William Panton

William Panton (c. 1740 – 26 February 1801) was the head of a group of five Scottish merchants who founded the powerful and influential trading firm of Panton, Leslie & Company in 1783 at St. Augustine, then the capital of British East Florida. They formed a partnership to trade with the Indians of Florida and the Spanish borderlands on the southern frontier of the British colonies. Panton, the son of John Panton and Barbara Wemyss, was born on the family farm at the Mains of Aberdour on the south coast of the Moray Firth in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Panton emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina with his countryman, Thomas Forbes, in 1765. He got into the Indian trade as an apprentice with the firm of John Gordon, a Scots immigrant from Aberdeenshire who established a vast trade network in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida during the 1760s. Panton served as Gordon's clerk from 1765 until 1772, when Gordon appointed him one of his attorneys. Forbes was Gordon's maternal nephew. In 1774 Panton and Philip Moore formed a partnership that lasted for several years, and in 1776 Panton started his own trading house with Thomas Forbes in Savannah known as Panton, Forbes and Company. They began to trade with the growing population of white colonists, and speculated in lands, acquiring large tracts in both Carolina and Georgia. Soon after the American revolution broke out, they being determined loyalists, their properties were confiscated. They migrated to East Florida, now a British province and rapidly developing with the infusion of British capital and enterprise, and established themselves on the St. Marys River.

In December 1775, the British governor of East Florida, Patrick Tonyn, appointed Panton official trader for the Creek Indians, and in 1778 the British Indian agent, Col. Thomas Brown, charged Panton with responsibility for the giving of presents to the Creeks and Cherokees, a necessary part of diplomacy with the Indian tribes. On l0 January 1783, he received a license signed by Governor Tonyn, Brigadier General Archibald McArthur, commander of British forces in East Florida, and Thomas Brown, Superintendent of Indian Affairs, to carry on trade with the Indians and supply them with British manufactures.

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