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After a coal transaction went awry in 1794, the Irish merchant, John Large, found himself concerned about the state of his soul. Before he departed Cork, Ireland, for the Caribbean in an attempt to recoup his losses, he penned a hurried letter to the home of his business partner, William Willcocks, outlining the circumstances of their now shared financial misfortune. Large explained that, “So far was I from appropriating your money to my use that, from the first day I began it till this [moment], I was distressed, this, with the sarcastical observations put on me by Mr. Willcocks, has pierced my very soul, however, a little Patience will rectify all those matters.”[1] To banish the spectre of impropriety conveyed in Willcocks’ charge, Large directed Willcocks’ attention to his sentimental capacities, rather than to his mercantile capabilities. His distress was an expression of their shared interest; his pierced soul was evidence of his innocence. Most importantly, Large’s ability to recognize Willcocks’ feelings and respond in kind framed their commercial arrangements in moral terms. Large’s sentimental language was intended as proof of his sensibility, and of his capacity to react to the emotions of others. Whether this emotional outpouring was a genuine reaction to a friend’s displeasure or a strategic response to an accusation of financial mismanagement, Large’s account of his own distress transformed his letter into a space in which expressions of affective sincerity possessed a rhetorical power to mediate and manage the flow of credit between debtors and creditors.

The soul was one of many sentimental images that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers evoked to make claims to authority, intimacy, and power. Joined by descriptions of beating hearts, streaming tears, and seething anger, the suffering soul arose from a popular culture of sensibility that defined relationships through the communication of affection and the exchange of sympathy between feeling individuals.[2] In a later letter sent from Martinique to Willcocks’ wife, Phoebe Willcocks, Large shared news of his latest commercial ventures and profusely thanked her for updates about his “darling little child,” Charlotte Large. Admitting that, “I must confess my soul is bound up in her, I shall never have it in my power to make you sensible of the obligations I hold myself and for all your kindness to her,” Large was quick to reassure Phoebe Willcocks that “you may depend on [my] due attention paid to the remittances” that he owed her family.[3] Though Large’s sentimental descriptions of his debts aligns well with the literature on the “webs of obligation and affection” between transatlantic migrants, the connection between his credit and his soul points to an understudied area within the recent “affective turn” — the role of emotions in transatlantic credit networks.[4] Indeed, little of what is known about credit’s emotional dimensions have been applied to investigations of its circulation and use among merchants. To understand how emotions stirred Large’s soul to shape the negotiation of credit and debt, it is necessary to situate his commercial credit relationships within a wider culture of sensibility that encompassed the household and its domestic relationships.[5] Doing so reveals that the moral economy of Large’s transatlantic credit relationships was formed less by a liberalism that privileged the cold pursuit of individual self-interest than by a liberalism indebted to warm, sentimental relationships.[6]

For credit to function, its users required a common understanding of its value and the evaluative frameworks needed to manage its circulation. Scholars have traced ideas of credit to those strains of liberalism in eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosophy in order to investigate the consequences of the moment when a culture of embodied individual sensibility and an increasingly disembodied form of commercial capitalism met. Their analysis has largely focused on pages penned by prominent authors, philosophers, and theorists who thought about credit, rather than on those individuals who used credit.[7] The approximately 80 letters that make up Large’s extant correspondence were exchanged when he was a merchant in the Caribbean and the United States between 1792 and the early 1810s, and then after he emigrated to Upper Canada where he lived until his death in 1837. Large’s letters offer a chance to return these sentimental credit exchanges to the daily rhythm of economic life around the Atlantic.[8] Importantly, the window into credit exchanges opened by Large’s correspondence reveals that sympathy was a colonial relationship. The letters he sent and received illuminate the way that emotions met the challenges that distance and isolation in the transatlantic trade posed to the trust and honour that undergird credit relationships.[9] When faced with the difficulty of transmitting value between individuals across two distinct but connected colonial economies with imperfect communication and few institutional bridges, the circulation of credit relied on feeling to guide the actions of borrowers and lenders.

By beginning with Large’s experiences as a merchant in the Caribbean and America before examining his life in Upper Canada as a settler, a better sense emerges of how the emotional value backing credit, as much as its accumulation, was what connected the transatlantic economies of commerce and emigration. Indeed, though Large’s credit network changed over time to admit new generations, creating new relationships in new places, sentimental language framed according to the idea and ideal of friendship remained the common discourse for negotiating belonging and mitigating risk.[10] Investigating how friendship and the expectation of sympathy in exchange structured credit’s circulation across colonial boundaries illustrates how economic interest became emotional. Such an analysis reveals the role that credit exchanges played in creating the sentimental disposition necessary for Large to cast his participation in a global economy built on the exploitation of slaves’ labour and Indigenous people’s lands in terms of friendly economics. Indeed, though sentimental language may have softened the relationship between creditors and debtors by way of sympathy, it reinforced wider power dynamics and hierarchies within colonial society by designating some as friends who deserved sympathy and others as strangers. Reading Large’s correspondence, therefore, offers an opportunity to see a particular history of liberal economic thought in action, one that relied on the sentimental dispositions of elite men and women tied together by friendly credit relationships.

