Scots immigrants and the deerskin trade John Gordon, a
Scots immigrant from
Aberdeenshire, established a vast trade network in colonial South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida during the 1760s, thus laying the foundation of Panton, Leslie, and Company, which would become the largest
mercantile company on the southern frontier. After immigrating to the American colonies, William Panton and John Forbes, Thomas's younger brother, had done business with James Spalding (a trader who settled at
St. Simons Island) and his partners before 1776 through Gordon's Charleston firm. Panton served as Gordon's clerk from 1765 until 1772, when Gordon appointed him one of his attorneys; Forbes was Gordon's maternal nephew. The firm's five founding partners—William Panton, Thomas Forbes, John Leslie, William Alexander, and Charles McLatchy—formed Panton, Leslie & Company at St. Augustine, the capital of British East Florida, in late 1782 or early 1783. They were all Scotsmen who had traded with the colonists and Indians of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida before and during the American Revolution. It was a matter of survival for them to remain loyal to the
Kingdom of Great Britain, as most of their trade goods, especially guns, lead, and gunpowder, came from the mother country, and rebelling against the British would have cut off those supplies. The southern
deerskin trade declined gradually after the
American Revolutionary War, but the resourceful Scottish merchants found new opportunities for trade with the Indians even as they lost political and economic influence in the former British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. Panton, Leslie & Company and its successor, John Forbes & Company, were actively involved in Indian affairs and had sway over international diplomacy in the region. All the original partners were from northern Scotland. Panton, Leslie, and Forbes were born on the coast east of
Inverness overlooking the
Moray Firth; the birthplaces of McLatchy and Alexander are unknown. As staunch loyalists, the Scotsmen fled to
St. Augustine during the war, and were allowed to stay when Spain regained Florida by the terms of the
Treaty of Paris of 1783. The
Spanish crown found it useful to sanction Panton Leslie & Company's trade with the Creeks and Seminoles, and allowed the firm to sell them British guns, ammunition, rum, and various dry goods as a means of solidifying the Spaniards' alliance with these southern tribes. As early as 1776, Panton had 32,000 deerskins stored in his main warehouse: his other enterprises included naval stores, lumber, a rice and indigo plantation, and tracts of land. In the 1780s he and his partner Thomas Forbes were granted thousands of acres of land west of present-day
Palatka; here they used slave labor to build drainage canals and dikes for a rice plantation, as well as to grow indigo and tap pine trees for naval stores such as
turpentine,
pitch,
tar, and
rosin.
Monopoly of the Indian trade In January 1783 a conference was held in St. Augustine between the representatives of the British crown—Governor
Patrick Tonyn, Brigadier General Archibald McArthur, and
Thomas Brown, the superintendent of Indian affairs—and the head men and principal warriors of the towns of the Upper and the Lower Creeks, who complained of the long distance they must travel to the stores from which they obtained their supplies. The Indians offered protection to merchants who would move their stores to locations closer to their territory, and pointed out the
Apalachicola River as a suitable place for a trading house. The Creeks said it was not only more convenient for themselves, but also much nearer to the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Indians, and requested that the house of Panton, Leslie, & Co., who had been supplying them with goods, should be solicited to settle there for that purpose. William Panton was present at the conference, and agreed with the Indians to establish a store at such a place as he or his co-partners might find suitable on the Apalachicola River, provided that letters of license were issued to him and his partners William Alexander, John Leslie, Thomas Forbes, and Charles McLatchy. The agreement was confirmed by the Crown, and the traders were granted the necessary license. Their store opened in 1784, by which time Spain had regained possession of Florida, at
Fort San Marcos de Apalache (modern
St. Marks, Florida). This store was attacked and looted by the adventurer
William Augustus Bowles in 1792 and again in 1800, at which point it ceased operations. Many different traders and trading houses had vied for a share of the Indian trade on the southern frontier, but few survived long. Panton, Leslie & Company made an alliance with
Alexander McGillivray, the quarter-blood leader of the Upper Creeks, who became a virtual silent partner in the concern. William Panton knew his father,
Lachlan McGillivray, a prosperous Scots planter and a deerskin trader himself, and had recognized Alexander's ability since he was a child. By 1786, when Spain granted Panton, Leslie & Company a monopoly over the Indian trade in East and West Florida, the firm owned 250 slaves and nineteen individual land grants in the Floridas encompassing 12,820 acres. Most of the slaves worked on company plantations and cattle ranches, but a few had specialized jobs: e.g., the company rented out its slave Langueste to the Spanish government as an Indian interpreter. Working in partnership with Alexander McGillivray, Panton, Leslie & Company were able to expand their operations from East Florida and the Bahamas to the
