Henry Laurens (323)
Election date: 1772Henry Laurens (24 February/6 March 1724–8 December 1792) was a planter-merchant, enslaver, trader, and public officeholder, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1772. He was born in Charleston, South Carolina to a wealthy family. In 1744 he apprenticed under a prominent London merchant for three years before returning to Charleston after his father died. With his inheritance, he opened an export business dealing in deerskins, rice, rum, and slaves. He held 20,000 acres in plantation land as well as multiple residential properties. He accepted an election to the Assembly in 1757. Laurens believed that the crown did not respect the rights of its colonial citizens and declined an appointment to the Royal Council for this reason in 1764. However, he was also apprehensive of the growing revolutionary zeal: he declared unabashedly his fealty to British law after the Sons of Liberty raided his basement during the Stamp Act crisis in 1765. Yet as tensions between Britain and the Colonies increased, his sympathies shifted towards independence: in 1774 he joined the first South Carolina Congress, became its president in 1775, and in 1776 he fought to defend Charleston. Seeing the inconsistency in his claim of exploitation by the hands of the British and his own slaveholding, Laurens freed the hundreds of enslaved people working on his plantation. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1779, also serving as its President from 1777–1778. In 1780, British naval forces captured him at sea, en route to the Netherlands. The crown charged him with treason and held him in the tower of London. In captivity, his health declined; Benjamin Franklin secured his release in 1781. Still, Laurens joined Franklin at the peace conference in Paris before returning to New York in 1784. His now failing health, along with the news of his son’s death at the hands of British forces, weighed on him until his death. Quite uniquely, he requested that his former slaves build and ignite his funeral pyre. (ANB, DNB)
One edition.
Two editions: one in 1776 in Philadelphia and one in 1777 in Williamsburg. The second (1777) was the version approved by the Continental Congress.
Three editions: one in Philadelphia in 1768 and two in Charleston in 1769.
As ESTC notes, "Published by Henry Laurens, who wrote the explanatory remarks. The introduction and "General observations" were written by Benjamin Chew. Cf. Rogers, George C., ed. The papers of Henry Laurens, v. 6. Rogers supplies the printers' names.
"Mr. Roupell, a searcher belonging to the custom-house, had .. seized a vessel belonging to Henry Lawrens .. This is a short, plain state of the case .. held before the Honorable Egerton Leigh"--p. iv."
One edition. Place of publication from Adams.