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Panton, Leslie and Company, established in 1783 and
headquartered in Pensacola from 1785-1830, was the Sears and Roebuck of its day, dealing
in a variety of goods and servicing over a large geographical area. The company had
trading posts scattered as far north as Memphis (then known as Chickasaw Bluffs) and as
far west as New Orleans, including posts at Mobile and at several locations in Florida,
the Bahamas, and in the Caribbean.
William
Panton and John Leslie were merchants from Scotland who emigrated to Georgia. When the
American Revolution heated up, they—being Loyalists—relocated to St. Augustine
in British East Florida. Accompanying them were other Scots including Thomas Forbes,
William Alexander, and Charles McLatchy. They were all experienced merchants involved in
the Indian trade, and together they formed Panton, Leslie and Company (known as John
Forbes and Company after 1805).
By the time the Company received its license in 1783, British
East Florida had again become Spanish East Florida, and in 1784 we find John and Thomas
Forbes, William Alexander, and William Panton joining other loyalists in the Bahamas. In
1785, however, William Panton and John Forbes relocated again to Pensacola and established
the Company’s headquarters there.
By 1795 the company had a monopoly on the Indian trade from
present day Memphis to St. Augustine, possibly due to the fact that one of their Pensacola
stockholders (or partners according to one source) was Alexander McGillivray, chief of the
Creeks. They also traded with the Seminoles, Upper and Lower Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws,
Cherokees, and other Indian tribes. Even though under Spanish domination, many of these
tribes preferred British goods, and the Panton-Leslie Scots were favored traders. As a
result, by the late 1700s, the Company had annual business activities that exceeded
$200,000.
In 1795, when the northern boundary for the Floridas moved up
to the 31st parallel, Natchez and St. Stephens in Alabama became part of the United
States, making it harder for the Company to collect money owed to it by those residing in
that area, especially the Indians. However, through negotiations between the Company and
the U.S. Government, arrangements were made for such debts to be paid through the transfer
of property rights. As a result, Panton-Leslie was able to acquire, at one time, over
three million acres of land.
The territory of what we now
know as the State of Florida was, for most of the 2½ centuries between 1565
and 1819, a Spanish colony, or rather two colonies—East Florida, centered on
St. Augustine San Augustin in Spanish), and West Florida, centered on
Pensacola (Panzacola in Spanish). The one exception was East Florida between
1763 and 1783. After being a loser in the Seven Years War (French and Indian
War), Spain ceded East Florida to Britain in 1763. Britain, being the loser
in the American Revolution, ceded it back to Spain in 1783. The brief time
during which East Florida was a British colony coincides with the time of
the American Revolution. For geo-political reasons, East Florida became a
haven for loyalists fleeing the southern colonies of the Carolinas and
Georgia. After 1783, these loyalists found themselves living in Spanish
territory. Many left, but some chose to remain. Ironically, their ancestors
later became American citizens in the State of Florida.
Between 1783 and 1818, border hostilities smoldered between Spanish Florida
and the US State of Georgia (which initially stretched westward all the way
to the Mississippi River and northward to the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers).
White settlers moving into Georgia’s interior aggressively pushed Indians
off of their ancestral lands and tested the frontier borders between Georgia
and Florida. Spain considered the settlers’ actions to be provocations
threatening to Spanish sovereignty. Part of the Spanish response was
designed, by giving gifts and encouraging trade (especially providing the
Indians with guns, ammunition, and gunpowder), to obtain the ongoing
friendship of Indians living on their side of the border and to encourage
Indians living in the “wilderness” beyond to resist the expansion by
Georgians. Thus, governmental relations with Indian tribes became a
centerpiece of foreign policy for both Spain and the US.
By 1818, frontier hostilities had mushroomed into international conflict.
