During the Revolutionary War, an enslaved man named George was the “body servant” for Henry Laurens, president of the Second Continental Congress and one of the largest enslavers and slave traders in colonial South Carolina.
George was such a constant aide to Laurens that he also may have sailed to the Netherlands with him when the British captured Laurens in 1780 and held him in the Tower of London, said Annette Guild, a metadata specialist at the South Carolina Historical Society. She is digitizing the volumes of Laurens’ papers.
Although the slave trader Laurens hypocritically said he abhorred slavery, he didn’t free any of the people he enslaved before he died in 1792. Instead, he blamed slavery on his birthplace of England, arguing that “these Negroes were first enslaved by the English … Acts of Parliament.”
George appears to be the only of nearly 300 people enslaved by Laurens who gained freedom after Laurens died, according to the letters. George also received carpenter’s tools, money and clothing. Laurens wrote to his son-in-law on July 7, 1790, that when he died, George should also be known as George Laurens.
More than two centuries later, George Laurens and his enslaver — Henry Laurens — might still be together in death.
An unmarked Mepkin cemetery
Historians say it is possible that George Laurens is among the 20 people buried in unmarked Mepkin graves that abut the small brick-walled Laurens family cemetery where Henry Laurens’ cremated remains rest near his son, Revolutionary War hero John Laurens, once an aide to General George Washington.
On Saturday, the Most Rev. Jacques Fabre-Jeune, bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston, blessed both cemeteries, which are part of a new Meditation Garden of Truth and Reconciliation at Mepkin Abbey.
The bishop noted the dedication coincides with the funeral of Pope Francis in Rome.
“I don’t think souls have a color, do you?” he asked the 80 people who attended the ceremony. “All the enslaved … were children of God when they were born … so I can see all these people welcoming the pope.”
Noting that the dedication ended with the singing of Lift Every Voice and Sing, U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-SC, said he has always had a problem with that song.
The song is commonly known as the Black National Anthem. But Clyburn emphasized Saturday that the song is a hymn, not an anthem.
“We should only have one national anthem,” he said. “There is no reason why we can’t have a national hymn.”
Clyburn said he introduced legislation years ago to make the song become the nation’s national hymn as a part of reconciliation to bring the country together.
“Thy Father’s Hand”
Father Joseph Tedesco, Mepkin Abbey’s superior monk, said according to Mepkin Plantation oral history, enslaved people were buried next to the Laurens family cemetery under a bed of purplish-blue periwinkle wildflowers, which have long since died away. It is likely the people buried in the plot were enslaved Africans who were the Laurens family house servants, he said.
Laurens wrote a letter at Mepkin manumitting George so there is a possibility, Guild said, that George is buried at Mepkin. It is possible that Laurens freed others, “but I don’t believe scholars have found any other records or documentation beyond George,” she added.
The new mediation garden tells the story of the enslaved and Native Americans who were also enslaved at Mepkin. It now serves as a place where people can come for mediation to reconcile the conflicts caused by slavery, Tedesco said.
“The Bible accepted slavery,” the monk said in an interview before the ceremony. “It took a long time for the churches to say no to slavery and enslavers used the Bible to justify slavery. That is why it is so hard to change it because it is so engrained around the world.”
According to Anti-Slavery International, about 49.6 million people live in modern slavery in forced labor and marriages.
The garden features “Thy Father’s Hand,” a 640-pound bronze statue of God’s out-stretched palm holding the life-sized body of the crucified Christ.
The statue anchors an infinity path. Along the path are seven stations that point to the abbey’s history and moments of reflection at the abbey, a community of Roman Catholic monks who established the monastery 75 years ago.
Summerville residents James and Dora Ann Reaves donated the statue to Mepkin in 2022. Sculptor Garland A. Weeks of Lubbock, Texas, created it.
Dora Ann Reaves said she donated the statue to the abbey “because this is where it belongs. I put a lot in God’s hands, and I don’t ask him why or what. When I feel it on my heart, I do that.”
When the Reaveses donated the statue, Tedesco said he immediately knew how it could be used to honor the enslaved Africans and Native Americans who lived on the property before it became Laurens’ 7,500-acre rice plantation on the west branch of the Cooper River and one of six plantations he owned in Georgia and South Carolina.
Remembering a family friend
The 14 monks at Mepkin today devote their lives to prayer, spiritual study, work and hospitality. In the 1940s, Brother Lawrence was one of them.
Eleanor Cooper-Brown, who served on the committee that designed the meditation garden, remembers him. She decided to be involved with Mepkin because when she was a young adult Brother Lawrence befriended her grandfather, Eddie Cooper, who lived in the Cherry Hill community near Cordesville, she said.
Brother Lawrence’s caring for people in the mostly African American community, she said, prompted her to be a “friend of Mepkin” and to curate a Sacred Spaces Tour that starts at Mepkin.
Cooper-Brown said she believes the people buried near the Laurens family cemetery were also enslaved by Henry Laurens’ descendants. She is not familiar with a Black family in the Cordersville area who might be related to George Laurens or any resident who is a descendant of people enslaved at Mepkin. They may have all moved away after the Civil War, she said.
Enslaved burials
After the 20 graves were discovered, each was marked with a small stone engraved with a diamond-shaped image to resemble a slave badge with the date of 1762 when Laurens acquired the property and 1865 when the Civil War ended slavery.
In Charleston during the 1700s and 1800s, enslaved workers were required to wear small copper badges when they were hired out from one enslaver to another.
But are the badges, a symbol of slavery, an appropriate marking for the graves of unnamed enslaved people?
“It helps us know who they were,” Tedesco said. “We want to know who they were, the enslaved, because we want to honor them.”
Finding the enslaved
The markers were placed on the graves after Matthew Loomis, owner of South Carolina History Rescue, used ground-penetrating radar to map the burial site in February 2024. The images that appeared on the radar screen, he said, were consistent with a burial plot.
“It was surreal to [locate] the cemetery that everyone knows about but didn’t give much attention to,” he said. As images of what are likely burial plots appeared on the radar screen Loomis said he used small orange flags to mark the corners of each plot, sporadically arranged in a field under towering magnolias that slopes down a high bluff overlooking the river.
Charleston historian and genealogist Grant Mishoe speculated the enslaved were favored by Laurens because of their proximity to him and his relatives. They were likely buried at night so as not to take time away from daylight working hours, said Mishoe, a historical researcher and genealogist at the International African American Museum.
Burying the dead near the river, he said, is consistent with the Africans’ belief that in death the water would be their pathway back home to Africa.
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