The Roots and Routes of a Transatlantic Credit Network

The origins of Large’s transatlantic credit network can be traced back to relationships formed in his native Cork. Large’s participation as a freeman in the court of d’oyer hundred, the voting assembly of Cork’s municipal corporation, indicates that he was likely born there in the 1760s.[11] Cork was a crucial port in the West Indies trade and the city’s Protestant merchants participated in this transatlantic commerce, including Willcocks, who shipped provisions to Gibraltar, Lisbon, and the Leeward Islands during the 1770s and 1780s.[12] Large’s commercial circle here included his own family, particularly his brother, Thomas. In the late 1780s, Thomas worked as a cooper on Millerd Street, mere metres away from where Large worked as a merchant along Prospect Row and where Willcocks’ merchant house was located on Morrison Island.[13] Reconstructing Large’s web of kin and community before he left Ireland reveals both gaps in the historical record and threads that never crossed within Large’s own lifetime. Large’s wife and mother to Charlotte Large, today known only as “Mrs. Large,” died 21 January 1791 and was buried in Cork; her family, the Kingstons of nearby Bandon, Ireland, were clearly familiar with her husband’s family but seem not to have known the Willcocks family.[14]

Linked by degrees of proximity and intimacy, Large’s Cork connections offered him commercial opportunities in the transatlantic trade even before he left Ireland, first appearing in the Willcocks family household. In September 1792, Large sent a letter to Willcocks in Upper Canada after Phoebe Willcocks told him about a business proposal suggested by Willcocks’ cousin, Peter Russell, then serving as a member of Upper Canada’s Executive Council under Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe. Large jumped at Russell’s suggestion to ship out “servants” to the colony with “a prospect of their selling at £20 a head” and proposed sending 150 people on board the Eliza, along with the Willcocks family, who were planning to emigrate to Upper Canada.[15] As much as a demand for servants in British North America, it was Large’s connection with the Willcockses and their extended family that allowed him to tap into an Atlantic world of commercial opportunities, one in which women’s household roles made them important purveyors of information.[16] “Last week Mrs. Willcocks was kind enough to show me Capn Russells letter to you,” Large wrote before concluding his pitch: “Last night I had a conversation with all your family on this business, they of course want your determination respecting their going out.” Despite their deferral to their father, the Willcocks family had their own opinions about the wisdom of Large’s proposed business venture. Willcocks’ son, Charles, ended his post-script to Large’s letter stating, “Notwithstanding what JL writes I would by no means have you enter into any engagements in consequence but such as you could get off from with honor if he did not pursue his plan.”[17] Individual honour, as much as potential profit, guided Charles’ concerns as he evaluated the risk involved in Large’s scheme, acting as an impartial observer on his father’s behalf. Determining what was in an individual’s best interest meant evaluating commercial activity against the standards of both public propriety and personal prosperity.

As suggested by the speculative manifest proposed by Large for the Eliza, transatlantic trade and emigration were related ventures. Though he justified his time in the Caribbean by declaring that the provisions trade allowed him to “discharge all my creditors, which is the first wish of my heart,” this sentimental aim was just one step in financing his larger plan to settle on a “snug farm” in Upper Canada.[18] In 1794, he learned that the Willcocks family might not emigrate that year but mentioned, “I trust you will hold over my Lott of ground as you may.”[19] In reality, it was the dispossession of Indigenous people following the 1788 Johnson-Butler Purchase between certain Anishinaabe leaders around northern Lake Ontario and the British Crown that enabled Large to obtain land in Upper Canada.[20] Yet, when Large imagined his future lot as “a good & apleasing situation and near water,” he blended romantic ideas of British North America as a terra nullius with his sentimental hopes of commercial success in the Caribbean in order to better align his own interests with those of the Willcocks family.[21] He continued to press this point in 1795, admitting that “It would afford me singular satisfaction to know whether your plan to go to Canada goes forward this year or not, for your sake I wish it to take place [but] for my own I could wish it not, as I find it impossible to be home in time and by delay I expect to contribute more amply to it.”[22] In the joint-enterprise of commerce and settlement, Large framed his transatlantic movements as the product of a mutually beneficial connection with the Willcocks family.

At the heart of Large’s friendship with the Willcockses was the ethic of reciprocal exchange. In 1795, Large thanked Willcocks for “the reservation of the ground you intended for me,” and proposed sending a ship filled with rum, sugar, and other goods from the Caribbean to Quebec so that “perhaps I may have the pleasure of seeing you sooner than you expected.”[23] Friendship with the Willcocks family bolstered Large’s feelings and his finances. In turn, he sought to repay this debt, urging Willcocks to “let me know if I can forward you anything from hence, every thing here is very high and getting higher.”[24] Despite land in Upper Canada and goods from Caribbean plantations belonging to different economies, they were extended as favours whose exchange gave them a commensurable affective value.[25] Though the value of credit and the emotional valence of commercial undertakings were difficult to quantify, they were nonetheless obvious in moments of financial failure. In another letter to Willcocks concerning his separation from Charlotte, Large confessed that “It grieves me to the soul that my disappointments here shd prevent me from carrying my plan in to execution of Provisioning a vessel and cargo suitable for Cork to go [?] bring her out with me.”[26] Examining Large’s letters for evidence of sentimental value in commercial credit exchanges reveals his attempts to depict his pursuit of profit and extension of credit as social goods that he shared with friends and family, rather than an isolating form of individual gain.[27] To negotiate credit, therefore, was not just to enrich or evaluate individuals, but to judge a myriad of overlapping personal and commercial relationships between individuals in order to determine whose debts mattered.

