Colonial agents

The wealth of the eighteenth-century British Empire was founded on commerce and overseas trade, a trade enhanced by its American plantations. Within a few decades of South Carolina’s settlement in 1670, the colony developed a flourishing rice culture, owed partly to the agricultural know-how of its African American slaves. In 1704 Parliament named rice an enumerated commodity, meaning that it had to be carried in British ships and landed in British ports. Yet rice’s natural markets were in the Iberian Peninsula and northern Europe. Transshipment via a British port could mean loss-making spoilage. South Carolina, like Britain’s other American colonies, had no elected representative in Parliament to argue for its interests. The problem for South Carolina then was how to get Parliament to pay attention to its particular concerns. Parliament, too, desired an informed source on its distant settlement.

The answer was a permanent colonial agent, paid for by the colony’s Commons House of Assembly. In 1712 South Carolina’s legislature passed an act appointing its first permanent agent to remove “the pressure which the Trade of this colony now lies under . . . by a fair and impartial representation of the same to the Parliament of Great Britain.” The colonial agent reported regularly to the Commons House on matters of interest to the colony. He could present petitions and propose bills in Parliament favorable to the colony’s needs and arrange “expert witnesses” to give supporting evidence before the committees created to consider them. He liaised with the Board of Trade, the agency mainly responsible for overseas commerce. In the early 1760s Lord George Grenville, the British prime minister, consulted him on matters of colonial policy. In time the agent came to represent all the colony’s interests, but the leading interest continued to be trade.

Later the agent was joined by an informal network of British and homegrown Carolina merchants whose lobbying tactics brought off such improvements to South Carolina’s commerce as direct shipment of rice to ports south of Cape Finisterre, Spain (1730), and to the Canary, Azores, Caribbean, and foreign West Indian Islands (1764). Another success was Parliament’s passage in 1748 of a bounty on indigo, South Carolina’s second-most-important export crop. During an acute grain shortage in Great Britain in the 1760s, the agent Charles Garth and the Carolina merchants succeeded in gaining a temporary duty exemption on rice imports to Great Britain despite the powerful corn law lobby. In 1766 Garth, with the other colonial agents, promoted repeal of the Stamp Act. Garth argued South Carolina’s case in strictly commercial terms, that the colony’s trade could not bear the expense. Those were the arguments that Parliament was prepared to hear. After 1770 when colonial arguments became more rights based, Garth and most of the other colonial agents (and their British merchant supporters) sheared away. The loss of the colonial agent meant the loss of the colony’s only voice within Parliament, while the breakup of his supporting mercantile networks eliminated an important unofficial source of reciprocal information and negotiation with the mother country, and hurried the Revolution.

Namier, Lewis. “Charles Garth, Agent for South Carolina.” English Historical Review 54 (October 1939): 632–52.

Starr, Rebecca. A School for Politics: Commercial Lobbying and Political Culture in Early South Carolina. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.