Greenwood, Abram

The mercantile firm of Leger & Greenwood operated in late colonial-era Charleston, trading in a wide variety of goods, including cloth, clothing, tools, wine, seed, tea, spices, candles, and household items. Their primary source of supply was the London firm of Greenwood & Higginson, but they also maintained contacts in New York, Rhode Island, and Manchester (through London), and were willing to use other Charleston merchants when necessary to supply their regular customers. For preferred clientele, they often arranged special import orders for luxury goods such as fine furniture, architectural stone work (marble hearths, chimney pieces, marble tombstones), and guns, and in one case, they even shipped an entire pre-fabricated house to Grenada. The firm also occasionally sold slaves on a consignment basis. Anxious to reap the financial rewards of this lucrative trade, and feeling themselves at an economic disadvantage to those merchants who already did, Leger & Greenwood would have become more extensively involved in human cargo if they had not lacked the capital and the backing of their London connections.

Typical of South Carolinian mercantile firms of the period, the primary media of exchange for Leger & Greenwood were rice and, to a lesser extent, indigo, and they also dabbled variously in tobacco, hemp, pitch, deer skins, and "pink root" (an herb used to kill intestinal parasitic worms) when a favorable opportunity arose. Local planters consigned their rice and indigo directly to Leger & Greenwood in Charleston, or, increasingly after 1770, consigned their crops indirectly through George Croft & Co. of Georgetown, S.C., which was located closer to the point of production. The major rice markets exploited by Leger & Greenwood were London, Lisbon, and Grenada, with less extensive trading to Bermuda, Glasgow, Manchester, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia. Indigo was shipped almost exclusively to London. In turn, Greenwood & Higginson supplied the majority of goods imported by Leger & Greenwood, and in the largely barter-based Charlestonian economy, these goods were then used to pay planters for their crops. Payments for rice shipped to Portugal or Grenada were usually sent directly or indirectly to Greenwood & Higginson to pay for dry goods already shipped.

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