John Laurens (October 28, 1754 – August 27, 1782) was an American soldier and statesman from South Carolina during the American Revolutionary War, best known for his efforts to help recruit slaves to fight for their freedom as U.S. soldiers.
In 1779, Laurens gained approval from the Continental Congress for his plan to recruit a brigade of 3,000 slaves by promising them freedom in return for fighting. The plan was defeated by political opposition in South Carolina. Laurens was killed in the Battle of the Combahee River in August 1782.
Early life and education John Laurens was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on October 28, 1754, to Henry Laurens and Eleanor Ball Laurens, both of whose families were prosperous as planters cultivating rice. He had French heritage and spoke the language fluently.
John was the eldest of the five children who survived infancy. John and his two younger brothers, Henry Jr. and James, were tutored at home, but after the death of their mother, their father took them to England for their education. His two sisters, Martha and Mary Eleanor, remained with their paternal uncle James in Charleston.
By the 1750s, the elder Laurens and his business partner George Austin had become wealthy as owners of one of the largest slave trading houses in North America.
In May 1770, Laurens's mother died a month after giving birth to his last sibling, Mary Eleanor Laurens, who was one of the five to survive to maturity.
In October 1771, Laurens's father moved with his sons to London, and Laurens was educated in Europe from the ages of 16 to 22. For two years beginning in June 1772, he and one brother attended school in Geneva, Switzerland, where they lived with a family friend.
As a youth, Laurens had expressed considerable interest in science and medicine, and later in life, he would be elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. However, upon returning to London in August 1774, he yielded to his father's wish that he study law. In November 1774, Laurens began his legal studies at the Middle Temple. Laurens's father returned to Charleston, leaving Laurens as guardian to his brothers, both enrolled in British schools.
Military and diplomatic career Service as Washington's aide-de-camp
Laurens arrived at Charleston in April 1777. That summer he accompanied his father from Charleston to Philadelphia, where his father was to serve in the Continental Congress. Henry Laurens, finding himself unable to prevent his son from joining the Continental Army, was able to obtain a position of honor for his 23-year-old son.
General George Washington invited Laurens to join his staff in early August, as a volunteer aide-de-camp. Washington wrote:
Laurens became close friends with two of his fellow aides-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette. He quickly became known for his reckless courage upon first seeing combat on September 11, 1777, at the Battle of Brandywine during the Philadelphia campaign. Lafayette observed, "It was not his fault that he was not killed or wounded [at Brandywine,] he did everything that was necessary to procure one or t'other." Laurens behaved with similar recklessness at the Battle of Germantown, in which he was wounded on October 4, 1777:
Two days after the Battle of Germantown, on October 6, 1777, he was given his official appointment as one of General Washington's aides-de-camp, and was commissioned with the rank of lieutenant colonel. From November 2 to December 11, 1777, Washington and several aides, including Laurens, were quartered at the Emlen House, north of Philadelphia in Camp Hill, which served as Washington's headquarters through the Battle of White Marsh.
After spending the remainder of the winter of 1777–1778 encamped at Valley Forge, Laurens marched to New Jersey around June 1778, to fight in the Battle of Monmouth. Near the start of battle, Laurens had his horse shot out from under him while he did reconnaissance for Baron von Steuben.
On December 23, 1778, Laurens engaged in a duel with General Charles Lee just outside Philadelphia, after Laurens took offense to Lee's slander of Washington's character. Lee was wounded in the side by Laurens's first shot, and Laurens, believing the wound was more serious than it seemed, went to help the general. However, Lee said it was fine and proposed to shoot a second time. The men's seconds, Alexander Hamilton and Evan Edwards, opposed this idea and had the duel end there, despite Lee's protests to fire again and Laurens's agreement.
Anti-slavery statements and recruitment of black soldiers
As the British stepped up operations in the South, Laurens promoted the idea of arming slaves and granting them freedom in return for their service. He had written, "We Americans at least in the Southern Colonies, cannot contend with a good Grace, for Liberty, until we shall have enfranchised our Slaves." Laurens was set apart from other leaders in Revolutionary-era South Carolina by his belief that black and white people shared a similar nature and could aspire to freedom in a republican society.
In early 1778, Laurens advised his father, who was then the President of the Continental Congress, to use forty slaves he stood to inherit as part of a brigade. Henry Laurens granted the request, but with reservations that caused postponement of the project.
Congress approved the concept of a regiment of slaves in March 1779, and sent Laurens south to recruit a regiment of 3,000 black soldiers; however, the plan was opposed, and Laurens was ultimately unsuccessful. Having won election to the South Carolina House of Representatives, Laurens introduced his black regiment plan in 1779, again in 1780, and a third time in 1782, meeting overwhelming rejection each time. Governor John Rutledge and General Christopher Gadsden were among the opponents.