Hotheaded General Andrew Jackson, choosing to interpret his military orders
expansively, invaded Spanish West Florida, capturing both St. Marks (San
Marco in Spanish) and Pensacola. Thereafter, West Florida remained de facto
American territory. East Florida was ceded to the US the following year in
1819. In 1795, the border between Florida and Georgia had been set farther
south, in Jay’s Treaty between Spain and the US, at the 31st parallel. This
reduced the size of Florida but regularized the border line. After 1819,
Americans from both Georgia and Florida jointly participated in the
dislocation, relocation, and annihilation of the Indians. By 1838, most of
the remaining Indians in the Southeast were forced to follow a “Trail of
Tears” to be “resettled” in Oklahoma Territory. Florida remained a frontier
territory until finally becoming a state in 1845.
Characters in the Panton & Leslie Drama—both individual and institutional
William Panton (1842?-1801): Born in Scotland; immigrated to Charleston, SC
by the 1760s; became a coastal trader, soon moving his operation from
Charleston to Savannah, GA. He was a staunch loyalist before, during, and
after the American Revolution. This caused him to move his operation again,
by 1775, as the Revolutionary conflict was starting, to St. Augustine, East
Florida, then British territory and not a part of the American rebellion.
His trading operation prospered, and he decided to remain in Florida when it
again became Spanish.
Sometime in the 1770s, he met John Leslie (1749?-1803), another Scotsman who
came to the southern British colonies, became a trader, operating
independently of Panton, was also a loyalist, and also moved to St.
Augustine. (John’s brother Robert Leslie (1758?-1798) was also involved,
especially in the company’s Bahamas shipping operations.) In 1783, Panton
and Leslie established a joint trading company that would continue in
operation until the early 1840s. By 1784 they were expanding both into the
Bahamas and to St. Marks (once a sizeable coastal port town south of
present-day Tallahassee). By the late 1780s, Panton and Leslie moved their
operations to Pensacola in West Florida, also continuing to trade out of St.
Marks.
Early in their trading careers (separately, going back to their American
colonial days), Panton and Leslie had found the same lucrative niche for
their trading operations—1) providing supplies and munitions to colonial
governments (mostly early, to the British, but later, as well, to the
Spanish) and, more importantly, 2) trading with the Indian tribes of East
Florida and West Florida. In what was largely barter trading, the Indians
sold mostly “skins” (that is, furs and deerskins) and in return received
various supplies, including especially salt, rum, coffee, and munitions. For
some time, the traders ran a triangular shipping operation, selling “skins”
in London, picking up manufactured goods in London and agricultural goods in
the West Indies (especially New Providence and Nassau in the British Bahama
Islands), and delivering these goods to warehouses in East and West Florida,
from which they were sold to Indians or to the colonial government.
By the mid 1790s, the shifting complexities of hostilities in Europe among
Spain, Britain, and France severely limited the number of Spanish ships that
could transport goods from London to Florida, first to two and then to one
per year. During this period, Panton & Leslie’s ships plied mostly the route
between Florida and the Bahamas. At its height (around 1800), the company
was running 15 ocean-going ships plus numerous coastal boats. It had offices
in London, Nassau, Havana, St. Augustine, New Orleans, and Mobile. It also
had agents along the St. Johns River in East Florida, at St. Marks, near the
mouth of the St. Mary’s River (now the boundary between Florida and
Georgia), and at trading sites on the lower Apalachicola River and lower
Mississippi River.
Although Panton and Leslie’s main business was the Indian trade, they took
advantage of opportunity as it presented itself. For example, they
occasionally brought ships full of slaves into Pensacola and perhaps to
other ports. The company also owned at least one plantation with its own
slaves, a rice plantation along the middle St. Johns River in East Florida.
As a part of doing business as traders, the Panton & Leslie company needed
to acquire land in a variety of places. This necessitated additional
dealings with the Spanish authorities, who controlled land grants. The
papers contain a number of documents pertaining to the settlement of Panton
land claims by Spanish officials. The Spanish were crafty in this respect.
By retaining title to the lands on which the company leased space for stores
and warehouses, governmental authorities maintained the option of “evicting”
them at will.
Judging from the papers, Panton was clearly the “front man” and probably the
“brains” of the trading operation. Leslie seems to have been involved in
more of the detailed business of shipping and trading. Panton was reputed to
be a shrewd—but scrupulously fair—businessman. He was operating not in an
open, free market but in a closely regulated market, especially so because
he was dealing directly with colonial governments, Indian nations, and
merchants in foreign countries.