Narrating A Transatlantic Credit Economy

As eighteenth-century merchants knew well, the world of transatlantic commerce depended on credit. “Only this moment I am informed that the Terpsichore Frigate being to sail in half an hour for Europe,” Large scribbled to Willcocks from Martinique, giving him just enough time to enclose a bill for £70 to cover a debt he was owed by Robert Hibbs that was to be lodged “to my credit” with the London bankers, Marsh and Creed.[28] As Large’s letter indicates, credit was a financial instrument, connected to an individual’s character. Despite the higher degree of legal and institutional protection offered under British imperial policies in the Caribbean, the exchange of credit was loaded with individual risk.[29] The shift in the Atlantic economy’s provision trade during the mid-eighteenth century away from permanent Caribbean firms towards a commissions system of independent, contracted agents only increased the personal responsibility that Large bore for any trade he facilitated.[30] An unpaid bill fed charges of financial impropriety and could lead to personal acrimony, making it necessary for Large to insist that he always “meet [his creditors] with due honour” in their exchanges.[31] For Large and his contacts, then, commerce was an ongoing conversation. “[You] will of course say you have a good deal of business on hand,” Large wrote to Willcocks, “but I know you are fond of writing, and I think I could hit on a plan for getting out 200 Irish rascals to Canada if encouraged, so let me hear from you on the subject.”[32]

The importance of communication in trade was recognized by the Scottish moral philosopher, Adam Smith, who argued: “If we should enquire into the principle in the human mind on which this disposition of trucking is founded, it is clearly the natural inclination every one has to persuade. The offering of a shilling, which to us appears to have so plain and simple a meaning, is in reality offering an argument to persuade one to do so and so as it is for his interest.”[33] In the transatlantic trade, however, credit was both more pervasive and more persuasive than Smith’s shilling, and Large’s letters reveal how credit helped naturalize the self-interested “disposition of trucking” that Smith theorized. As Large borrowed from the Willcocks family, he made himself responsible for evaluating and explaining the situation of their money and the timeline for their repayment. Large insisted he would only send back “Good bills” that he believed would be honoured by London banks.[34] While trading on the island of St. Lucia, Large told Willcocks that “I would be happy to remit you £50 by this conveyance but can not get a bill here except an Officer Dft [draft] which I am not found of taking,” though he swore he would be able to find a lender he preferred on Martinique.[35] Even a promise to settle a bill could keep up confidences. After failing to draw a bill for £60 that the Willcocks requested, Large explained that he wrote a letter all the same “as the Packet is to sail this evening [and] I would not lose the opportunity of writing, [for] we expect another Packet in 10 days when you may depend on the Remittance.”[36]

Managing risk by building trust in long-distance commerce was at the heart of the communication problem that Large attempted to remedy through his letters. Due to the vagaries of transatlantic trade, Large maintained his correspondences by sending duplicates of his bills and multiple letters, “lest any accident may have happened to the first.”[37] Smith captured the heightened risks that the transatlantic trade posed when he argued that a merchant would necessarily prefer “home-trade to the foreign trade of consumption … He can know better the character and situation of the persons whom he trusts, and if he should happen to be deceived, he knows better the laws of the country from which he must seek redress.”[38] One way that Large sought to get around the problem of knowing who to trust in trade was to conduct his commerce with people he already knew. Unsolicited proposals for consignments from individuals in Cork were not well-received by Large, who informed Phoebe Willcocks that “I want no connection with them, I can do profitable business here and if I want European goods I can order them out.”[39] Large clearly preferred to conduct his business within a circle of familiar commercial contacts, including his brother, Thomas, who Large entrusted to sell his remaining coal supplies in Cork.[40] When Large agreed to work with merchants from Ireland, he gravitated to people he had known before he left, like his former neighbour in Cork, Solomon Newsom, to whom he sent a consignment of sugar, coffee, and cotton in 1796.[41] Large’s reliance on trusted contacts for his trading ventures was supported by a maxim shared with him by a fellow merchant: “know without an endorsement the impossibility of getting cash, particularly [from] a stranger.”[42]

Yet meetings with strangers were inevitable within the world of transatlantic trade. For those interactions that involved the exchange of credit, Large frequently used the label “friend” to designate individuals who he may not have known intimately but nonetheless trusted.[43] He instructed Willcocks to deposit a draft for £100 drawn on “my friends Messrs. Anderson Child & Child of Lpool,” and noted that “I send this by way of New York under cover to your friend Messrs. W. Nelson and Co. as you desire.”[44] Even when used as a formality, friendship was a powerful social formation that emphasized care and trust through mutual interest and reciprocal advantage among merchants who may never have met one another.[45] As Smith mused, “Among well-disposed people, the necessity or convenience of mutual accommodation, very frequently produces a friendship not unlike that which takes place among those who are born to live in the same family.”[46] Indeed, after Large relocated his business to America, he informed Willcocks that he was working alongside “my worthy friend Hutchison to embark in the curing of spirit[s].”[47] Failure in business likewise pushed him to rely on his old friends to make new friends. When the firm he traded with in New York shuttered, he asked Willcocks whether “your friend W. Nelson [is] alive there, if he is be so good as to write him and on my going there I shall introduce myself to him.”[48] In essence, friendship was the term that Large used to personalize an impersonal market and to build trust and affection in his credit relationships.

