Early Life and Education
John Laurens was born in 1754 to Henry Laurens and Eleanor Ball in Charleston, South Carolina; both their families were planters who had grown wealthy through cultivation of rice based on slave labor. Henry Laurens ran one of the largest slave trading houses in the country with his partner Richard Oswald.
John was the eldest of the five children who survived infancy. John and his two brothers were tutored at home, but after the death of their mother, their father took them to England for their education. John completed his studies in Europe, first in London in 1771, then in Geneva, Switzerland in 1772. As a youth, John expressed considerable interest in science and medicine, but he yielded to his father's wish that he study law. In August 1774 he returned to London to do so.
His father returned to South Carolina but refused to let John return until completing his legal studies two years later. In the summer of 1777, after the Revolutionary War had started, Laurens accompanied his father to Philadelphia, where the senior man was to serve in the Continental Congress. Despite the father's objections, the younger Laurens continued on to General George Washington's camp as a volunteer at the age of 23.
Read more about this topic: John Laurens
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind difficulties which are none of his.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)