Relationships with the colonial government (first British and then Spanish)
were perhaps similar to those between modern US military contractors and the
Pentagon. Relationships with foreign-country merchants were regulated by the
mercantile laws, in this case, of both Spain and Great Britain (regulations
on what goods from one country could legally be transported by ships of what
country to what other country). Relationships with Indian nations were
regulated by treaties and by the Indian policies of the current colonial
government. These dynamics made the trading operation, in effect, an aspect
of governmental foreign policy as well as mercantile commerce.
Throughout his long trading career, Panton was amazingly consistent in his
primary goal in life—to make money. To succeed at making money, he sought to
negotiate and maintain monopoly trade arrangements with the colonial
government of the time. Secondarily, he remained a devoted British loyalist,
but he tried hard to submerge this motivation in order to ingratiate himself
with Spanish colonial officials for the benefit of his business, which
required him to take an oath of allegiance to the king of Spain (but not to
become Catholic).
Despite his best efforts, American settlers and traders kept intruding into
“his” territory, jeopardizing “his” monopolies and his profits. By 1794, he
was petitioning the Spanish government either to buy out his Indian trading
business (for 400,000 pesos) or to grant him a 10-year loan of the same
amount to make his continuing the business profitable. Although he raised
this issue at least once more, in 1797, the Spanish successfully stalled him
off, and he and Leslie kept the business going for the rest of Panton’s
life.
After Panton died in 1801 (he died at sea, but he was at sea trying to get
medical assistance, in Havana or the Bahamas, as his health was failing),
the company soon lost its trading monopolies. It continued in business,
under the management of brothers John and Thomas Forbes, who had been
involved in the company under Panton. But it gradually declined, having lost
its colonial “patron,” and finally was dissolved in the early 1840s, just
before Florida became a state. The papers continue until 1853.
Colonial Florida government: Both British and Spanish colonial policy in
Florida included a strong effort to keep surrounding Indian nations “happy,”
meaning peaceful and friendly. As the colonial government saw it, “happy”
Indians would be less of a frontier threat to their own land-hungry European
settlers and citizens, nor would they as easily be enticed to ally with
other governments on their borders, meaning especially Georgia as a colony
and later a US state. The colonial government sought to accomplish this
purpose by negotiating treaties and then by encouraging and funding trade
with the Indians, meaning that some of the “trade” items were gifts. Because
of the importance of their Indian policies, the colonial government sought
to maintain strict control over the Indian trade.
Besides seeking to maintain control over its own Indian policy, it was
obligated to enforce its parent country’s mercantile laws. As political
alliances shifted in Europe, Spanish officials in Florida found themselves
changing their policies on whether English or French goods could be
imported, along with Spanish goods. Great numbers of the papers consist of
official documents and letters (in Spanish) by the major Spanish officials
with whom Panton & Leslie worked for many years—especially Spanish governors
in St. Augustine, Pensacola, New Orleans, and Havana, as well as royal
officials in Spain. Additional quantities of papers consist of Panton &
Leslie correspondence (in English) to and from these Spanish officials.
In the late 1790s, when Spain was at war with Britain, making money forced
Panton & Leslie to try an economic arrangement antithetical to their
political proclivities. They sought to convince the Spanish officials to
allow them to do their annual shipping to and from London using neutral,
meaning American-owned ships. Furthermore, Panton even took the step of
swearing an oath of neutrality, in essence declaring himself to be siding
with those hated Americans. This plan did not work out well at the time
because Britain refused, officially at least, to accept neutral ships but
would have been happy to allow British ships to carry the goods.
Colony of Georgia, state of Georgia, and US governments: During the
Revolutionary War period, Georgia, as well as the Carolinas, sought to root
out loyalists and to confiscate their property. Both Panton and Leslie were
among those who left both personal and business property (as well as
personal credits and debts) when they moved to East Florida. Georgia
declared Panton a traitor and confiscated his property in 1778. In 1782, he
was officially “banished,” along with numerous other loyalists. The papers
include governmental documents on the confiscation of Panton property and on
his efforts to sort out his business affairs and reclaim his property.