Whether friendship arose from shared financial interests or vice-versa, the friendships that facilitated the exchange of credit were predicated on what Smith called “fellow-feeling.”[49] Fellow-feeling depended on affection, which, according to Smith, “is nothing but habitual sympathy.”[50] Sympathy, he argued, “does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it,” and our ability to imagine the experiences of the suffering individual as our own.[51] While Smith envisioned sympathy as a universal and liberal quality within everyone, he believed its extension between individuals was frustrated by distance. [52] To overcome the threat that distance posed in credit exchanges, Large and his network filled their commercial correspondence with sentimental language that sustained fellow-feeling and exchanges of sympathy. When Large was informed of Willcocks’ displeasure with Large’s brother, Thomas, who had skimmed 6 shillings per barrel of coal he sold on their behalf “for mine and my family’s trouble,” Large protested that he had no knowledge of his brother’s action.[53] In effusive language, Large wrote back to Willcocks in order to “ashure you [it] gives me no small concerns, of which I shall not fail to take proper notice of, it being my wish to render you and family every assistance in my power [rather] than to distress you.”[54] When he felt Willcocks’ concerns as his own, Large expressed sympathy with his plight and did so in sentimental terms in order to maintain their friendship. And when Large wrote to Phoebe Willcocks in 1796 that he was “particularly grieved to have the Drft on Costley for £30 returned,” and emphasized that the matter “gave [him] no small share of uneasiness as I ashure you no person feels more for you as a friend,” he was offering sympathy and hoping for it in exchange.[55]

Merchants’ Duties and Friendly Judgements

In transatlantic credit networks, judging prospects and people was a merchant’s means of survival. Scottish writer John Galt recognized that commerce depended on individuals acquiring information to evaluate one another, referring to the “mercantile duty” to inquire “as to the credit and character of their friends,” by “prying into the circumstances of their neighbours.”[56] Sympathy shaped these judgements, as seen when Large became sentimental in his account of the hardships of undertaking transatlantic journeys in a letter to Phoebe Willcocks: “thank God my heart feels a sympathy for all my fellow travelers.”[57] In other words, for one’s feelings about commerce to be effective they could not solely be rational or self-interested, but also affective; emotions comprised important parts of the “floating knowledge” Galt identified circulating in the “sphere of business.”[58] Certainly, the repayment of credit in a timely fashion was an essential part of building trust in commerce and compelled Large to guarantee Willcocks that he “may depend [that] every exertion in my power shall be used to forward the sum you ask for.”[59] But a merchant’s duty to judge and be judged also included more personal exchanges. In an expression of his care, Large wrote to Willcocks: “I but rec’d two Letters from my mother without a word of any news, but all abt. my dear little child, tho. I frequently enquired for you and family.”[60] More than politeness, these friendly exchanges shaped commerce, helping merchants evaluate individual’s character and, by extension, credit.[61] Thus, when Large wrote that the actions of one of his debtors, Mr. Knight, “weighed heavy on me for some months and will turn out to his utter confusion,” he relied on his own feelings to pass judgement on Knight’s present propriety and future prosperity.[62]

Though feeling was not always a trustworthy guide, deception in the transatlantic trade only increased Large’s ability to appeal for sympathy in exchange. In 1797, Large complained bitterly of the “Villainous behavior of O’Conor,” a fellow merchant.[63] In an account reminiscent of those “unmanning” moments among colonial merchants in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, Large recounted how O’Conor had refused to honour a draft he authorized him to draw for £300, after Large had shipped him a consignment of sugar, cotton, and rum.[64] Subsequently rejected and overdrawn by £200, Large declared that “Never was man more exercised to preserve the property I brought out than I, or more basily treated [than] by O’Conor.” In a bid to evoke sympathy for his circumstances, Large emphasized that “you will observe that he was in possesstion of my property when he refused the Bill which he acknowledges in his Letter.” On the one hand, Large’s account still leaves enough room to see him as a naïve rube, conned by an enticing deal wrapped in suspiciously warm terms from a stranger. But it was O’Conor’s very double-dealing under the mask of friendship that Large presented as clear evidence of his own innocence and the depths of O’Conor’s treachery. Particularly egregious for Large was the fact that “at the time the Bill lay under Protest he writes a most friendly letter (the only one I ever had from him) that he was looking out for a suitable vessel for the Trade and [to] send [him] the Cargo I pointed out.” [65]

O’Conor’s deceit rattled through Large’s credit networks and threatened to expose his own poor judgement in the process. “As [the affair] efected my Credit,” he wrote, “I have sent Copy of his letter and a full state of the business home.”[66] As letters became a form of evidence, Large framed O’Conor’s alleged friendliness as proof that his duplicity was premeditated. This was a violation of the mercantile code of honour that required Large publicly to expose O’Conor in order to warn others and rehabilitate his own reputation.[67] Initially, Large brought the affair before his fellow merchants on the island of Martinique, who encouraged him to sue. However, in an effort to avoid the potential costs and exposure that a public case would necessarily entail, Large settled for restitution from O’Conor’s nephew the following year.[68] Of course, the network of kin and community that saved Large’s poor judgement from any legal exposure in 1797 was not always available. In 1801, after a Captain Gage of Boston stole £1000 of his cargo off the coast of Cape Verde, Large did not appear to have had any personal connections to settle the score privately and had to rely on his fellow merchants to judge him accordingly. Writing from Virginia, he explained to Willcocks: “I arrived here on the 13th inst. […] but not in time to overtake him but I hope to establish my claim against him [at the] Merchts hose [sic] which I suspect will detain me two or three months, whence I propose going to Boston.”[69]

