"You would have pitied me"
Gamesters and deadbeats and a threat to leave it all behind, 1753 and 1754
By June of 1754 Peter Timothy had served in the Commons House of Assembly two and a half years, including the session just ended. He had published the South-Carolina Gazette weekly for ten years. He had helped found the Charleston Library Society. He had fathered four children, and buried two. He was thirty-one years old. But in a letter to Benjamin Franklin, Timothy begged for understanding and offered excuses like a scolded child. He wrote:
Dear Sir, Your favor of the 23th of April, by Capt. Robeson, has been received. Perhaps if you had been by when I read it, you would have pitied me; for my Concern was so great, and very visible. I own you had some Reason to be so severe; But had you been in my Place you might have acted as I did.
Franklin’s steady cash-flow from the Charleston print shop ended ten years earlier when Elizabeth Timothy bought out the business and gave it to Peter. But Franklin not only franchised printers, he also sold paper. Now he was holding up a shipment because Peter was too far in the hole.
Timothy had tried to send money. First came the problem of finding a ship going to Philadelphia. “Robeson came here under the Character of a professed Gamester,” he wrote, and “Baddely’s vessel is really bad.” Timothy had planned to send the money by a Captain Haselton and managed to scrape together “Dollars, of which there were hardly any to be seen,” but Haselton departed a day early, leaving without them.
Apparently Timothy resigned himself to trusting Robeson, but a Charleston merchant and bookseller, John Sinclair, told him Robeson was going to Hispaniola, not Philadelphia. On the day he was writing, Timothy had learned Sinclair was mistaken. The professed Gamester was going to Philadelphia. Timothy ran all over town trying to pull together money to send, because the dollars he had scrounged earlier “were gone”. Austin and Laurens “had not more than £10 to draw for” and “no Other Merchant in Charles-Town had Money due in your City.” It beggars belief that Austin and Laurens could not lend a hand. In the 1750s it was the largest slave-trading house in North America.
“I was again obliged to hunt for Dollars, and Dollars (which are every Day scarcer) were not to be found.” He apparently complained all over town and attracted the attention of “a Gentleman who had with great Pains collected some Dollars for London” and “spared me 50.”
Timothy was sending them by Robeson, along with 15 he had managed to collect, or hold on to.
Timothy’s problems paying Franklin were not caused by lack of business, but by lack of being paid. One of his largest creditors was the state. A year earlier, April 6, 1753, Timothy petitioned the Assembly for 164 pounds, eight shillings, and nine pence, owed for printing laws and three annual subscriptions to the Gazette. The next month he made himself the main news in the Gazette. A banner along the bottom of the front page read:
AS there is an absolute Necessity that all the Affairs of the Printer of this Paper should be speedly settled (he being about to depart this Province) he desires, that all Persons who are any Ways indebted to him, will discharge their respective Debts by the 20th of July next at farthest, that all the Demands outstanding against him may be satisfied.
Following that was a long list of property he was auctioning “for ready Money, on Thursday next.” There was land adjoining “Mrs. Timothy’s” on King Street, plus 250 acres “esteemed the best land in the Township” of Orangeburg, another 200 acres there, apparently less esteemed, plus household goods and printing equipment and supplies, and a “Set” of enslaved people serving the print shop and household.
The paper also carried a notice that Samuel Kynaston’s store had moved “into the house where the Printer hereof lives, where all kinds of goods formerly advertised may be had at low prices, and the LADIES assured of good attendance by Robert Collins.”
The variety of products Collins would be selling out of space Kynaston rented in the Printer’s house added up to the colonial equivalent of a CVS: creams, tinctures, soap, powder, spices, toys, sewing supplies and fabric, bed coverings, kitchen gear, “diaper tapes,” and “many other articles.”
A few weeks later, the front page banner in the Gazette announced that the printer had “laid aside his design of departing this Province.” Then he demanded payment of all debts by August 20, and told debtors “unless they make more frequent and regular Payments . . . it will be impossible for him to continue carrying on his Business here.”
Perhaps designing to leave had been a ruse, and some of his creditors may have suspected he was bluffing, but no one was willing to take the chance. People who held Timothy’s debt were not going to get paid until Timothy got paid.
August 22, 1753, the Commons House of Assembly authorized paying for printing the laws, but not for the three subscriptions, disbursing 155 pounds, eight shillings, and nine pence.
Timothy ended his letter with a desparate plea. He had only eight reams of paper left. He asked Franklin to send twenty reams to Sinclair, which Timothy would buy when he could. “If I could get more Dollars I have not Money now to purchase them … (Money comes in very slowly in Carolina, especially to me)”. He had given “Mr. Griffith Five Dollars for two Barrels of Beer,” which he had not received. “Please receive the Five Dollars of him,” and convey his respects, as “I am in the greatest Hurry imaginable.”
Next: The villainous Apprentice, or Why Timothy was in the greatest Hurry imaginable.