After Georgia became a state, it actively encouraged settlement in its
interior, which soon brought conflict with Indians already living there.
Georgia’s Indian policy was more bellicose and less diplomatic than Spanish
Florida’s. This helped the Spanish to maintain friendly relations with the
Indian nations to their north, as long as they kept up the flow of gifts and
trade goods. It also led eventually to Andrew Jackson’s 1818 invasion of
West Florida and Spain’s loss of all of Florida in 1819.
The new US government established in 1789 largely agreed with Georgians’
attitudes toward Indians, generally supported their expansionist activities,
and encouraged American trade with the Indians, for purposes similar to
those of the Spanish. As documented in the papers, President George
Washington sought also to deal with the Indians through diplomacy and
treaties. In August 1789, he established a three-man commission (General
Benjamin Lincoln, Cyrus Griffin, and Colonel David Humphries), which he
instructed to negotiate a treaty with the southern Indian nations, both to
achieve some peace and stability in the western wilderness and to open the
door for American trading opportunities with the Indians. This appears to
have been a conscious ploy to both emulate and confront the Panton & Leslie
trading monopoly on the Spanish side. The documents in these papers do not
suggest much success on the part of the commissioners. Perhaps the only
tangible result was a very strange, rather bogus “treaty” negotiated with US
authorities in New York in 1791 by Alexander McGillivray (see below) on
behalf of the Creek nation.
Indian nations: The Indians were motivated primarily to find ways to hold
onto their lands and continue to live their Native American lives. By the
late 18th Century, they felt that only by “playing ball” with the Europeans
would they succeed in their goal. This meant negotiating and signing
treaties that carved out parts of their land for European settlement and
governing. It also meant relying on European traders for supplies they felt
they needed to maintain their livelihoods and to protect themselves—and
paying for these in the only way they could, by supplying something the
European market wanted, which at this time was furs and skins from animals
they trapped and shot.
The Indian nations learned the political “game” early and, where possible,
sought to play one European government off against another, for what they
hoped would be their own benefit. In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries,
Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Chickasaw Indian tribes living in
the territories then known as Florida and Georgia found themselves having to
deal with both Spanish Florida and US Georgia governments, as well as these
governments/’ traders and frontier settlers. The Indians tried hard to
maintain their way of life but found themselves in a losing battle. Through
all this, the Indian nations continued to interact among themselves through
a complex, shifting mix of alliances, hostilities, and open warfare. The
difference now was that Indian “foreign and military policy” became
intertwined with European foreign and military policy.
The papers contain English-language abstract texts of a number of Indian
treaties, both those negotiated by the British in East Florida starting in
1765 and later treaties negotiated by the Spanish and Americans. Panton paid
special attention to these treaties, as they regulated his opportunities for
Indian trading.
Alexander McGillivray: This almost fictional character was a half-breed who
had become a Creek chieftain. Early on, he calculated that he and his Indian
people would be better off if he worked closely with the Europeans. He did
so partly by establishing a close but shady relationship with William
Panton. The two became very close friends and sought over many years to help
each other’s causes. By 1785, McGillivray had become a 1/8 owner in the
Panton and Leslie company, although this fact did not become public until he
got into trouble with the Spanish authorities and had to disavow it. He
helped “grease” the Indian trade for his and Panton’s financial benefit.
He also was a “loose cannon” in the political game playing, actively arming
and leading Indian bands friendly to the Spanish on raids into territory to
the north, in areas that later became the states of Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Alabama (or were already a part of Georgia). For a time in 1778, it
appeared that McGillivray was trying to establish a European-style
independent Indian nation (which the Spanish perceived would somehow be
pro-British) in the wilderness interior of disputed Spanish-US territorial
jurisdiction. These activities gave the colonial rulers major headaches, as
documented in the papers, and they sought to “neutralize” him by restricting
his authority to trade and to act on his own.
