Coker and Watson’s impressive narrative of two Scot trading companies operating in the southeastern borderlands utilizes a vast collection of previously untapped documents. Their story spans six and a half decades and involves international intrigues, the making and undoing of fortunes, and the struggle to turn a profit in the face of great risk. Affirming that the various partners of Panton, Leslie and Company and John Forbes and Company were “free market business pioneers on the Gulf Coast” (p. 362), Coker and Watson definitively demonstrate that the partners’ loyalty was “to purse rather than to flag” (p. 366).
Between 1783 and 1847, the fortunes of Panton, Leslie and Company and of the subsequent John Forbes and Company rose and fell, with 1793 designated as the watershed year. The companies’ national loyalties fluctuated with their economic interests. Originating as an anti-U.S., loyalist firm, Panton, Leslie and Company supplied goods and weapons to the southeastern Indians in exchange for furs. By the early 1790s, the company furnished more than half the deerskins sold on the London market. Because inexperienced Spanish merchants were unable to maintain favorable trading relations with the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, Panton, Leslie and Company acquired a virtual monopoly over the trade and gradually moved westward from their base at St. Augustine. Especially advantageous was their partnership with the powerful Creek leader, Alexander McGillivray.
With profits at a peak in 1793, many adversities began to afflict the company. Problems arose with the death of McGillivray; the outbreak of war between Spain, France, and England; the growing power and acquisitiveness of the United States; the War of 1812; and the First Seminole War. During the War of 1812, John Forbes and Company sided with the United States against the British, thus alienating many Indian customers. The firm, though, already viewed trade with Spanish and U.S. colonists to be more profitable than with the Indians. By the 1820s, the partners were involved primarily in land speculation rather than in trade, and a snare of litigation involving Florida land grants, claims against the company, and difficulties with company heirs enmeshed the remaining partners. The company dissolved by 1847, even though litigation continued into the 1900s.
The book incorporates extensive research in private and public document collections in the United States, Spain, Great Britain, France, Cuba, and the Bahamas. Using these sources, Coker and Watson reveal the “tangled web” surrounding the trading firms’ dealings with “the three ‘superpowers’ of those times —Spain, England, and the United States” (p. 362). In a concluding chapter— which more appropriately belongs at the beginning of the book—the authors point to the firms’ unique relationship with Spain, a relationship that proved to be an exception to mercantilist theory and common Spanish policy. Similar exceptions can be observed in the commerce of other Spanish borderland colonies, such as Louisiana. Despite a few problems—most notably the repeated use of the term “Negro” instead of the preferred “black” or “Afro-American”—Indian Traders is a major contribution to the field, especially as a stimulus to further research.
