Panton, Leslie & Company

[6] After immigrating to the American colonies, William Panton and John Forbes, Thomas's younger brother, had done business with James Spalding (a trader who settled at St. Simons Island) and his partners before 1776 through Gordon's Charleston firm.

It was a matter of survival for them to remain loyal to the Kingdom of Great Britain, as most of their trade goods, especially guns, lead, and gunpowder, came from the mother country, and rebelling against the British would have cut off those supplies.

The Spanish crown found it useful to sanction Panton Leslie & Company's trade with the Creeks and Seminoles, and allowed the firm to sell them British guns, ammunition, rum, and various dry goods as a means of solidifying the Spaniards' alliance with these southern tribes.

[13] In the 1780s he and his partner Thomas Forbes were granted thousands of acres of land west of present-day Palatka; here they used slave labor to build drainage canals and dikes for a rice plantation, as well as to grow indigo and tap pine trees for naval stores such as turpentine, pitch, tar, and rosin.

In January 1783 a conference was held in St. Augustine between the representatives of the British crown—Governor Patrick Tonyn, Brigadier General Archibald McArthur, and Thomas Brown, the superintendent of Indian affairs—and the head men and principal warriors of the towns of the Upper and the Lower Creeks, who complained of the long distance they must travel to the stores from which they obtained their supplies.

The Indians offered protection to merchants who would move their stores to locations closer to their territory, and pointed out the Apalachicola River as a suitable place for a trading house.

The Creeks said it was not only more convenient for themselves, but also much nearer to the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Indians, and requested that the house of Panton, Leslie, & Co., who had been supplying them with goods, should be solicited to settle there for that purpose.

[22] It also purchased indigo plants, hides, furs, corn, cattle, tallow, pitch, tar, hickory nut oil, tobacco, myrtle wax, salted wild beef, sassafras, canes and truck produce in exchange for weapons, gunpowder, tools, cloths, dyes, liquor, and various trinkets.

[23] Packhorse trains were outfitted with European-made goods—primarily guns, powder, flint, rum, and various dry goods—at Pensacola and the company's other warehouses, then sent to Indian villages in the interior, from which they returned with deerskins, furs, bear oil, honey, and foodstuffs.

[24] The depot at Pensacola comprised a store and warehouses where the furs and skins were sorted and packed for shipment to foreign markets in schooners or brigantines belonging to the firm's fleet of fifteen vessels.

[25] After its archenemy, the adventurer and self-styled "Director General of the Muskogee Nation" William Augustus Bowles, had been sent to Morro prison at Havana in 1783, Panton, Leslie & Company emerged as a multinational power broker acting in league with the plantation masters of the lower South.

[27] The travel writer John Pope, who visited the region in 1790 on his tour of the southern and western territories of the United States, inquired into the accounting of profits generated by the Indian trade, and concluded that William Panton generally sold his goods at 500 percent of cost.

From its earliest days the trade had yielded high returns: the apparently enormous profits were a matter of concern to some government officials and the leaders of the Creeks.

[29] The Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks rarely dealt with numbers and prices; their sales of hides and purchases of ammunition, weapons, liquor, and other goods took place on the barter system.

[30] Among the most active firms and merchants participating in the slave trade of East and West Florida were Panton, Leslie & Company, Arredondo and Son, Zephaniah Kingsley, and John Fraser.

[31] From Florida they were exported northwards, to Georgia and the Carolinas A research project collected 517 microfilm reels and 31 cubic feet of paper records relating to Panton, Leslie & Company.

Panton, Leslie & Company headquarters in Pensacola, Florida . This building, built as William Panton's residence, also served as headquarters for the company and its successor from 1796–1848.
Yellow buckskin breeches, late 18th century, from the George C. Neumann Collection, Valley Forge National Historical Park
This is an unconfirmed portrait of Lachlan McGillivray, father to Alexander McGillivray, contained in a silver locket.
View of the north and east sides of the old Panton, Leslie & Company warehouse, converted into a residence for John Innerarity in 1806. The hipped roof building in the left foreground is the kitchen of the Panton mansion that was destroyed in a fire in 1848 (courtesy of the Pensacola Historical Society).
Panton, Leslie & Company reorganized in 1804 as John Forbes & Company, then sought to collect on its claims of debt against the Seminoles and the Lower Creeks. The Indians agreed to settle their debt by ceding land in 1806 and 1811 to the Spanish government, which conveyed the deeds for more than 1.2 million acres of land to its creditors, John Forbes & Company; this became known as the "Forbes Purchase". These grants comprised a tract of land on the Gulf of Mexico between the Apalachicola and Wakulla Rivers in Florida, extending inland twenty to thirty miles.