In the early 1790s he again took independent action, actually negotiating a
treaty of sorts, in New York in 1791, between the Creek nation and the US
government. The Spanish never recognized this as a valid treaty, and it
appears the Americans didn’t trust McGillivray either. Through all this, the
Spanish understood that he, in cooperation with Panton, was providing a
valuable, irreplaceable service to the Spanish with quiet trading and noisy
political shenanigans. So, when he died in 1793, they were sorry he was
gone. Panton was more directly aggrieved, having lost a close friend and
valuable trading colleague. When difficulties arose about where the
half-breed could be buried, Panton had him interred in his own backyard.
William Bowles: This adventurer was another interesting loose cannon in the
Panton & Leslie story. Although, like Panton, a dedicated loyalist during
the Revolution, after 1783, Bowles sought his “fortune” and political
revenge by turned to Britain against Spain and Panton. A freelance
“troublemaker” apparently financed by private interests and (unofficially)
the governor in the British Bahamas, he tried at least twice to upset the
Panton & Leslie monopoly on the Florida Indian trade by raiding the
company’s St. Marks warehouse. In 1792, he plundered the warehouse, using
the goods inside as “gifts” to Indians he was trying to organize into an
independent Indian-nation alliance (cooperating at this point with Alexander
McGillivray, although the latter was working with Panton), to use mostly to
destroy the Panton & Leslie company. With this, the Spanish authorities had
had enough.
After many intrigues, he was lured on board a Spanish ship and taken to New
Orleans. Although not actually a “prisoner,” (as he kept pointing out in his
complaints), he was jailed as the only way of keeping him securely. As the
wheels of the Spanish bureaucracy slowly turned, he was transferred first to
Havana and later to Cadiz, Spain, where he was kept under house arrest (now
an ocean away from his few faithful Indian followers). Later, he was exiled
to the Spanish Philippines, but in 1798, he escaped, returning to London and
then to the Bahamas, where he proceeded to enact a rerun of his own previous
act.
Once again, he allied with the Creek Indians; once again, in 1799, he
captured St. Marks with the intent of destroying the Panton & Leslie
operation (this time forcing the Spanish garrison to surrender). This time,
the Spanish took the fort back by force, but Bowles escaped, only to be
captured again, finally, in 1801. This time, the Spanish was locked up in
Castel El Morro in Havana, where he languished until he died in 1805. Bowles
was an amazing character who lived a larger-than-life life (as did others in
this drama). His specialty was lying—to others and to himself—to manipulate
his way to the most advantageous result he could accomplish. The papers
document well that he was a consummate con-artist. But ultimately, when he
lied to others, they ceased believing him. And when he lied to himself, he
fell into traps that led him to prison.
Around the edges, other loose cannons lurked. One was a man named Wellbank,
one of Bowles’ lieutenants. Sometime after their 1792 raid on St. Marks,
when Bowles was in prison in Spain, Well bank apparently thought up a scheme
to capture Panton, to be exchanged for Bowles’ freedom. Apparently, the plot
was never hatched.
Yet another loose cannon turned up in 1794, a certain “General” Elijah
Clark, a Georgia backwoods adventurer, who apparently assembled an irregular
band of Georgian and Indian fighters to engage in raids along the
Georgia-Spanish border, all in the cause of (white) Georgian expansion. A
year later, their cause was helped by the redrawing in Jay’s Treaty of
Florida’s northern boundary at the 31st parallel, leaving only a thin strip
of land along the Gulf Coast in Spanish hands (now the Florida “panhandle”).
Clark dropped in and out of the papers rapidly and apparently never did any
serious harm to the Panton & Leslie Company.
The Drama—more fantastic than fiction
The drama of the Panton & Leslie story is revealed by untangling the complex
interactions among the characters. Researching the papers promises rich
rewards from such untangling. Whether a researcher is seeking information on
colonial British or Spanish colonial government, on European settlement of
the Old Southwest frontier, on the politics and violence of Indian-European
relations in the decades before and after 1800, or on the policies,
practices, and intrigues of trading in a colonial/Indian environment on the
southern frontier, he or she will find much of interest in these papers.