Mississippi River. Panton had promised McGillivray a one-fifth share of the company's profits once it obtained Spanish approval. With headquarters at Spanish
Pensacola, by 1795 the company had a near monopoly on trade with Native American tribes in the southeast, and westward as far as
New Orleans, with posts at
Mobile and several locations in Florida, the Bahamas, and around the Caribbean. The Indian trade was generally an exchange between the colonies and Native Americans of the commodities each party desired but did not produce. The company was a major buyer from the Indians of hogs and cattle: either live on the hoof, as smoked or salted meat, or as skins. It also purchased indigo plants, hides, furs, corn, cattle, tallow, pitch, tar, hickory nut oil, tobacco, myrtle wax, salted wild beef, sassafras, canes and truck produce in exchange for weapons, gunpowder, tools, cloths, dyes, liquor, and various trinkets. Packhorse trains were outfitted with European-made goods—primarily guns, powder, flint, rum, and various dry goods—at Pensacola and the company's other warehouses, then sent to Indian villages in the interior, from which they returned with deerskins, furs, bear oil, honey, and foodstuffs. The company's agents ran stores in Indian villages scattered from the
St. Johns River in East Florida to the Mississippi, and from the
Gulf coast to Tennessee. The depot at Pensacola comprised a store and warehouses where the furs and skins were sorted and packed for shipment to foreign markets in
schooners or
brigantines belonging to the firm's fleet of fifteen vessels.
Exploitation of Native Americans and use of African slaves Rivers in Florida, extending inland twenty to thirty miles. After its archenemy, the adventurer and self-styled "Director General of the Muskogee Nation"
William Augustus Bowles, had been sent to
Morro prison at
Havana in 1783, Panton, Leslie & Company emerged as a multinational power broker acting in league with the plantation masters of the lower South. For almost twenty years, deerskins acquired from the Creeks and Seminoles had been shipped in the company's vessels to its massive warehouse in
Nassau, where they were stored with other trade goods purchased from markets in the southeast for redistribution to the mainland markets to the north. Some bulk goods were sold to Bahamian merchants for retailing locally and in the outer islands; this Bahamian trade was managed by John Forbes. The company controlled the East Florida trade with a dozen posts, including five on both banks of the St. Johns River. In West Florida, the Pensacola store alone took in 250,000 hides in a peak year. Panton's salt works dried fish and tanned hides; Leslie's lumbermen on the St. Johns cut timber for sale in the West Indies where wood was scarce, and his
drovers herded cattle to be slaughtered for salt beef. At such trading stores as Almacén de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción on the river's west bank, slaves tended the company's corn and vegetable crops fields, herded cattle, and tanned deerskins from the Indian towns. Other slaves processed the hides for export at the warehouse in St. Augustine. The travel writer
John Pope, who visited the region in 1790 on his tour of the southern and western
territories of the United States, inquired into the accounting of profits generated by the Indian trade, and concluded that William Panton generally sold his goods at 500 percent of cost. From its earliest days the trade had yielded high returns: the apparently enormous profits were a matter of concern to some government officials and the leaders of the Creeks. Yet this business did involve risk and substantial legitimate expenses. As in Louisiana, the Spanish government took advantage of the system already in place, adapting it to its own purposes. Panton, Leslie & Company, under very liberal terms from the Spanish point of view, held their monopoly as long as the Spanish controlled Florida; their influence with the Indians was essential to Spanish policy in its relations with the various tribes, and an important means of maintaining Spanish interests in the region before the surrender of all of Florida to the United States in 1821. The Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks rarely dealt with numbers and prices; their sales of hides and purchases of ammunition, weapons, liquor, and other goods took place on the
barter system. Panton, Leslie & Company were there to make a profit, buying low and selling high. As they had a monopoly, prices were whatever they wanted them to be. The old native way of life was largely gone; the natives were dependent on European-style products. The price (credit towards barter) Panton, Leslie, and Company paid for hides was low, the goods the natives purchased were expensive, and the result was that the natives went into
company store-like debt, which grew until it was enormous. To pay this debt the natives were persuaded to cede millions of acres (millions of ha) of land to the company. This land was within the current states of Alabama and Mississippi. Among the most active firms and merchants participating in the slave trade of East and West Florida were Panton, Leslie & Company, Arredondo and Son,
Zephaniah Kingsley, and John Fraser. Individually and jointly they imported at least ten groups of captive Africans, totaling 1,260 people, to Florida between 1802 and 1811. From Florida they were exported northwards, to
Georgia and the
Carolinas ==Archival material==