Student Blog: Visiting A Guy We All 'Like a Lot'

To your left, you'll see the final resting place of none other than one of our favorite revolutionary manumission abolitionists, Mr. John Laurens.

He didn't have the same upbringing as his colleague Alexander Hamilton, but that doesn't make his story any less worthy of being told.

He was born to Henry Laurens, a bigshot Charleston slave trader and plantation owner, in 1754. He and several of his brothers went to Europe for schooling during their teenage years before John married in London and had a child not long before he departed for the war, never to see them again.

He met Hamilton when they had similar positions in the Army, but John was an abolitionist, very much on the contrary to his father, so he recruited several black men that were still enslaved, to his regiment in his home state of South Carolina.

Unfortunately, in 1782, his life was cut short at the Battle of the Combahee River several miles south of his birthplace in Charleston. He was buried in his family's property in Monck's Corner, on a property that is now a monastery that is called Mepkin Abbey.

It wasn't an easy find for me and my family, as it is about an hour away from Charleston, but it was a beautiful one. There are beautiful trees all along the property, and even on the trail leading up to the cemetery itself, where I had to unlatch a gate to get into take this picture.

Don't worry guys, I blew him a little kiss from all of us, and he does have some presents from other Hamilfans and Revolutionary War enthusiasts. He's very much lesser-known than his colleague, but he's far from being forgotten.

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