Richard Oswald | |
|---|---|
 portrait by William Denune | |
| Born | 1705  |
| Died | 6 November 1784 (aged 78–79) |
Richard Oswald (c. 1705 – 6 November 1784) was a Scottish merchant, slave trader and diplomat. During the American Revolution, he served as an advisor to the North ministry on trade regulations and the best way to respond to the American War of Independence. Oswald is best known for being one of the British peace commissioners who negotiated the Peace of Paris in 1782.
Oswald was born to the Reverend George Oswald of Dunnet, and his wife Margaret Murray. At age 20 he was apprenticed to cousins who were merchants in Glasgow, the brothers Richard Oswald (1687–1763) of Scotstoun and Alexander Oswald (1694–1766), sons of the Rev. James Oswald (1654–1698). As a young man he worked for them as a factor, travelling in America and the Caribbean. In 1741 he became a partner in the Glasgow firm. [1] [2]
Doing good business during the War of the Austrian Succession, Oswald in 1746 established himself in mercantile business in London. [1] He leased a counting-house at 17 Philpot Lane, where he initially devoted most of his time to the shipping and trading of tobacco. [3] He took on a forage contract for the British Army, having in 1756 the merchant James Buchanan (1696–1758) as guarantor. [4] He prospered also as a contractor during the Seven Years' War, particularly in the supply of bread in the German theatre, and was praised by Ferdinand of Brunswick. [5]
Oswald bought the Cavens estate in Kirkcudbrightshire, and the Auchincruive estate in Ayrshire, in 1759. [6] He made large additions of land to both estates, in the following decades. [1] In British North America he had large land holdings and owned slaves in East Florida, and held estates in both Georgia and Virginia. He ran down these holdings during the American War of Independence. He also owned plantations in the Caribbean. [1] [7]
Oswald was instrumental in directing British businessmen to promising locales in America for growing rice and indigo. Oswald directed British planter Francis Levett, who formerly worked for the Levant Company, to locations in the colony of East Florida for his plantations, and urged East Florida's Governor James Grant to make generous land grants to Levett, whom Oswald called his "worthy friend" to whom he owed "particular obligations." [8]
Oswald put together deals with investors who had good connections, raising his own social standing. In his petitions to the Board of Trade and Plantations for the settlement of Nova Scotia plantations, for instance, he demonstrated an ability to bring together groups acceptable to the King. Those he put forward for Nova Scotia included: a former governor (Thomas Pownall); the cartographer John Mitchell; Member of Parliament Robert Jackson; MP and Paymaster for the Marines John Tucker; and a judge of the Marshalsea Court, and cousin of adventurer Sir Michael Herries, Levett Blackborne, who was himself stepbrother to Thomas Blackborne Thoroton, brother-in-law of the Marquess of Granby. This formula of connecting power-brokers was a key to his success. [9] [10]
In 1748, a consortium of Alexander Grant and Oswald, with Augustus Boyd (1679–1765) and his son John Boyd, John Mill (1710–1771), and John Sargent , purchased Bance Island, on the Sierra Leone River. [11] [12] The Royal African Company had erected a fort there. Oswald and his associates gained control of other small islands through treaties, and established on Bance Island a trading station for factors in the trafficking of African people. [13]
Oswald's extensive network of business connections served him well in building his slave-trading empire. [14] The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa formed at this time had some close links to the Bance Island consortium, for example through Robert Scott and then George Aufrere. [15]
Oswald had a cadre of young merchants whom he trained. Among these was John Levett, brother of planter Francis, who was in Oswald's employ as a young man. Levett (1725–1807) was born in Turkey to an English merchant father, and later settled in India, where he became a free merchant and invested in shipping, as well as becoming the Mayor of Calcutta. As a former trader in the Levant, Levett was ready to help Indian silk merchants supplant the former Mediterranean silk trade, which had fallen off. The British merchants were sensitive to the vagaries of fashion. Each year merchant Richard Oswald sent wigs to Levett in Calcutta, for instance. At the same time, Oswald associates like John Levett in Calcutta kept an eye on local trends, and adjusted their schemes to fit them. Levett, for instance, who had previously managed some German bread interests for Oswald, now planted cornfields in Bengal.
