John Forbes (1767–1823) and his elder brother Thomas Forbes (d.1808) were Scottish traders who operated in East Florida, West Florida, Spanish Florida and the southeastern borderlands during the tail end of the eighteenth century. John Forbes & Company took control of the assets of its precursor trading firm, Panton, Leslie & Company, after William Panton died in 1801, followed by John Leslie in 1803.
When trade in deer hides and ammunition declined due to the War of 1812 and the Creek War, Forbes & Company sought repayment of losses through lawsuits against British officers and negotiations with Indian tribes. Creek and Seminole Indians ceded large tracts of land to the firm as payments for their debts, and the Spanish governor ratified the title. What became known as the Forbes Purchase equaled over 1.4 million acres acquired by Forbes and Company during the period from 1804 to 1812, making it the largest land grant in Spanish Florida. In 1817, the Forbes Purchase was sold to two merchants named Carnochan and Mitchel, who later formed the Apalachicola Land Company. In territorial Florida (1821–1845), the title to land near the Apalachicola River was not settled until 1835, and lawsuits related to land claims in the Florida Panhandle by heirs of Thomas Forbes were contested as late as 1887.
Forbes families Brothers Thomas and John were children of James and Sarah Gordon Forbes, who lived in the County of Banff, Scotland. John was christened on December 20, 1767, near Gamrie, and died in Matanzas, Cuba, on May 13, 1823. Thomas' birth date is not known; he died in 1808. The men had two sisters named Anne and Sophia. Like Thomas and John, Sophia's husband, Alexander Glennie, also worked in trans-Atlantic trade.
Genealogical records suggest that John Forbes, though never married, had children with a widow in Mobile, Alabama, named Marie Isabelle Narbonne. The family moved to an estate in Matanzas, Cuba in about 1818, where Forbes ran a sugar mill with his sons-in-law. Marie Narbonne died in 1822. A letter received by James Innerarity states that John Forbes died of dysentery on May 13, 1823 while sailing to New York.
Thomas Forbes married Elizabeth Anne Yonge in the Bahamas in 1789 and the couple had four children named William Henry, John Gordon, Mary Sophia and Thomas Irving Forbes. Some of Thomas Forbes' descendants later sued successors to John Forbes and Company to obtain reimbursement for lands that the company originally owned.
Colonial export-import companies Thomas Forbes, the older brother, probably arrived in Charles Town, South Carolina before the American Revolution and began meeting his future trading partners of Panton, Leslie and Company. His maternal uncle, John Gordon, had arrived around 1760. John Gordon and Company hired William Panton as a clerk in 1765 while importing goods from Europe that were sold to colonists and traded with the Cherokee and Creek (Muscogee) nations that controlled land west and south of the Southern Colonies. In 1772, Gordon named Panton as one of his attorneys. Another future partner and fellow Scotsman, John Leslie, began trading in the Charleston area before 1779, but primarily did business in East Florida.
Just before John Forbes arrived, all prior companies were dissolved when William Panton, John Leslie, Thomas Forbes, William Alexander and Charles McLatchy formed Panton, Leslie and Company in 1783. The new firm expanded into Florida and came to dominate the Indian trade from St. Augustine to Pensacola. In 1784, John Forbes sailed from Scotland to the Bahamas, where the company maintained wharves and warehouses, and then to St. Augustine, headquarters of the company in East Florida. He was shortly assigned to assist William Panton at the West Florida headquarters and to manage the store in Mobile, West Florida (Alabama did not become a U.S. territory until 1817.)
Panton, Leslie and Company and its successors engaged in the triangular trade, bringing manufactured goods to Africa via ship, which would traded for slaves. The slaves would be then be taken across the Atlantic to the West Indies and the Thirteen Colonies and sold to planters, including some Creek Indian chiefs. Rum, sugar, salt and indigo were acquired in the West Indies and taken to the North American mainland. Other goods, including firearms, gunpowder and lead bullets were exchanged with the Indians in return for deer hides and peltries. Hides, cotton, tobacco, sugar, rum and rice were taken back to Europe and sold to purchase merchandise for the next round of trade.
All of the partners of Panton, Leslie and Company were Scots who remained steadfast loyalists (referred to in the colonies as "Tories") during the Revolutionary War. The decision was pragmatic because their trade depended on manufactured goods which could not be made in the colonies. The partners came under attack from Patriots, and they were declared treasonous by the Committee for Safety in South Carolina. Owing to the hazards of staying in the rebelling colonies, in 1776 the partners moved to St. Augustine, Florida, which remained a haven for loyalists until the British government transferred the territory back to Spain in 1783 Peace of Paris.
William Panton and Thomas Forbes developed a working relationship with the Governor of East Florida, Patrick Tonyn. Their trading firm operated out of East Florida and Nassau in the Bahamas, acquiring trading posts along the St. Mary's and St. Johns rivers and plantations that grew indigo, rice, tobacco and cotton. The firm periodically imported African slaves who worked the plantations or were sold to other owners. Thomas also managed a very successful operation in the Bahamas.