A few examples and comments may illustrate why “untangling” may be the
operative verb and “intriguing” an appropriate adjective to keep in mind as
a researcher approaches these papers:
Going beyond trading to “military” activities: Panton’s vocal support for
the loyalist cause, as well as his desire to make money, led him beyond
trading, in 1781, to parlay his business of supplying British military needs
in St. Augustine into a couple of temporary “naval” operations to assist in
making prisoner-of-war exchanges between British and Spanish combatants. For
this service, Panton’s company was, of course, paid by the British. Spain
had declared war on Britain in 1779 and was clandestinely supplying arms to
the Americans. Although it never became directly involved militarily in
America, it appears to have engaged British ships at sea, leading to the
need to exchange prisoners. Not long after the war, Britain was gone from
Florida, and it was the Spanish who were paying Panton, Leslie and Company
to trade with the Indians.
Indian trading preferences: As merchants, Panton and Leslie had to sell
goods the Indians wanted. For some time since 1763, the Indians had been
receiving British-made goods, which they thought were of superior quality to
goods they started receiving from Spain and France after 1785. Panton
continued trading through London but had to wrangle with the Spanish
authorities (as mentioned above) to allow British goods to be landed in
Spanish Florida, in apparent violation of Spain’s mercantile laws and the
current distribution of its political friends and enemies in Europe.
Gaining a monopoly at Mobile: A competing company, known as Mather and
Struther, had negotiated a trade monopoly at Mobile (later in Alabama). As
Panton and Leslie expanded their operations into West Florida and later
moved their headquarters to Pensacola, Panton was intent upon adding the
Mobile market to his own monopoly. The process of obtaining this goal took
years but was ultimately successful. Success required currying favor with
Spanish officials in both New Orleans and Pensacola. It also required
showing Mather and Struther up as less competent. An opportunity arose for
such a maneuver when the latter company was unable to meet a particular
demand for supplies and munitions. Panton saw his opportunity, supplied the
goods, sowed uncertainty among Spanish officials about Mather and Struther’s
ability to meet their Indian trade needs, and ultimately prevailed in 1788.
Later, other traders sought to “horn in” on the company’s monopolies, and
Panton was kept busy persuading the Spanish officials not to change the
status quo.
Paying duty on goods shipped into West Florida: In St. Augustine, Panton had
not had to worry about import duties. East Florida did not charge any such
duties. However, West Florida had for some time been charging a 6% duty on
incoming and outgoing goods. When Panton began expanding his operation
westward, he first began trading at St. Marks. When he opened business
there, the Spanish had designated St. Marks as a part of East Florida, hence
no duty. However, in 1788, for reasons apparently unrelated to Panton &
Leslie, the Spanish transferred St. Marks to the jurisdiction of West
Florida, hence a duty.
For some time after the transfer, Panton apparently conveniently neglected
to pay the duty in St. Marks. When the Spanish realized what was happening,
they insisted not only that Panton pay the duty but that his ships stop in
Pensacola, to make sure the duty was collected. Panton disputed this both
officially (in the papers) and by diversionary action, clearly feeling
entitled to continuing his company’s “deal” with the Spanish colonial
government for a no-duty trade monopoly. In the long run, Panton won this
battle, as he did so many others, by patient diplomacy (call it wheeling and
dealing) combined with shrewd business practices. For Panton, the obvious
profit-making incentive of not paying the duty was intertwined with his
political agenda. By reducing his costs, he could undersell the hated
American traders and perhaps deter the expansion of Americans into “his” and
Spanish trading territory.
Dangers to the monopoly: Throughout his business career, Panton had to work
constantly to maintain the monopolies he had so carefully negotiated. The
papers reveal how frequently he and his company’s “legitimacy” was on the
line.
During British rule in East Florida, he was busy developing a reputation and
negotiating monopolies. Here, he had the advantage of being a Scottish
native and vocal British loyalist. His relationships with Spanish rulers in
East and West Florida and Louisiana were more tenuous. At first, he had to
reestablish with the Spanish the monopolies he had enjoyed under the
British. That accomplished, he had to maintain them, and then he sought to
expand them westward across Florida and beyond.