When Oswald needed Chinese labourers, for his own estates, he approached John Levett in Calcutta, who employed Chinese labourers in his Bengal operations growing arrack for his distilleries. The relationships between the various associates in Oswald's extended trading empire grew: John Levett was corresponding with Oswald about the marble chimney-piece sculptures that his brother Francis Levett was purchasing on Oswald's behalf in Livorno, Italy, where Francis was then living as a British merchant. [16] Oswald was particularly close to the Levett and Thoroton families, as well as to the Duke of Rutland. [17]
In letters to British General and East Florida Governor James Grant, Oswald confided that at one dinner of investors in East Florida and Nova Scotia that "Oswald had been dining at the Duke's with Lord Granby, Mr. Thoroton, and others where jokes passed round the table about the many settlements that would be needed to satisfy Mr. Thoroton's nine children." (The humor was explained by the relationships between the various families). [18]
In 1782, Oswald was selected by Lord Shelburne to open informal negotiations with the Americans, to be held in Paris. Because of his prior experience living in America and his knowledge of its geography and trade, he had been consulted frequently by the North ministry about matters concerning the war. Lord Shelburne chose Oswald because he thought his selection would appeal to Benjamin Franklin. Oswald shared Franklin's free trade commercial views; he possessed a "philosophic disposition"; and he had previously had a limited correspondence with Franklin. [19] Franklin was impressed with Oswald's negotiating skills and described him as a man with an "Air of great Simplicity and Honesty." [20]
On 25 July 1782, official negotiations began. The preliminary articles were signed by Oswald for Great Britain, and John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens for the United States on 30 November 1782. With almost no alterations, these articles were made into a treaty on 3 September 1783. Oswald was criticised in Britain for giving the Americans too much. The Duke of Richmond urged the recall of Oswald, charging that he "plead only the Cause of America, not of Britain." [21] Oswald resigned his cabinet post and returned to his estate of Auchincruive in Ayrshire where he died on 6 November 1784.
Oswald was related to American soldier and journalist Eleazer Oswald. [22]
After his death, his nephews and fellow slave traders John and Alexander Anderson, also with interests on Bance Island, were appointed executors of his estate. [23] : 612 [24]
Oswald's papers were among those relating to the peace negotiations acquired by William L. Clements, and then by the library of the University of Michigan. [25]
Robert Scott Davis has identified Richard Oswald as "An American", the anonymous author of the encyclopaedic two volume American Husbandry (London, 1775). [26]
Oswald married in 1750 Mary Ramsay (1719–1788), daughter of the merchant Alexander Ramsay (died 1738). [1] She brought a dowry including property in Jamaica and British North America. She died in London, and her funeral cortege took her body for burial in Ayrshire, having the effect of depriving Robert Burns of his lodgings. He wrote a hostile poem on the event, published in 1789. [27]
Richard Oswald had illegitimate children before his marriage, but no children with his wife. His Auchincruive estate passed to his nephew the tobacco merchant George Oswald, son of James Oswald (1703–1793), his elder brother, known as a minister and writer. [1]
Charles Manners-Sutton was a bishop in the Church of England who served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1805 to 1828.
The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States on September 3, 1783, officially ended the American Revolutionary War and recognized the Thirteen Colonies, which had been part of colonial British America, as an independent, sovereign nation.
East Florida was a colony of Great Britain from 1763 to 1783 and a province of the Spanish Empire from 1783 to 1821. Great Britain gained control of the long-established Spanish colony of La Florida in 1763 as part of the treaty ending the French and Indian War. Deciding that the territory was too large to administer as a single unit, Britain divided Florida into two colonies separated by the Apalachicola River: East Florida with its capital in St. Augustine and West Florida with its capital in Pensacola. East Florida was much larger and comprised the bulk of the former Spanish territory of Florida and most of the current state of Florida. It had also been the most populated region of Spanish Florida, but before control was transferred to Britain, most residents – including virtually everyone in St. Augustine – left the territory, with most migrating to Cuba.