Battles in South Carolina In 1779, when the British threatened Charleston, Governor Rutledge proposed to surrender the city with the condition that Carolina become neutral in the war. Laurens strongly opposed the idea and fought with Continental forces to repel the British.
Battle of Coosawhatchie
On May 3, 1779, Colonel William Moultrie's troops, outnumbered two to one, faced 2,400 British regulars under General Augustine Prevost, who had crossed the Savannah River. At a point about two miles east of the Coosawhatchie River, Moultrie had left 100 men to guard a river crossing and provide warning when the British arrived.
Due to Laurens's connections, his activities could not escape notice; for example, in a May 5 letter to the governor of Virginia, South Carolina's lieutenant governor Thomas Bee added a postscript: "Col. John Laurens received a slight wound in the arm in a skirmish with the enemy's advanced party yesterday, & his horse was shot also – he is in a good way – pray let his father know this."
Battles of Savannah and Charleston That fall, Laurens commanded an infantry regiment in General Benjamin Lincoln's failed assault on Savannah, Georgia.
Prisoner of war Laurens was taken prisoner by the British in May 1780, after the fall of Charleston. As a prisoner of war, he was shipped to Philadelphia, where he was paroled with the condition that he would not leave Pennsylvania.
In Philadelphia, Laurens was able to visit his father, who would soon take ship for the Netherlands as American ambassador, in search of loans. During the voyage to his post, Henry Laurens's ship was seized by the British, resulting in the elder Laurens's imprisonment in the Tower of London.
Determined to return to South Carolina, and in the expectation of being freed by a prisoner exchange in November 1780, Laurens wrote to George Washington and requested a leave of absence from his service as aide-de-camp:
Washington responded, "The motives which led you to the Southward are too laudable and too important not to meet my approbation."
Diplomatic mission to France Upon his release, Laurens was unwillingly appointed by Congress in December 1780 as a special minister to France. Preferring to return to the South, he had originally refused the post and proposed Alexander Hamilton as the better candidate. Laurens was ultimately persuaded by both Hamilton and Congress to accept the post. He wrote again to advise Washington that "unfortunately for America, Col. Hamilton was not sufficiently known to Congress to unite their suffrages in his favor and I was assured there remained no other alternative to my acceptance than the total failure of the business. Thus circumstanced I was reduced to submit—and renounce my plan of participating in the southern campaign."
In March 1781, Laurens and Thomas Paine arrived in France to assist Benjamin Franklin, who had been serving as the American minister in Paris since 1777. Together, they met with King Louis XVI, among others. Laurens gained French assurances that French ships would support American operations that year; the promised naval support was later to prove invaluable at the Siege of Yorktown.
Laurens was also reported to have told the French that without aid for the Revolution, the Americans might be forced by the British to fight against France. When Laurens and Paine returned to America in August 1781, they brought 2.5 million livres in silver, the first part of a French gift of 6 million and a loan of 10 million.
Laurens also was able to arrange a loan and supplies from the Dutch, before returning home. His father Henry Laurens, the American ambassador to the Netherlands who had been captured by the British, was exchanged for General Cornwallis in late 1781, and the senior Laurens had proceeded to the Netherlands to continue loan negotiations.
British surrender at Yorktown
Laurens returned from France in time to see the French fleet arrive and to join Washington in Virginia at the siege of Yorktown. He was given command of a battalion of light infantry on October 1, 1781, when its commander was killed. Laurens, under the command of Colonel Alexander Hamilton, led the battalion in the storming of Redoubt No. 10 on October 14.
British troops surrendered on October 17, 1781, and Washington appointed Laurens as the American commissioner for drafting formal terms of the British surrender. Louis-Marie, Vicomte de Noailles, a relative of Lafayette's wife, was chosen by Rochambeau to represent the interests of France. At Moore House on October 18, 1781, Laurens and the French commissioner negotiated terms with two British representatives, and the articles of capitulation were signed by General Cornwallis the following day.
Return to Charleston Laurens returned to South Carolina, where he continued to serve in the Continental Army under General Nathanael Greene until his death. As head of Greene's "intelligence department", stationed on the outskirts of the city near Wappoo Creek, Laurens created and operated a network of spies who tracked British operations in and around Charleston, and was given responsibility for guarding Greene's lines of secret communication with the British-occupied city.
Death On August 27, 1782, at the age of 27, Laurens was shot from his saddle during the Battle of the Combahee River, as one of the last casualties of the Revolutionary War. Laurens died in what General Greene described sadly as "a paltry little skirmish" with a foraging party, only a few weeks before the British finally withdrew from Charleston.
Laurens had been confined to bed at Wappoo Creek with a raging fever for several days, possibly due to malaria. When he learned that the British were sending a large force out of Charleston to gather supplies, he left his sickbed, "wrote a hurried note to Gen. Greene, and, in disregard of his orders and the important duties with which he had been charged—a practice which the loose discipline of the American forces rendered not unusual—put off for the scene of action."