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John Gordon (merchant)


John Gordon (c. 1710–1778) was a Loyalist British merchant and trader of Scottish origin who lived in South Carolina for many years. He settled in Charles Town about 1760, and from 1759 to 1773 he was a major exporter of deerskins supplied by Native American hunters. Gordon also participated in the transatlantic slave trade but was not a major importer of captive Africans.

John Gordon did business in Charles Town and Savannah, as well as in British East Florida. The regional network of Scottish traders headed by Gordon in Charles Town, and the brothers John and James Graham in Savannah, served as a liaison between government officials (many of them fellow Scots to whom they were connected politically) and the Indian tribes, primarily the Creeks. Gordon also underwrote the mercantile activities of George Galphin, the wealthiest Indian trader in the Southeast, whose trading firm was predominant in the tribal towns of the Chattahoochee Valley and in Coweta.

Gordon, the son of Mary MacQueen and John Gordon of Aberdeenshire, appears to have come to America in 1736, possibly among the 130 Highland Scots from Inverness aboard the vessel Symond, in the same convoy that brought John Wesley and his brother Charles to America. They were part of the so-called "Great Embarkation" of settlers recruited to emigrate to the new colony of Georgia founded by General James Oglethorpe. A list of the original settlers of St. Simons Island and the soldiers stationed at Fort Frederica in 1736 includes a John Gordon among those who were both settlers and soldiers. His rank is given as captain in the 1751 marriage records of the register of St. Helena's Parish at Beaufort, South Carolina.


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