Henry Laurens and Richard Oswald

Bance (also Bunce) Island lies in the Sierra Leone River, about twenty miles above Freetown. In 1748 the London merchant Richard Oswald joined Alexander Grant, the Boyds, John Sargent, and John Mill in acquiring it; Grant, Oswald & Co. ran it as a slave-trading fort for the next generation. Historians put the number of people shipped from the island to the Americas between 1748 and 1784 at about 13,000. Many of them went to South Carolina, where rice planters paid a premium for people from the rice-growing coast of West Africa.

Henry Laurens’s firm, Austin & Laurens, was the Charleston house that received and sold cargoes from Bance Island and from other ships, for a commission of ten percent. Scholars give different totals for the people sold through the firm: about 6,900 in one reckoning (Wallace, McDonough), more than 8,000 in the 1750s alone in another (the Brown University report of 2006), over some seventy voyages (Higgins). Laurens left the trade in the 1760s but went on planting with enslaved labor. He and Oswald corresponded and did business for decades; David Hancock, the historian of Oswald’s circle, calls it a lifelong friendship.

Captured at sea in 1780 on his way to Holland as an American envoy, Laurens was held in the Tower of London for fifteen months. On December 31, 1781, he was released on bail: bound in £4,000 himself, with two sureties in £2,000 each. The editors of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin identify the sureties as the merchants Richard Oswald and Alexander Anderson (or, in Laurens’s own account, John Anderson). He was fully discharged in April 1782, and Franklin, at Oswald’s request, discharged the parole of Lord Cornwallis, the British general who had surrendered at Yorktown, in exchange. Oswald, who had visited Laurens in the Tower as an unofficial go-between, was sent to Paris in the spring of 1782 as Britain’s negotiator with Franklin.

Laurens reached Paris on November 29, the day before the preliminary articles were signed. John Adams wrote in his diary that evening: “Mr. Laurens added the Plunders in Carolina of Negroes, Plate &c.” The next day: “Mr. Laurens said there ought to be a Stipulation that the British Troops should carry off no Negroes or other American Property. We all agreed. Mr. Oswald consented.” The words were written in between the lines of the eighth page of the fair copy. The attestation signed by Caleb Whitefoord and William Temple Franklin records that the words “or carrying away any Negroes, or other Property of the American Inhabitants” were “between the seventh and eighth Lines of the eighth Page, being first interlined,” as was Laurens’s own name on the first page.

Adams added, later in the same entry, that he was glad Laurens had come even for the last day, because of “the Article which he caused to be inserted at the very last that no Property should be carried off,” which “would most probably in the Multiplicity and hurry of Affairs have escaped Us.” No account by Franklin, Jay, Laurens, or Oswald of the insertion has been found. Adams is the only eyewitness narrative.

The definitive treaty was signed at Paris on September 3, 1783, by David Hartley for Britain and by Adams, Franklin, and Jay for the United States, with Oswald no longer in the British role and Laurens absent. Laurens had sailed for England on August 1, with his colleagues’ consent, to sound out whether an American minister would be received at the British court, and wrote them from London on August 9 that the ministers had said he would be. He passed through Paris that September on his way to a sick brother in the south of France. Adams wrote on September 10: “Mr. Laurens has been little with Us.” The seals and signatures shown on Board 2 are therefore four, not five.