page_title: Panton, Leslie & Company
section_title: Scots immigrants and the deerskin trade
hierarchical_section_title: Panton, Leslie & Company / History / Scots immigrants and the deerskin trade
caption_attribution_description: English: Yellow buckskin breeches, late 18th century, from the George C. Neumann Collection, Valley Forge National Historical Park
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: John Gordon, a Scots immigrant from Aberdeenshire, established a vast trade network in colonial South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida during the 1760s, thus laying the foundation of Panton, Leslie, and Company, which would become the largest mercantile company on the southern frontier.
  After immigrating to the American colonies, William Panton and John Forbes, Thomas's younger brother, had done business with James Spalding (a trader who settled at St. Simons Island) and his partners before 1776 through Gordon's Charleston firm. Panton served as Gordon's clerk from 1765 until 1772, when Gordon appointed him one of his attorneys;
  Forbes was Gordon's maternal nephew.
  The firm's five founding partners—William Panton, Thomas Forbes, John Leslie, William Alexander, and Charles McLatchy—formed Panton, Leslie & Company at St. Augustine, the capital of British East Florida, in late 1782 or early 1783. They were all Scotsmen who had traded with the colonists and Indians of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida before and during the American Revolution. It was a matter of survival for them to remain loyal to the Kingdom of Great Britain, as most of their trade goods, especially guns, lead, and gunpowder, came from the mother country, and rebelling against the British would have cut off those supplies.
  Between 1710 and 1714, European cattle stocks had been devastated by deadly bovine diseases, causing Britain to prohibit the importation of cowhides from continental Europe.  As those supplies declined, the market for deerskins from British North America and Spanish Florida had expanded rapidly. Buckskin was used in place of cowhide to manufacture saddles, leggings, shoes, gloves, harnesses, whips, breeches, and aprons; by the middle of the 18th century, yellow buckskin breeches, formerly the working garb of common laborers, were worn by members of all social classes in England.
  The southern deerskin trade declined gradually after the American Revolutionary War, but the resourceful Scottish merchants found new opportunities for trade with the Indians even as they lost political and economic influence in the former British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. Panton, Leslie & Company and its successor, John Forbes & Company, were actively involved in Indian affairs and had sway over international diplomacy in the region. All the original partners were from northern Scotland. Panton, Leslie, and Forbes were born on the coast east of Inverness overlooking the Moray Firth; the birthplaces of McLatchy and Alexander are unknown. As staunch loyalists, the Scotsmen fled to St. Augustine during the war, and were allowed to stay when Spain regained Florida by the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1783. The Spanish crown found it useful to sanction Panton Leslie & Company's trade with the Creeks and Seminoles, and allowed the firm to sell them British guns, ammunition, rum, and various dry goods as a means of solidifying the Spaniards' alliance with these southern tribes.
  As early as 1776, Panton had 32,000 deerskins stored in his main warehouse: his other enterprises included naval stores, lumber, a rice and indigo plantation, and tracts of land. In the 1780s he and his partner Thomas Forbes were granted thousands of acres of land west of present-day Palatka; here they used slave labor to build drainage canals and dikes for a rice plantation, as well as to grow indigo and tap pine trees for naval stores such as turpentine, pitch, tar, and rosin.
caption: Yellow buckskin breeches, late 18th century, from the George C. Neumann Collection, Valley Forge National Historical Park
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