page_title: Henry Laurens
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Laurens / Political career
caption_attribution_description: Benjamin West, American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain, 1783-1784, London, England. (oil on canvas, unfinished sketch), Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware, gift of Henry Francis du Pont. From left to right: John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin. The British commissioners refused to pose, and the picture was never finished.
context_page_description: Henry Laurens was an American merchant, slave trader, and rice planter from South Carolina who became a political leader during the Revolutionary War. A delegate to the Second Continental Congress, Laurens succeeded John Hancock as President of the Congress. He was a signatory to the Articles of Confederation and President of the Continental Congress when the Articles were passed on November 15, 1777.
  Laurens had earned great wealth as a partner in the largest slave-trading house in North America, Austin and Laurens. In the 1750s alone, this Charleston firm oversaw the sale of more than 8,000 enslaved Africans.
  Laurens served for a time as Vice-President of South Carolina, and as the United States Minister to the Netherlands during the Revolutionary War. He was captured at sea by the British, and imprisoned for several years in the Tower of London.
  His oldest son, John Laurens, was an aide-de-camp to George Washington and a colonel in the Continental Army.
context_section_description: Henry Laurens served in the militia, as did most able-bodied men in his time.  He rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel in the campaigns against the Cherokee Indians in 1757–1761, during the French and Indian War (also known as the Seven Years' War).
  1757 also marked the first year he was elected to the colonial assembly. Laurens was elected again every year but one until the Revolution replaced the assembly with a state Convention as an interim government.  The year he missed was 1773, when he visited England to arrange for his sons' educations.  He was named to the colony's Council in 1764 and 1768, but declined both times.  In 1772 he joined the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, and carried on extensive correspondence with other members.
  As the American Revolution neared, Laurens was at first inclined to support reconciliation with the British Crown. But as conditions deteriorated, he came to fully support the American position.  When Carolina began to create a revolutionary government, Laurens was elected to the Provincial Congress, which first met on January 9, 1775.  He was president of the Committee of Safety, and presiding officer of that congress from June until March 1776.  When South Carolina installed a fully independent government, he served as the Vice President of South Carolina from March 1776 to June 27, 1777.
  Henry Laurens was first named a delegate to the Continental Congress on January 10, 1777.  He served in the Congress from until 1780.  He was the President of the Continental Congress from November 1, 1777 to December 9, 1778.
  In the fall of 1779, the Congress named Laurens their minister to the Netherlands. In early 1780 he took up that post and successfully negotiated Dutch support for the war.  But on his return voyage to Amsterdam that fall, the British frigate Vestal intercepted his ship, the continental packet Mercury, off the banks of Newfoundland. Although his dispatches were tossed in the water, they were retrieved by the British, who discovered the draft of a possible U.S.-Dutch treaty prepared in Aix-la-Chapelle in 1778 by William Lee and the Amsterdam banker Jean de Neufville.  This prompted Britain to declare war on the Dutch Republic, it becoming known as the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War.
  The British charged Laurens with treason, transported him to England, and imprisoned him in the Tower of London (he is the only American to have been held prisoner in the Tower).  His imprisonment was protested by the Americans.  In the field, most captives were regarded as prisoners of war, and while conditions were frequently appalling, prisoner exchanges and mail privileges were accepted practice. During his imprisonment, Laurens was assisted by Richard Oswald, his former business partner and the principal owner of Bunce Island, a slave-trading island base in the Sierra Leone River.  Oswald argued on Laurens' behalf to the British government. Finally, on December 31, 1781 he was released in exchange for General Lord Cornwallis and completed his voyage to Amsterdam. He helped raise funds for the American effort.
  Laurens' oldest son, Colonel John Laurens, was killed in 1782 in the Battle of the Combahee River, as one of the last casualties of the Revolutionary War. He had supported enlisting and freeing slaves for the war effort, and suggested to his father that he begin with the 40 he stood to inherit.  He had urged his father to free the family's slaves, but although conflicted, Henry Laurens never manumitted his 260 slaves.
  In 1783 Laurens was sent to Paris as one of the Peace Commissioners for the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris.  While he was not a signatory of the primary treaty, he was instrumental in reaching the secondary accords that resolved issues related to the Netherlands and Spain.  Richard Oswald, a former partner of Laurens in the slave trade, was the principal negotiator for the British during the Paris peace talks.
  Laurens generally retired from public life in 1784.  He was sought for a return to the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the
caption: Treaty of Paris, by Benjamin West, 1783 (left to right: John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin)
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