February 24, 1723] – December 8, 1792) was an American Founding Father,[1][2][3] merchant, slave trader, and rice planter from South Carolina who became a political leader during the Revolutionary War.

[4] Laurens served for a time as vice president of South Carolina and as the United States minister to the Netherlands during the Revolutionary War.

His oldest son, John Laurens, was an aide-de-camp to George Washington and a colonel in the Continental Army.

His grandfather Andre Laurens left earlier, in 1682, and eventually made his way to America, settling first in New York City and then Charleston, South Carolina.

[5] Laurens married Eleanor Ball, also of a South Carolina rice planter family, on June 25, 1750.

Instead of completing his studies, John Laurens returned to the United States in 1776 to serve in the American Revolutionary War.

When Carolina began to create a revolutionary government, Laurens was elected to the Provincial Congress, which first met on January 9, 1775.

But on his return voyage to Amsterdam that fall, the British frigate Vestal intercepted his ship, the continental packet Mercury,[10] off the banks of Newfoundland.

Although his dispatches were tossed in the water, they were retrieved by the British, who discovered the draft of a possible U.S.-Dutch treaty prepared in Aix-la-Chapelle in 1778 by William Lee and the Amsterdam banker Jean de Neufville.

He had supported enlisting and freeing slaves for the war effort and suggested to his father that he begin with the 40 he stood to inherit.

While he was not a signatory of the primary treaty, he was instrumental in reaching the secondary accords that resolved issues related to the Netherlands and Spain.

Richard Oswald, a former partner of Laurens in the slave trade, was the principal negotiator for the British during the Paris peace talks.

He lived on the estate the rest of his life, working to recover the estimated £40,000 that the revolution had cost him[citation needed] (equivalent to about $7.26 million in 2023).

Part of the original estate was donated to the Roman Catholic Church in 1949 and is now the location of Mepkin Abbey, a monastery of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappist monks).