The opinions of fellow merchants were not the only ones Large sought to shape through sentimental appeals. In her purse, pen, and person, Phoebe Willcocks remained a crucial part of Large’s transatlantic credit system after he left Ireland. Through their correspondence, Phoebe Willcocks often furnished Large with commercial updates from Ireland and the balance of his outstanding debts with her family.[70] Those included a £34 debt that Large incurred directly from Phoebe Willcocks, and a 34 Guineas debt with her daughter, Margaret Phoebe Willcocks, “which I am indebted for my dear child’s board.”[71] Clearly, these debts recorded what Large owed his daughter as well as what he owed the Willcocks women for the money they spent on her care. “I really long to see [Charlotte],” Large to Phoebe Willcocks, “[though] that pleasure I can not expect for a few months” when he had the money to return to Ireland.[72] Large worked to soften this miserly view of fatherhood by emphasizing his absence from Charlotte Large’s life as a painful necessity rather than a thoughtless abandonment. Drawing on sentimental imagery in a bid for sympathy, Large confessed that his separation from his daughter “grieves me to the soul,” and he frequently asked for news about her, thanking Phoebe Willcocks for the “the information of the health of my dear little Child.”[73] His letters also included instructions for her care, including that she undertake “private devotion and serious reading, particularly the Bible.”[74] Lest Phoebe Willcocks think Large had sacrificed his morality and absconded from his paternal obligations to enrich himself, he drew on their shared Anglican faith to justify his absence. “I hope shortly [and] amply to provide for [Charlotte] and others,” he explained, “so that when Providence shall please to call me, that [way] shall not be a closed.”[75]

Tellingly, Large never judged the Caribbean or Virginia to be safe places for Charlotte Large. Amidst revolutionary upheaval, the Caribbean was a theatre of war filled with “hot-headed people.”[76] Yet danger was not limited to warring imperial forces. Large’s observation around individuals’ temperament grew out of his judgement that the islands’ inhabitants, including those tens of thousands of black slaves who laboured on the plantations of white men and women he profited from, possessed “very little society.”[77] Though veiled, Large’s explanation for why it was best for Charlotte Large to remain in Ireland drew on racial hierarchies that subordinated the Caribbean for exploitation by him and the wider metropole.[78] Drawing on biblical allusions, he expressed similar reservations about the society he found in Virginia, calling it “an infernal hole equal to Sodom,” where yellow fever outbreaks were frequent and his commercial dealings were frustrated by “the Devile & his imps; sufficient to weary the Patience of Job.”[79] Large’s racialized and gendered evaluations of the Caribbean and Virginia become even clearer when his resolution to keep his daughter in Ireland is contrasted with his readiness to have his nephews join him in the transatlantic trade. In 1796, Large wrote to Phoebe Willcocks from the Caribbean that his nephew, John, “continues on in good health and is useful. I have sent for his next Brother; I propose having them all out [and] if Providence spares me a few years I hope to establish them.”[80] While more familial than friendly, the relationship between Large and his nephews likewise blended affective obligations and commercial interests in reciprocal exchange; Large facilitated his nephews’ entrance into the transatlantic trade and they, in turn, supported and expanded his commercial enterprise.[81] In 1802, after Large relocated his trading ventures to Norfolk, Virginia, he informed Willcocks that he now did the majority of his trade in the Caribbean through John, who was soon to be connected with one of Large’s contacts in Trinidad, and another nephew, William, who planned to join Large in Virginia before returning to Martinique.[82]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Large’s appeals for sympathy are most frequent in his accounts of commercial disappointment. After a storm destroyed his cargo off the coast of Madeira, Large asked Willcocks, “you see my friend how this fickle dame fortune treats me,” before he assured him, “my soule rises above mortality and I will preserve to this and against all opposition.”[83] War likewise imperiled Large’s profits and pushed him to ask for sympathy. In February 1795, Large took advantage of the French evacuation of Guadeloupe and chartered a ship to St. Lucia to trade fish, flour, and tobacco for sugar, coffee, and cocoa. “I offered the scheme to a Gentlen here who readily come in to my proposal,” he explained, “and I now have the pleasure to inform you (though not 2 months standing) we have cleared £1000, without advancing £5.”[84] But by October, Large’s claims that risk had prudently been avoided were overturned when the French retook the island. In his account of the “the shamefull loss of St. Lucia,” Large blamed British General Stewart, “[whose] conduct has been so villainous,” before he recounted his own actions: “I staid til the last and with great difficulty escaped with my life, leaving £1800 worth of goods in my store and £1600 in debts, by this misfortune I was stripd of every shilling.”[85] While sentimental imagery could not save Large from shifting imperial fortunes in the Caribbean, the sympathy it evoked could save him from shameful judgement by his creditors.

