failure of his motion to suspend hearings until Congress could hold an investigation. Insulted, Laurens resigned the presidency on 9 December 1778, though he stayed in Congress until November 1779. Selected to negotiate a treaty of friendship and commerce with Holland and to arrange for a ten-million-dollar loan, Laurens left Philadelphia on 13 August 1780 on the brig Mercury. The vessel was captured by the British off Newfoundland on 3 September. Laurens threw his official papers overboard, but the British recovered them. One of the captured documents was used by the British as a pretext for declaring war on the Dutch.

After being examined by the Privy Council, Laurens was confined in the Tower of London on 6 October "on suspicion of high treason." Held almost fifteen months, under conditions so severe at times that his health was seriously impaired, he twice refused a pardon in return for serving the British. In two petitions to British authorities, however, he justified his own role in the American Revolution in terms that some patriots considered unduly subservient. On 31 December 1781 he was finally released on heavy bail (put up by Richard Oswald), thanks to the efforts of Franklin and Edmund Burke, and exchanged for Cornwallis in April 1782. Named one of the commissioners to handle peace negotiations, Laurens reached Paris only two days before the preliminary peace articles were signed. Despite his eleventh-hour arrival, Laurens was useful to the peace commissioners on several points of the treaty. He immediately returned to England to discuss commercial matters with government officials. On 3 August 1784 he was back in New York, and shortly thereafter he reported to Congress on his mission. His final years in public life had not been happy: his health had been broken; his son had been killed in action in the closing phase of the war; and he had suffered enormous property losses. He returned to Charleston early in 1785 and retired to his plantation, Mepkin, on the Cooper River some thirty miles above the city. He died on 8 December 1792 and, as stipulated in his will, was cremated, in what was one of the first instances of this practice in America outside of some Indian cultures.

SEE ALSO Convention Army; Conway Cabal; Deane, Silas; Lee, William; Oswald, Richard; Peace Negotiations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hamer, Philip M., et al., eds. The Papers of Henry Laurens. 14 vols. to date. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press 1968–.

Wallace, David Duncan. The Life of Henry Laurens. New York: Putnam, 1915.

                                revised by Michael Bellesiles