From his desk on Tuesday, April 13, 1756, Henry pens his first extant letter to Richard Oswald, who would come to play a principal role in Laurens’s accumulation of wealth. A quarter century later he would save Laurens from the Tower of London.¹

Henry’s is a response to Oswald’s of two months prior. He acknowledges appreciation for “our worthy Friends,” Augustus and John Boyd, “for the confidence they repose in us by becoming our Security for a punctual Remittance of the Produce of your Slaves intended us by the Carlisle,” captained by Thomas Oswald.² The Boyd brothers were West Indian merchants in London. Henry likely met them during his time in the capital in the late 1740s. Here again we can see Henry making ample use of his growing transatlantic connections.

The provincial government’s inability to protect the backcountry following General Edward Braddock’s defeat along the Monongahela threw the Lowcountry into spasms, leaving Henry to suggest other options for Oswald’s human cargo. The current “Scene,” Henry wrote, “is so much alter’d for the worse within these” last several months that “we sincerely wish you may order the Sloop to a much better than our at present.”

Recent events were especially loathsome, Henry writes, because South Carolinians insatiably spent £330 “for some very prime Gambia men” just last fall. However, one would be lucky to unload similar men at two-thirds of that price.

1. Henry Laurens to Richard Oswald & Co., Charles Town, April 13, 1756, Papers of Henry Laurens, 2:169-170. ↩︎
2. Henry’s firm, Austin & Laurens, sold Gambian slaves brought across the Atlantic via Thomas Oswald’s Carlisle later that summer. South Carolina Gazette, July 1, 1756. ↩︎