Arguably, something of a counter-revolutionary mercantile disposition emerged from the judgements that fill Large’s letters, though it is rife with contradictory sentiments and silences.[86] Large disparaged the “massacres” and “Politicks” of the French Revolution, and proclaimed “Tho the times in Europe are awful, I have no fears about the security and prosperity of Great Britain,” believing that “France and Bonaparte will be humbled” during the Napoleonic Wars.[87] He also held a skeptical view of Americans, who he felt were “split in to factions without principle to hold to honor or virtue.”[88] Yet, even as Large eagerly pursued a contract to provision the army and navy in the Windward Islands with beef, a streak of Smithian commercial liberalism characterized Large’s repeated wish that “God send us peace,” so that his trading ventures would be free from “The French in Guadeloupe [who have] a swarm of privateers out & do much mischief.”[89] Despite his disdain for Americans, it was likely this desire for safer trade that induced Large to stay in Virginia, alongside fellow merchants eager to transport their cargo under a neutral American flag.[90] Yet, if there were incongruities in the opinions Large held, his own pursuit of self-interested profit was not solely responsible for reconciling competing commercial and political sentiments in his letters. The feelings of both reader and writer also shaped Large’s accounts of politics and business in the transatlantic trade. Indeed, Large judged that “Our Politicks [here] is of little account” and admitted to Phoebe Willcocks, “I have very little to entertain you with.”[91]

For all the sympathy imbued in Large’s accounts of political upheaval, his correspondence never once mentions slavery directly, despite the doubly significant presence of slaves in both the Caribbean and American plantation economies, and the moral economy of sentimentality from which Large profited.[92] In a letter to Willcocks, Large complained how he and other merchants were routinely harassed and “duly insulted by the Patriots who keep in the woods.” [93] Though some of those “Patriots” likely included former slaves on St. Lucia, who, along with French and free black republicans, made up l’armée française au bois that confined Large and the rest of the British presence to the town of Castries, Large made no attempt to distinguish them.[94] Presented as unnamed and unknown strangers, slaves were not only relegated to the silences within Large’s letters but put into the space in which Adam Smith feared sympathy had failed: in the “established customs” of society that had justified slavery and the silence surrounding it on the grounds that black men and women’s subordination was simply “the way of the world.”[95] Thus, while there is an undeniable element of what Ann Laura Stoler calls the “disposition of disregard” in Large’s narration, his silences were a product of the same moral economy that undergird his friendly commercial sentiments, one that transformed slaves into silent strangers and credit exchanges into friendly undertakings.[96] Even when the Haitian Revolution challenged slavery as “the way of the world,” Large still gravitated towards talking about his friends rather than discussing strangers.[97] Offering no comment on how the overthrow of slavery by black men and women threatened to upend the racial hierarchy that the entire transatlantic trade relied upon, he instead wrote about individuals familiar to his commercial circle, perhaps in pursuit of the business opportunities that well-placed friends could provide: “I find by the papers your friend General Simco is appointed to St. Domingo. I hope he will not get delayed as most of them in coming here.”[98] Though never acknowledged in his letters, the moral economy that Large relied on to negotiate his credit exchanges among friends was dependent on slavery and shaped by strangers.

Settlers’ Debts and Sentimental Exchanges

Sometime between 1810–1811, Large left the transatlantic trade with his credit and contacts to establish a household in Upper Canada, where he was “received by his worthy friends, Mr. Wilcox and his Daughter.”[99] By this time, Willcocks’ daughter, Margaret Phoebe Willcocks, had married William Warren Baldwin, further cementing the family’s ties within a prominent circle of Irish-Protestants in Upper Canadian society.[100] Unable to attend the wedding, Large passed along his “respectable regards wishing them every happiness” in one of the last letters he sent before he eventually joined them in Upper Canada.[101] When Willcocks died in 1813, his property was divided up among this circle. Some of it went to paying off the debts he incurred in what Baldwin called his father-in-law’s “useless schemes at Mill building,” while he and Margaret Phoebe Baldwin received the remaining acres of the estate.[102] But Willcocks’ mill building was not useless for everyone. The sawmill that he erected along the south bank of the Rouge River seems to have passed on to Large, as did a good deal of his remaining property in Millbrook.[103] Over the next twenty years, Large grew his holdings by buying and selling lots around the Baldwin-Willcocks family lands.[104]

Though it does not appear that Large continued to invest in the transatlantic trade, ideas of friendship continued to unite the moral and commercial economies of credit exchanges in Upper Canada.[105] In 1837, Baldwin wrote to Large on his wife’s behalf: “[Margaret Phoebe] thanks you also for the Ham, but we neither see receipt nor ticket attached to them — this is not business like.”[106] Though gifts belonged to a different culture of exchange than commerce, the sentimentality that organized friendship could blur the lines between them, especially because Baldwin was also responsible for managing Large’s finances, particularly by furnishing him with the “blank bills as you requested,” on which he could draw credit.[107] However, unlike in the transatlantic trade, many of these credit arrangements in Upper Canada related to land rather than to goods, and they depended on Indigenous dispossession rather than slavery. In 1833, Lawrence Heyden, a relation of the Baldwin-Willcocks household by marriage, asked that Large pay back his debt: “I really want [the sum] to make up my land payment. I would not trouble you if I could well do without it.”[108] Heyden’s request for repayment out of need mirrored Edward Hayes’s request that Large pay him back, “now that I understand you have acquired affluent means to enable you to so do”[109] In both cases, settling an outstanding debt was positioned as more than an economic calculation; it was a social judgement about what was fair given the creditor’s knowledge of the debtor’s situation. When Hayes suggested that Large’s financial means ensured that “the discharging of [the debt ought] to be more readily and honourably acceded,” he perhaps unwittingly indicated that the morality of settling a debt likewise extended to the timing and nature of the creditor’s request.[110]

