page_title: Panton, Leslie & Company
section_title: Exploitation of Native Americans and use of African slaves
hierarchical_section_title: Panton, Leslie & Company / History / Exploitation of Native Americans and use of African slaves
caption_attribution_description: English: Panton, Leslie &amp; Company reorganized in 1804 as John Forbes and Company, then sought to collect on its claims of debt against the Seminoles and the Lower Creeks. The Indians agreed to settle their debt by ceding land in 1804 and 1811 to the Spanish government, which conveyed the deeds for more than 1.2 million acres of land to its creditors, John Forbes and Company; this became known as the “Forbes Purchase". These grants comprised a huge tract of land on the Gulf of Mexico between the Apalachicola and Wakulla Rivers in West Florida, extending inland twenty to thirty miles.
context_page_description: Panton, Leslie & Company was a company of Scottish merchants active in trading in the Bahamas and with the Native Americans of what is now the Southeastern United States during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
  Panton, Leslie & Company was a partnership formed in 1783 at St. Augustine, capital of British East Florida, by William Panton, John Leslie, Thomas Forbes, Charles McLatchy and William Alexander, for the purpose of trading with the Indians of Florida and adjacent territory claimed by Spain. The partners, who were Loyalists, had been forced out of the United States during the American Revolutionary War, with their property confiscated. Having established themselves in Florida and the Bahamas, the company was able to continue operating in Florida after the colony's return to Spain in 1783 because there were no Spanish traders doing business with the region's Indians. Panton, Leslie & Company were granted a monopoly on this trade in East Florida, and eventually also dominated the Indian trade in West Florida.
  For many years Panton, Leslie & Company dominated trade with the Creeks and Seminoles.
context_section_description: After its archenemy, the adventurer and self-styled "Director General of the Muskogee Nation", William Augustus Bowles, had been sent to Morro prison at Havana in 1783, Panton, Leslie & Company emerged as a multinational power broker acting in league with the plantation masters of the lower South. For almost twenty years deerskins acquired from the Creeks and Seminoles had been shipped in the company's vessels to its massive warehouse in Nassau, where they were stored with other trade goods purchased from markets in the southeast for redistribution to the mainland markets. Some bulk goods were sold to Bahamian merchants for retailing locally and in the outer islands; this Bahamian trade was managed by John Forbes. The company also was part owner of the salt works on Providence Island, the product of which was sent to Pensacola where it was vended to the Indians for high profits.
  The company controlled the East Florida trade with a dozen posts, including five on both banks of the St. Johns River. In West Florida, the Pensacola store alone took in 250,000 hides in a peak year. Panton's salt works dried fish and tanned hides; Leslie's lumbermen on the St. Johns cut timber for sale in the West Indies where wood was scarce, and his drovers herded cattle to be slaughtered for salt beef.  At such trading stores as Almacén de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción on the river's west bank, slaves tended  the company's corn and vegetable crops fields, herded cattle, and tanned deerskins from the Indian towns. Other slaves processed the hides for export at the warehouse in St. Augustine.
  The travel writer John Pope, who visited the region in 1790 on his tour of the southern and western territories of the United States, inquired into the accounting of profits generated by the Indian trade, and concluded that William Panton generally sold his goods at 500 percent of prime cost. From its earliest days the trade had yielded high returns: the apparently enormous profits were a matter of concern to some government officials and the leaders of the Creeks. Yet this business did involve risk and substantial legitimate expenses.
  As in Louisiana, the Spanish government took advantage of the system already in place, adapting it to its own purposes. Panton, Leslie & Company, under very liberal terms from the Spanish point of view, held their monopoly as long as the Spanish controlled Florida; their influence with the Indians was essential to Spanish policy in its relations with the various tribes, and an important means of maintaining Spanish interests in the region before the surrender of the whole country to the United States.
  Over the years, the Chickasaws, the Choctaws, and the Creeks had incurred enormous debts to Panton, Leslie & Company; they eventually ceded millions of acres of land to the United States, using the proceeds to pay off those debts. This resulted in the United States acquiring millions of acres of land within the current boundaries of Alabama and Mississippi.
  Among the most active firms and merchants participating in the slave trade of East and West Florida were Panton, Leslie & Company, Arredondo and Son, Zephaniah Kingsley, and John Fraser. Individually and jointly they imported at least ten groups of captive Africans, totaling 1,260 people, to Florida between 1802 and 1811.
caption: Panton, Leslie & Company reorganized in 1804 as John Forbes & Company, then sought to collect on its claims of debt against the Seminoles and the Lower Creeks. The Indians agreed to settle their debt by ceding land in 1806 and 1811 to the Spanish government, which conveyed the deeds for more than 1.2 million acres of land to its creditors, John Forbes & Company; this became known as the "Forbes Purchase". These grants comprised a tract of land on the Gulf of Mexico between the Apalachicola and Wakulla Rivers in Florida, extending inland twenty to thirty miles.
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