Under Spanish rule, he was always susceptible to suspicions—he had been
pro-British; he was a Protestant; he had perhaps too much influence over the
Indians, especially through his shady relationship with Alexander
McGillivray; he was a self-serving merchant potentially liable to make money
at Spanish expense, or at the expense of the Indians he claimed to be
helping. For years, Panton steadily and fairly successfully maneuvered
through the minefields of intrigue. Only after he died in 1801 did the magic
of his management fall way from the company’s operations.
Indispensability of Panton: Most of the Spanish officials did not really
trust Panton and from time to time contemplated ending their relationship
with him (Governor O’Neill of West Florida, in particular, was convinced
that Panton was working for the British, the Indians, and especially for
himself, against Spanish interests). Nevertheless, they never went that far,
realizing what an invaluable service he was providing to them, in a more
effective manner than anyone else seemed capable of doing. So, Panton kept
on getting rich, and Spain kept on using him as a major pawn in its
relations with the Indian tribes and, by extension, with other governments
on its colonial American borders and in Europe.
Still, by the 1790s, Panton was being worn down by the political intrigues,
bureaucratic hassles, and economic losses resulting from frontier violence
and maritime disasters. His strategy was to petition the Spanish Crown to
buy out his “monopoly” or to loan him the equivalent of the value of his
business to remain in business. Although Panton was also constantly seeking
various ways to obtain indemnity compensation for his various losses, his
“buy or loan” proposal does not appear to have been just a ploy. He honestly
“wanted out.” However, the Spanish still found him to be indispensable, and
they never let him off the hook, to the end of his life in 1801.
A
Chapter of Panton, Leslie and Company
By Robert S. Cotterill (pdf)
Panton, Leslie and Company
Indian Traders of Pensacola and St. Augustine by J. A. Brown (pdf)
Continuity in Commerce
Development of the Panton, Leslie and Company Trade Monopoly in West Florida
by Thomas D. Watson (pdf)
William Panton
A biography by Marie Taylor Greenslade (pdf)
Panton, Leslie & Company
Herbert J. "Jim" Lewis, Birmingham, Alabama
Panton, Leslie & Company, established in 1783 by Scottish merchants William
Panton, John Leslie, and Thomas Forbes, was a major mercantile firm that
played a significant role in shaping political and military events along the
United States' border with colonial Florida in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. By 1795, the company had a virtual monopoly on trade
with Native American groups in the Southeast, stretching northward from its
headquarters in Pensacola to Memphis (Chickasaw Bluffs) and westward to New
Orleans. The company also had a major post located in Mobile as well as
posts in the Bahamas and other parts of the Caribbean. Panton, Leslie &
Company traded European-made goods—primarily guns, powder, flint, and rum—to
the Indians for deerskins, furs, bear oil, honey, and other foodstuffs.
Several Native American tribes ceded land over the years to the United
States and used the proceeds to satisfy their debts to Panton, Leslie &
Company. This scheme resulted in the United States acquiring millions of
acres of land within the current boundaries of Alabama and Mississippi.
The principal founder of the company, William Panton, was born in Scotland
around 1745 and immigrated to North America in 1765. By 1774, Panton had
become a partner in the Savannah, Georgia, trading firm of Moore and Panton.
The next year, Panton was appointed by the British governor of East Florida
as the colony's official trader with the Creek Nation. Soon thereafter, he
formed his own trading house with Thomas Forbes in Savannah known as Panton,
Forbes and Company. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Panton and
Forbes remained loyal to Great Britain and were forced to move their
business to St. Augustine in British East Florida. In retaliation for their
support of the British, the United States confiscated their property in
Georgia and South Carolina.