Large found himself on the opposite side of this relationship in 1835, when he tried to collect a £6 debt from David Long, a black man living in York, Upper Canada. [111] In this instance, Large relied not on what T.H. Breen called an “etiquette of debt,” but instead acted, as Smith observed, the way that the powerful often did when they exploited the poor, “either by violence or by more orderly oppression of law” to increase their wealth.[112] After Large sent a constable to Long’s home, Long protested in a letter to Large that “I had not one shilling at present, but if it satisfyed you or him he may do his duty … not that he or all the constables, that is, could render me more destitute,” for “there is [no] advantage in drowning a ded rat.”[113] While a free man in British North America, Long’s position within colonial society was precarious due to the racism that structured settler society, a marginalization compounded by his debts.[114] Rather than a friend, Large treated Long as a stranger — a poor black man in a credit network and a settler society that was overly white — whose relationship was administered by the rule of law, not by any sort of friendly intercession. But Large’s actions did not stop Long from writing sentimental appeals for sympathy. He promised Large that he had hired out his son to cover his debts before he implored him to end his public humiliation. “Send a note by the bearer to [the] constable to stop, not that there is any thing at stake but a little shame of [the] neighbours,” he wrote.[115] While Long’s retort seems conscious of the limitations around sympathy to challenge colonial society’s entrenched racial hierarchies, his words left little doubt that he understood sympathy’s power to negotiate credit’s moral economy. Put differently, he was just as sensible a man as Large. Ultimately, Long’s narration turned his neighbours into impartial spectators who publicly judged their exchange, leaving ambiguous who was more shamed by the affair: the pitiful debtor or the unfeeling creditor.

While it is unclear whether Long’s emotional appeal achieved the reprieve he sought, Large’s correspondence in Upper Canada is rife with examples of when sentimentality both succeeded and failed to secure credit. In 1825, a letter from New York sent to Large by a fellow merchant, Richard Popham, opened with an explanation that his poor finances kept him from visiting Large in Upper Canada, and followed with an inquiry about emigrating to open “[a] small store which I should like to do in your parts where I think with some Cash I could procure some credit.”[116] Besides information, Popham was likely asking for financial assistance, informing Large a few months later: “My mind is in a dreadful state of agitation. I have nearly made it up in order to stop expense to take refuge in the Poor House till matters come round.”[117] Without Large’s replies, it is impossible to know his reactions to Popham’s letters. Yet, even if Popham’s account of his precarity moved Large to pity, it did not move his money. In 1826, Popham repeated to Large that it was the “wish of my heart” to emigrate to “the neighbourhood of so beloved a friend and in case of accomplishing this desirable object I flatter myself that the remainder of our lives will be spent in reciprocal pleasures and advantages,” a sentiment he repeated again in 1829 when he inquired if “you were still living at Millbrook or in the neighbourd I would endeavour to join you next spring.”[118] Indeed, despite Popham’s sentimental pleas for financial aid, it appears that Large was one of those “pretended friends” and family members that Popham denounced, whose “hearts would not allow them to advance for the purpose a few pounds.”[119]

Popham might have erred in his letter because he relied too heavily on sympathy. As Smith recommended, “man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect if from their benevolence only.”[120] Yet, Large’s correspondence with his estranged sister, Mary Supple, reveals that heartfelt appeals to an individual’s sentiments could be enough to secure help and credit. Indeed, emotions were a powerful force, capable of undermining those “principles of contract” between family members that Nancy Christie found in her study of women’s begging letters of the nineteenth century.[121] In the course of their correspondence, Mary Supple recounted the dead and dying around her during London’s cholera epidemic, and how her “unkind” husband had died after his failures in business, leaving the family, including Mary, her daughter, her unemployed son-in-law, and their four children, without any financial prospects. Her account of their situation was intended to evoke pity but also to shame her brother, telling him “you little know what has been the suffering sorrows difficulties and dangers that has marked my passage through this vale of tears as I believe that the misfortunes and hardships of all the family has been centered in me.”[122] Clearly moved by her sentiments, Large extended both his sympathy and his money to settle his fraternal debt with his sister. Sending bills drawn in his name to both Bandon, Ireland, and Montreal, in Lower Canada, Large covered the cost of Mary Supple and her family’s emigration to Upper Canada and invited his sister to live with him at his home in Millbrook.

The inverse of this relationship was equally true; bad feelings could undo both familial and market expectations for the repayment of credit. When Charlotte Large arrived in Upper Canada to join her father’s household in 1817, she maintained a correspondence with her maternal aunt, Hester Kingston, in which matters of debt frequently appeared. In a letter from 1819, Hester Kingston asked Charlotte Large “how I was to remit your money,” a sum of approximately £50.[123] The money appears to have been part of an ongoing payment that Charlotte Large received from her mother’s family; a later letter from Hester Kingston in 1820 deducted Charlotte Large’s expenses for clothes and her passage to Upper Canada, and calculated her income to be £23.15.0, which included £5.16.3 of interest.[124] Though Charlotte Large’s credit was accounted for in seemingly objective financial terms, it never lost its emotional valence. In the same letter, Hester Kingston intimated that the cost of paying her family’s debts to Charlotte Large was steep since her husband, George Kingston, had died.[125] Hester Kingston mixed shame into her appeal for aid from Large when she wrote her niece, “if [it is] in your father’s power he would consider my children who have met severe loses and pay them the debt he owed their dear good father. It would be a great hardship if he did not as we willingly pay you.”[126]

