top of page
Writer's pictureHistoricAnnapolis

Turning Tables

Two hundred fifty years ago, Joshua Johnson was about to embark on a bold commercial venture. The Annapolis merchant placed an ad in the Maryland Gazette to inform his customers and creditors of his imminent departure for London. Johnson had authorized John Davidson to oversee his business accounts while he was overseas, collecting any debts owed him and paying any legitimate claims against him.

Joshua Johnson’s notice didn’t mention his connection to another Annapolis businessman, Charles Wallace. The three entrepreneurs—Wallace, Davidson, and Johnson—had recently formed a partnership that aimed to turn the traditional economic relationship between the Mother Country and her American colonies on its head.


According to the mercantile system which prevailed in European economic policy and practice at the time, a nation’s fiscal strength depended on maintaining a favorable balance of trade: minimize imports and maximize exports. Colonies supplied their sponsor states with needed raw materials and served as ready markets for the manufactured goods created using those resources. In such a purposefully lopsided arrangement, the senior party called the shots and benefitted most by design.


In colonial Maryland, agents (or factors) of English and Scottish firms bought tidewater tobacco and transported it on company ships to Great Britain. Those same vessels carried consumer goods back to America, where they were sold in stores kept by some of the factors. The biggest planters whose enslaved workers produced the most tobacco each year used their credit to place special orders with British agents for the most expensive and fashionable products. Unfortunately, the planters’ earnings often failed to keep pace with their mounting debts. From the Americans’ perspective, British trading companies always seemed to have them over a tobacco barrel.


Which brings us back to Joshua Johnson and his partners, John Davidson and Charles Wallace. As Jane McWilliams describes it in her book Annapolis, City on the Severn: A History (available for sale at the HA Museum Store!), their ingenious idea was “to create an Annapolis-based mercantile firm with its own London agent, ships, and a retail store in town.” Johnson would go to England, where he could buy the latest goods directly from manufacturers, thereby cutting out the British companies, their agents, and their steep middleman markups. At first he’d make these purchases using money fronted by the partners themselves, investors, and lenders, then later by selling Maryland tobacco and other commodities shipped to him by Wallace and Davidson. Back in Annapolis, the company was soon based in one portion of a massive 4-part, 3-story brick structure built in 1772 by Charles Wallace.

Image caption: Charles Wallace’s large commercial building at Market Space dominates the background in volunteer Ken Tom’s photo of HA’s model of City Dock, circa 1800.


Wallace, Davidson, and Johnson’s bold approach paid off. Joshua Johnson landed at Bristol on May 29, 1771 and wrote the first of many letters back to his Annapolis partners on June 4th. The company weathered the storm of an economic crash in 1772-73 and succeeded, for a time, at the British mercantile firms’ own game in the turbulent years leading up to the American Revolution.


If you’re interested in learning more about Wallace, Davidson, and Johnson, I’d recommend the excellent book In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchants in the Era of the American Revolution by Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse, former Archivist of the State of Maryland and Commissioner of Land Patents.


Many of the letters written by Johnson to his Annapolis partners have been published in Joshua Johnson's Letterbook, 1771-1774: Letters from a Merchant in London to his Partners in Maryland, edited by Jacob M Price. The transcribed and digitized letters may be accessed here: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol15


You can read the April 25, 1771 issue of the Maryland Gazette starting here: https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-1269.html


Glenn E. Campbell

HA Senior Historian


35 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page