When the Revolutionary War concluded, the British government transferred East and West Florida (which was under de facto Spanish control) to Spain. The new governors viewed the Indian trade as a key element in controlling the territory, and soon learned that the Creeks in particular preferred to deal with Panton, Leslie and Company. The partners gained status as agents of the Crown and were granted a near monopoly on trade. Pensacola soon garnered the most business, and Panton, Leslie and Company moved its headquarters from St. Augustine to Pensacola.
Creek and Seminole Indian trade A major reason that Panton, Leslie and Company dominated the trade with Creek Indians was the cooperation of a Creek chief ("mico") named Alexander McGillivray. The son of a Scotsman, Lachlan McGillivray, and half-Creek woman named Sehoy Marchand of the Wind clan, Alexander studied in Charleston before the Revolutionary War and worked in a Savannah-based mercantile house. However, he returned to Creek country before the war and became the British commissary. Because Patriot troops had confiscated his lands in Georgia, he remained loyal to Britain, and came to favor trade with Panton, Leslie and Company. In 1783, McGillivray was named a head warrior of the Creek nation.
Panton, Leslie & Company established a headquarters in Pensacola, West Florida, and other trading houses in Mobile and St. Marks, Florida from which goods could be carried into Creek and Seminole lands by boat and pack train. Deer hides were the principle item bartered between the Creeks and the trading company, partly because there was strong demand for leather during periods when the cattle plague (rinderpest) depleted leather stores in Europe. Hides and furs brought in by the Indians were exchanged for woolen goods, cotton and linen cloth, handkerchiefs, leather shoes, saddles and bridles, rifles and muskets, gun flints, bullets, brass and tin kettles, axes, metal pots and pans, scissors, fishhooks, tobacco and pipes. However, gunpowder was always the major item of trade.
Indians of the Southeast had begun trading with Spanish, English and French in the 17th century. None of the tribes had developed the ability to manufacture cloth, iron goods, or glass, and firearms became essential not only for procuring deer hides but also for defending tribal lands against rivals and settlers from the American colonies. All of the southeastern Indians became dependent on manufactured goods, and traditional crafts such as the ability to fashion stone-tipped knives and arrows diminished. Like the Cherokee, Creeks took on many practices of European culture, including stable village life with agriculture based on corn, beans, squash, melons and cotton supplemented by raising cattle and hogs.
After William Panton's death in 1801, John Leslie returned to London to manage the firm's business. In July, 1803, "John Forbes and Company" appeared on the books, and in 1804, officially replaced Panton, Leslie and Company. During the same period, partners in Florida including John and James Innerarity, interpreter William Hambly and others sought payment from the Indians for bad debts.
From 1804 to 1817, John Forbes and Company dominated Indian trade in Spanish Florida even though making a profit was difficult during the War of 1812, the Creek War, and the first Seminole Wars. Spanish authorities, including governor Vicente Folch, defended the company's duty-free status as a way of preventing incursions from American fur traders. James Innerarity and Edmund Doyle opened a new store at Prospect Bluff, north of the Apalachicola River mouth, and James managed the store in Mobile, which remained in West Florida although the United States claimed it had been part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
John Forbes and Company operated in West Florida under the protection of the Spanish Crown. When the United States annexed Mobile and part of West Florida in 1814, Forbes and his partners, James and John Innerarity, claimed Spanish citizenship by residence, and obtained decrees from the Spanish governor verifying their status. The men adopted Spanish names and probably spoke fluent Spanish. To help affirm Spain's right to possess the territory, "Juan Forbes" wrote a book in 1804 entitled Descripción de las Floridas y medios de fomentarlas, which was translated as John Forbes Description of the Spanish Floridas, 1804.
Land cessions to the United States Many of the Indian tribes that traded with Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company lived on land between the state of Georgia and the Mississippi River. That area had been organized as Mississippi Territory in 1798 after Spain ceded the land to the United States with the Treaty of Madrid, and President Thomas Jefferson was interested in removing Indian tribes as a way to foster settlement of the territory.
Benjamin Hawkins, Indian agent in Mississippi Territory, and John McKee, Indian agent in Tennessee, met with John Forbes and discussed using Forbes & Company as an intermediary. Because the Creek (Muscogee), Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee (with the Seminoles, all were members of the five civilized tribes) owed debts to Forbes & Company, the tribes might agree to cede land in exchange for repayment of the debts by the United States government. The plan was discussed with U.S. General James Wilkinson, who forwarded the idea to Henry Dearborn, the U.S. Secretary of War. In 1804, Forbes set out for Washington to discuss the plan with Secretary Dearborn, taking with him a letter of introduction from General Wilkinson to Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton.
Forbes & Company negotiated successful agreements with the four tribes in 1805. The U.S. signed separate treaties with each of the tribes, and the land cessions that totaled about 8,000,000 acres were approved between 1805 and 1814. The Creeks ceded land in Georgia between the Oconee and Ocmulgee rivers, the Choctaw ceded land between the Alabama and Pearl rivers, and the Chickasaw and Cherokee ceded holdings north of the Tennessee river. The United States paid Forbes & Company over $77,000 for their services.
The Forbes land grants