Financial hardship also appears to have played a role in keeping Charlotte Large from receiving her share of the family’s property. Years after Hester Kingston’s death in 1820, her son, William Holland Kingston, sold off family property in Ireland to avoid bankruptcy, forcing Charlotte Large to pursue the “fair settlement of [her] claim on him in common with the rest of his creditors.”[127] Yet, it was as much poor feelings as poor finances that were to blame for Kingston’s refusal to pay. “Mr. Kingston is a most unpleasant kind of man to deal with,” wrote James Scott, one of Baldwin’s contacts in Ireland handling the case on the Large family’s behalf, “it being exceedingly difficult to get any kind of payment from him, he is besides very hard and unaccommodating.”[128] Scott detected no kindness from Kingston or any sense of obligation to the Large family, and Mary Supple recalled that Kingston was actively unfriendly to Charlotte Large, being “obliged to send for Mr. Kingston inconsequence of the ill treatment I received in various ways as to [Charlotte] being unkindly treated and talked of.”[129] Perhaps Kingston’s hostile disposition towards Charlotte Large can be traced back to her father’s failure to repay the debt he owed Kingston’s family years earlier. In any case, their personal acrimony kept Charlotte Large from the share she claimed of her mother’s family estate, causing Large to set aside £30 in his will for her to be paid quarterly so long as her cousin withheld her inheritance.[130]

Just as credit negotiations remained sympathetic affairs in settler society, the use of credit for transatlantic emigration to Upper Canada remained enmeshed with transatlantic credit economies in the Caribbean. In 1832, Large reconnected with his nephew, Seward Large. Sharing news about his life in Ireland, Seward informed his uncle that he was a cooper who “occasionally [did] a little West India business.”[131] That business was done with his brother, William, with whom Large had established in the provisions trade decades prior, and who had become a partner in selling sugar from Trinidad through the provision house of Large, Adams & Co.[132] However, Seward Large was curious to “try his fortune in Canada” after “the total failure of the coopering trade,” and asked his uncle whether £800 was enough to fund his family’s emigration.[133] Large’s reply must have been positive as Seward’s response months later informed his uncle that he had changed his mind. Though he was relieved to report that business had improved, Seward explained that his finances still prohibited him from emigrating, because “much of my capital is now afloat in the West Indies which I cannot come at for some time.”[134] That Seward Large found himself so invested in the extraction of sugar in the Caribbean that he could not take part in the colonial dispossession of Indigenous people from their land in Upper Canada is an important reminder that the circulation of credit was limited by the colonial conditions of its creation.[135] But it likewise reveals that the value of credit cannot be understood as a straightforward accumulation of colonial profits.[136] For Large and his network of friends and family to speculate on their futures, and with their finances in empire, the hands that exchanged credit were as important as credit itself.

Sympathy in Exchange

Turning our attention towards the role of sympathy and sentimental language in commercial credit exchanges is intended less to ignore the empirical or the imperial realities of trade in the Atlantic than to recognize, in the first place, the reasoning that allowed for a commerce dependent on credit to be conducted between individuals. Even as it was theorized universally, sympathy was a colonial relation in practice. Individual expectations for sympathy in exchange connected liberal domestic spaces and marketplaces through credit relationships while distancing both from the illiberal colonial conditions of slavery and dispossession upon which they depended. As Emma Rothschild has argued in relationship to Enlightenment thought, “The flux in conditions and dispositions [was] thus at the heart of late eighteenth century commercial life.”[137] Large and his transatlantic credit network illuminate this affective aspect of economics in colonial capitalism, within markets and households as well as across distinct colonial boundaries, in order to re-situate Smith’s ideas concerning morality within the daily rhythm of commercial life. Simply because the impact of emotions on credit relationships cannot be tallied up does not mean affect should be written off in understanding the circulation of credit in transatlantic networks; the debt that credit negotiations owed to sympathy and friendship was never discounted by those in Large’s network. Independent of the critical gaze of historians, these merchants and emigrants underwent their own affective turn, in which feeling played a major role in organizing and narrating the transatlantic exchange of credit.

The strength and weaknesses of sentimental language in credit exchanges can be traced to the way displays of affection fostered recognition between individuals. In Smith’s thought, our sentiments are best expressed when we are in “agreable company,” and where our feelings can be expressed “by sympathy” between the writer and the reader, for it is “then and then only [that] the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it.”[138] For Large and his network, it was according to the ideal of friendship that a liberal discourse of sentimental language had the power to negotiate a space for sympathy within credit relationships. Tempering those feelings of self-interest that united the individual pursuit of personal profit with reputation, liberal sentimentality demanded sympathy for others and promised a degree of propriety among friends. Crucially, the moral economy of sympathy was flexible and limited, making it a powerful tool for judging credit relations in the twinned transatlantic contexts of trade and emigration, without demanding that hierarchies of race, gender, and class be overturned.[139] If, as Ian Baucom posits, credit and the system of financial capital it arose from was a double economy of monetary value and individual trust, Large’s letters remind us that both sides of that economy negotiated emotions to determine the value of a debt and an individual.[140] Thus, Large’s transatlantic credit network narrated a practice of sympathetic commercial sentiments that reconciled Smith’s individual economic liberalism with his collective moral liberalism. The exchange of credit was financed by feelings.