THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2024 43 A Misleading Vestige The significance of the enslaved Africans shipped from Bance Island (now known as Bunce Island) to Charleston has not been lost—but not in ways that Laurens would have anticipated. The contributions by their American descendants to our country’s development and diversity have been significant. To recognize that connection and to bear witness to the horrors of the slave trade in which Laurens and Oswald engaged, the Department of State made grants from the Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation to Syracuse University in 2007 and the World Monuments Fund in 2017 to protect the remaining ruins on Bunce Island. As former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in his 1995 autobiography My American Journey, when visiting Bunce Island in 1992: “I felt something stirring in me that I had not thought much about before. … I am an American. … But today I am something more. I am an African too. I feel my roots, here in this continent.” Hilton’s portrayal of Laurens as a hero of American diplomacy and a precursor to the Foreign Service that rests in the archives of The Foreign Service Journal is a misleading vestige of an era when the complicity of our Founding Fathers in slavery was overlooked. This needs to be rectified by telling the truth of who Henry Laurens was and what he represented. His values were not the “cornerstone” of the Foreign Service. Although it has been asserted that he renounced slavery at the end of his life, he still owned 298 slaves shortly before he died in 1794. n Laurens was equating human beings with property in a founding document of the United States.
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