THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2024 41 NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY A portrait of Henry Laurens by John Singleton Copley, 1782. Hilton’s article relates how Laurens, en route to the Netherlands to negotiate a commercial treaty during the Revolutionary War, was captured by the British Royal Navy and incarcerated in the Tower of London. Upon being released, he participated in negotiation of the Treaty of Paris that officially recognized American independence from Britain. Although obscure today, Laurens was no ordinary envoy: He had been president of the Continental Congress when the Articles of Confederation establishing our first national government were enacted. Hilton’s sympathetic portrayal of Laurens as a model of loyalty, suffering, and professional perseverance for modern Foreign Service officers to emulate may have seemed appropriate when written more than a half century ago. Now we view our country’s Founding Fathers through a wider lens as we reconcile our past with our ideals. In the case of Laurens, these aspects would include his leading role in slavery, how that was reflected in the Treaty of Paris, and how it affected U.S. foreign relations in the decades to follow. “A Cosmopolitan Product of the Times” Hilton tells us vaguely that Laurens was “a cosmopolitan product of the South Carolina plantation and mercantile society of the times.” This phrase smoothly obfuscates that Laurens owned six plantations with hundreds of slaves and was the largest slave importer in the American colonies in the 1750s and into the 1760s, thereby making him one of the wealthiest Americans at the time of the Revolution, according to Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family (1998). Hilton also informs us that while Laurens was in the tower, “his imprisonment … brought pressure from influential Englishmen for his release” without specifying who they were. The most influential was Richard Oswald, a wealthy merchant, financier, and confidant to the prime minister. He was also a prominent slave trader. Sir Simon Schama describes Oswald in his book Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2005) as “a slave trader who had made a cool fortune from his slaving entrepôt of Bance Island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone river, where he bought slaves from the Temne people. And when those human cargoes had docked at Charleston en route to being auctioned for the low country plantations of South Carolina it was none other than Henry Laurens who took a nice ten per cent of the transaction.” These slaves were the economic engine of the Carolinas and Georgia in the 1700s because they brought skills from West Africa’s Rice Coast that the British lacked. Rice was the primary product of those colonies long before cotton and was the main source of wealth for Laurens and other plantation owners. This commercial relationship proved significant when Oswald was named the lead British negotiator of the Treaty of Paris and Laurens was added to the American delegation. Due to poor health exacerbated by the damp chill and foul air while in the tower, Laurens went to the south of France to recuperate and only joined fellow peace commissioners Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and John Adams on the final day of negotiations, Nov. 29, 1782. Laurens’ Obfuscations Hilton, citing Adams, makes the point that Laurens put forth, and the negotiators accepted, a proposal that the British reimburse the Americans for any property that they took when
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