George’s story: an enslaved child who visited the Tower during the American Revolution

Date: 19 October 2026

Author:

Dr Misha Ewen

George, a sixteen-year-old enslaved child, came to the Tower of London in the middle of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), accompanying his enslaver Henry Laurens who was imprisoned on charges of treason. Much of George’s life and his own private thoughts are unknown to us, but using surviving records we can trace his journey from South Carolina to London and back and delve into his understanding of liberty on the eve of American Independence. Assistant Professor in American History (Pre-1900) at the University of Sussex, Dr Misha Ewen explores his story.

Content warning: this blog contains discussions of slavery and the use of historic language and imagery which readers may find upsetting, triggering and offensive.

A man dressed in velvet, seated on an opulent velvet chair by a table with rolls of manuscript. — Image: Portrait of Henry Laurens by John Singleton Copley, 1782. © National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, 1942.

George’s Atlantic Crossings – Slavery

In August 1780, George was aboard the Mercury, sailing round the banks of Newfoundland in Atlantic Canada and heading towards the Netherlands. This may have been the second time that George crossed the Atlantic Ocean. George may have been captured as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery in America. If he had survived the ordeal of the Middle Passage, from West Africa to America, boarding a ship again might have filled him with fear and dread: stirring painful memories of the violence and death he witnessed during his earlier voyage and reliving the terror of dislocation from his family and home.

Between 1751-1769, George’s enslaver, Henry Laurens traded in human beings. His firm Austin & Laurens was responsible for the importation of seventy slaving vessels with thousands of captive Africans aboard. On different occasions, Austin & Laurens advertised the sale of ‘a Cargo of Likely and Healthy SLAVES’ from Sierra Leone; another shipment included ‘a choice cargo of about 250 fine healthy NEGROES’ from the ‘Windward Coast’—which stretched from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Plantation owners in South Carolina and Georgia, who had no experience with how to grow rice, preferred to purchase enslaved people from the Windward Coast because it was the traditional rice growing region of West Africa.

We do not know for certain if George was born on the Windward Coast and hand-picked by Henry from one of the ships his firm handled, or whether he was born to West African parents on the Mepkin Plantation, or elsewhere in America. Sierra Leoneans made up the majority of enslaved people on rice-growing plantations and were able to preserve language and culture from home. George could have sung songs and listened to African folk tales in languages spoken in Sierra Leone and he would have had an African name too, now lost to us.

Black and white newspaper snippet — *Image: Austin & Laurens' newspaper advertisement from June 1756 announcing the sale of enslaved people. Public Domain.*

No 4 Tower Green and No 5 Tower Green. Looking west, 21 September 2016. — *Image: Number 4 and 5 Tower Green. Number 4 (with blue door on the right) was likely where Laurens was imprisoned. © Historic Royal Palaces.*

George’s time at the Tower of London

Five years into the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the revolutionaries (or ‘patriots’ as they were usually called) needed allies if they were to defeat the British. Henry Laurens, who was the President of the United States Continental Congress, had been sent on a delicate diplomatic mission to negotiate a $10 million loan with the Dutch in exchange for ties of friendship and commerce. When the British intercepted the Mercury, capturing Henry and George, they also snatched a draft copy of the treaty and used it as evidence to charge Henry with treason and imprison him in the Tower of London.

Upon arriving at the Tower, Henry requested that ‘my Servant, a Black Boy named George may attend me in the place destined for my confinement’. Henry was imprisoned for a little over a year, during which time George was allowed to visit him a few times, perhaps bringing him secret letters hidden inside his clothing.

But what did George do the rest of the time? Where did he stay during his time in London? Eighteenth-century London had a large free Black population; George would have seen other Black men and women walking on the streets, running their own shops and businesses, or drinking in taverns. Along the Tower wharf he would have run into sailors from across the British Empire, some were young Black men and teenagers like himself.

Black and white etching of tall sailing ships on the river Thames with the battlements of the Tower of London in the background. — *Image: An etching of the Tower of London from 1794. © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.*

In the year George arrived in London, a twenty-year-old named Cromer had run away from Captain William Reynolds Swan. William posted a notice in the Public Advertiser seeking the return of his ‘Property’ who was also described as an indentured servant. If Cromer returned, ‘he shall be kindly received, and forgiven’. How he would be punished if he was apprehended was not recorded.