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Patrick Tonyn (1725–1804) was a British General who served as the last British governor of East Florida, from 1774 to 1783. His governorship lasted the span of the American Revolution. East Florida was a Loyalist colony during the war.
Bunce Island is an island in the Sierra Leone River. It is situated in Freetown Harbour, the estuary of the Rokel River and Port Loko Creek, about 20 miles upriver from Sierra Leone's capital city Freetown. The island measures about 1,650 feet by 350 feet and houses a castle that was built by the Royal Africa Company in c.1670. Tens of thousands of Africans were shipped from here to the North American colonies of South Carolina and Georgia to be forced into slavery, and are the ancestors of many African Americans of the United States.
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Richard John Uniacke was an abolitionist, lawyer, politician, member of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly and Attorney General of Nova Scotia. According to historian Brian Cutherburton, Uniacke was "the most influential Nova Scotian of his day.... His faith in Nova Scotia's destiny as a partner in a great empire was only to be equalled by Joseph Howe." He devoted 49 years to public service in Nova Scotia. He fought in the American Revolution and later sought to emancipate Catholics and Black Nova Scotians who were slaves in Nova Scotia. He is buried in the crypt of St. Paul's Church. His substantial estate is preserved as the Uniacke Estate Museum Park at Mount Uniacke.
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Levett is a surname of Anglo-Norman origin, deriving from [de] Livet, which is held particularly by families and individuals resident in England and British Commonwealth territories.
Francis Levett (1654–1705) was a Turkey Merchant of the City of London who in partnership with his brother Sir Richard Levett, Lord Mayor of London, built a trading empire, importing and distributing tobacco and other commodities, mainly from the Levant. He served as Warden of the Worshipful Company of Mercers.
Francis Levett was an English trader, who worked as factor at Livorno, Italy, for the Levant Company until he lit out for East Florida in 1769 where his brother-in-law Patrick Tonyn of the British Army had been appointed governor of the English colony. Wielding connections from a lifetime of overseas trading, as well as family connections from a powerful English mercantile family, Levett built one of the first plantations in Florida, and then forfeited his investment when the English lost their foothold in Florida, forcing him to flee to the British colony in the Bahamas. Eventually his son returned to Georgia, where he became the first to plant Sea Island cotton in America.
Sir Richard Levett was an English merchant, politician and slave trader who served as Lord Mayor of London in 1699. Born in Ashwell, Rutland, he moved to London and established a pioneering mercantile career, becoming involved with the Bank of England and the East India Company. Levett was acquainted with many prominent individuals during his time in London, among them Samuel Pepys, John Houblon, William Gore, Sir John Holt, Robert Hooke, and Charles Eyre. He acquired several properties in Kew and Cripplegate.
Events from the year 1724 in Canada.
Auchincruive is a former country house and estate in South Ayrshire, Scotland. It is located 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) east of Ayr, on the north bank of the River Ayr. Auchincruive House was built in the 18th century on the site of an earlier mansion. In 1927, the estate became the West of Scotland College of Agriculture, and the house was renamed Oswald Hall. The college became the Scottish Agricultural College in 1990. In 2007 the college announced that the site would be disposed of for redevelopment, and masterplan proposals were approved by South Ayrshire Council in January 2011. The house is protected as a category A listed building, along with other buildings on the estate. The estate is included on the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland, the national listing of significant gardens. The house was returned to its original name of Auchincruive House in May of 2020, the listed building records have also been updated to reflect this.
James Oswald was a Scottish merchant and Member of Parliament (MP) for Glasgow.
John Cruden (1754–1787) was a Scottish merchant and Loyalist leader of the American Revolutionary War.
George Oswald of Scotstoun (1735–1819) was a Scottish merchant of Glasgow. In 1797 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow.
Thomas Thoroton, was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons for 25 years between 1757 and 1782.
The central figure in the Granby-Rutland family group was Thomas Thoroton who had married an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Rutland and served him as his principal agent. Although Thoroton received no order in council for land in East Florida, he was a member of the East Florida Society and also of the Nova Scotia Society of London as well. Thoroton was the link between the East Florida and Nova Scotia speculators, particularly after Richard Oswald and James Grant decided to give up their Nova Scotia interests and concentrate on Florida.
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