In 1783, fellow Scots William Alexander, Charles McLatchy, and John Leslie
joined the firm, which was renamed Panton, Leslie & Company. By this time,
the Revolutionary War had ended, and Great Britain had ceded Florida to
Spain. The Spanish government initially asked the company to leave but soon
recognized its value as an intermediary to the Native American groups of the
region and also realized that there were no experienced Spanish traders to
take its place. The Spanish government then granted the company a monopoly
on trade with the Indians in Spanish East Florida and a tax-free status on
imported goods. In 1785, the company relocated to Pensacola, where it
dominated the trade with the Indians in West Florida. In 1792, Thomas
Forbes's younger brother John, John Forrester, and John Leslie's brother
Robert joined the firm. The company sent John Forbes to Mobile to open a
post to oversee trade with the Indians in that area. At the height of its
trading efforts, for several years the company in Pensacola annually took in
some 250,000 deerskins, which in turn were sent to London to be used in the
manufacture of leather goods.
The company's influence with Indians in the Southeast undoubtedly was due in
large part to its relationship with Alexander McGillivray, an important
leader of the Creek Nation born to a Scottish trader and a Creek woman from
the powerful Wind Clan in 1750 at Little Tallassee near present-day Wetumpka
in Elmore County. Many historians believe that McGillivray, the leading
chief of the Upper Creek towns along the Alabama, Coosa, and Tallapoosa
rivers, was a silent partner in the company. In any event, it was a Creek
force led by McGillivray that thwarted the efforts of William Augustus
Bowles, a former British army officer living in the Creek Nation, to end the
company's monopoly of the Indian trade. In January 1792, Bowles led a Creek
force that looted and took over the company's store in San Marcos (now St.
Marks), Florida. As a result, McGillivray and his men assisted the Spanish
in arresting Bowles, who was ultimately imprisoned far away in the Spanish
Philippines.
In addition to trading with the Creeks, the company also traded with the
Seminoles, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Cherokees. Opposed to the expansion of
the United States, the company's initial partners used their influence with
these tribes to advance Spanish territorial claims against the United States
and urged the Indians to resist white settlement and attempts by the United
States to acquire land. As the newer partners, who were less hostile to the
United States, gained control of the company, they pressured the Indians to
sell their land in the hopes that the Indians might use the payments to pay
off the debts (more than $200,000 by 1800) that the company had allowed them
to accumulate. Increasing Indian indebtedness to the Panton, Leslie &
Company resulted in a triangular scheme negotiated by the company and the
U.S. government whereby the Indians would cede lands to the United States
for cash, the Indians would use the cash to satisfy their debts to Panton,
Leslie & Company, and the company would then release it claims against the
Indians. The company did not, however, recover all of the monies owed it
immediately because some Indians did not use the payments for their lands to
repay their debts.
The company reorganized as John Forbes and Company in 1804 after the deaths
of William Panton and John Leslie, with William Simpson and James Innerarity
joining the remaining partners, Thomas and John Forbes. Overburdened by the
time spent collecting debts owed by their Indian trading partners, the
company began to scale back its Indian trade. At about the same time, it
expanded its interests by opening trade with Spanish colonists in Florida,
Texas, Lousiana and the Yucatan, and Americans living in the area north of
the 31st parallel in present-day southern Alabama and Mississippi. By 1812,
the Indian trade, which had been the source of the company's fortune, was no
longer even its principal source of income. In addition to its declining
trade with Native Americans, the company's fortunes suffered from the
increasing rivalry between Spain and the United States in Florida and from
the Creek War of 1813-14. Despite these setbacks, the John Forbes and
Company reduced much of the Indian indebtedness and became the largest
landowner in West Florida.
In 1818, the company was turned over to John and James Innerarity, and by
1821 its trade was restricted largely to Pensacola and Mobile. The company
ceased to do business in Pensacola in 1830 when John Innerarity purchased
most of the company property for his own use, leaving James Innerarity as
the sole surviving partner. The company remained on the tax rolls in Mobile
until James Innerarity died in 1847. The University of West Florida's Pace
Library contains an extensive collection of papers of the Panton, Leslie and
Company, which provide a detailed view of almost every aspect of frontier
life in British and Spanish Florida as well as the interaction of the
colonial governments with Native Americans in the bordering southeastern
states.
Additional Resources
Bense, Judith Ann, ed. Archaeology of Colonial Pensacola. Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 1999.
Coker, William S., and Thomas D. Watson. Indian Traders of the Southeastern
Spanish Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company,
1783-1847. Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1986. |