Return to South Carolina – Freedom?

Whilst Henry languished in the Tower of London, George somehow managed to make his way back to America: to Henry’s Mepkin Plantation near Charlestown in South Carolina. This was one of several plantations owned by Henry in the state and neighbouring Georgia. In 1766, Henry owned 227 enslaved people who worked his plantations—producing rice, corn, indigo, and wheat.

In 1785, Henry wrote a letter to Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, saying that George was ‘now about my house and says he does not want to be more free than he is’. The question of George’s liberty comes up in several places in surviving correspondence. In the same letter Henry writes, ‘You may remember George in Philadelphia, I had given him absolute freedom before I went last to Europe’. Henry stated that George refused his offer.

...he does not want to be more free than he is

Henry Laurens writing to Alexander Hamilton about George in 1785

What did freedom mean for someone like George? What did freedom look like for a Black person in Revolutionary America?

Henry told Alexander that he had ‘offered freedom’ to other people he held in slavery; they had, like George, apparently ‘declined the Bounty’. Henry already claimed to provide enslaved people with wages and said the ‘Lash’ (whipping) was ‘forbidden’ on his plantations. If those claims are true, then perhaps George understood his partial freedom as the closest he would get to peace and safety in those times.

Slavery did, after all, persist in the southern colonies of what would soon become the United States and in the British Empire. George may have understood that freedom was precarious for a formerly enslaved person. The ongoing war provided no certainty. Could he be taken captive and sold by the loyalists? Would he face a worse, potentially deadly, fate on a sugar plantation in the Caribbean? The loyalists promised freedom to enslaved people who fought on their side, but could they be trusted? If he was freed and left the plantation, how would he—still a child—support himself?

We will never know the full reasons why George may have refused freedom, if Henry’s claims are even true. But Henry’s letter to Alexander Hamilton does provide one further clue. Henry was proud he did not use the ‘Lash’ on his enslaved workforce; instead he resorted to threats to maintain control. He told them, ‘If you deserve whipping I shall conclude you don’t love me & will sell you’.

Dislocation. Separation. Isolation. As well as the ’Lash’, this is what many enslaved people feared: being sold off from a plantation and never seeing their loved ones again. Perhaps George did not want freedom because his friends, his family, every person in the world he cared for, and who cared for him, was on that plantation. We will never know, but it is a possibility worth considering.

In the end, George would be freed. When Henry died in 1792, George was aged twenty-eight and trained as a carpenter; Henry left him 120 silver dollars along with the tools he was working with. Southern Carolina was deeply entrenched in slavery and would continue so throughout George’s lifetime. What was life like for a freed enslaved person in 1790s South Carolina? How far would George get with his carpenters’ tools and 120 dollars? Freed enslaved people faced economic hardship, racial prejudice, and limited options for social advancement. There was no certain future for George. Did he leave Mepkin Plantation with his tools and search for opportunities elsewhere, or did he stay and continue to work for the family who had held him in slavery?

His life and his journey through sites of slavery, imprisonment, and finally freedom, illuminate what the archive can yield and what it continues to obscure about the lives of enslaved people in the era before abolition.

Sources

Booking, Gregg, and Burkes, George. “A Brief Introduction to the Slaving Empire of Henry Laurens.” All Things Liberty, https://allthingsliberty.com/2026/03/a-brief-introduction-to-the-slaving-empire-of-henry-laurens/#_edn63

“The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection.” Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, https://macmillan.yale.edu/glc/gullah-rice-slavery-and-sierra-leone-american-connection

Godbold, E. Stanly. “Laurens, Henry (1724–1792), revolutionary politician in America and merchant.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-68697

“Henry Laurens to Alexander Hamilton, 19 April 1785,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-03-02-0427. [Original source: The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 3, 1782–1786, ed. Harold C. Syrett. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962, pp. 605–608.]

“Henry Laurens”, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/chpi/learn/historyculture/henry-laurens.htm

“Public Advertiser 3 July 1780,” Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century, https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/database/display/?rid=776

Georgian