Laurens served under his friend Hamilton in the nighttime assault and capture of Redoubt Number 10.
Hamilton and Laurens worked side by side, and as a result became better acquainted with one another’s personality and beliefs. Image of John Laurens from Wikimedia Just two weeks before Lauren died in South Carolina, Hamilton wrote him a letter on August 15, 1782 imploring him to join Congress and help him with the country’s next steps after the Revolution. When he did write to him, it was to tell him that his efforts had met only with frustration.
On July 14, 1779, Laurens Ternant will relate to you how many violent struggles I have had between duty and inclination—how much my heart was with you, while I appeared to be most actively employed here—but it appears to me that I shd be inexcusable in the light of a Citizen if I did not continue my utmost efforts for carrying the plan of black levies into execution, while there remains the smallest hope of success.Just two weeks before Lauren died in South Carolina, Hamilton It requires all the virtue and all the abilities of the Country. Carol Kears Laurens himself was wounded, and his second in command fell back to the main force at the Tullifinny, where Moultrie was compelled to retreat towards Charleston.Due to Laurens's connections, his activities could not escape notice; for example, in a May 5 letter to the governor of Virginia, South Carolina's lieutenant governor That fall, Laurens commanded an infantry regiment in General Laurens was taken prisoner by the British in May 1780, after the fall of Charleston.
Laurens slowed their correspondence in hopes that he could help Hamilton leave their relationship. When Hamilton and Schuyler became engaged sometime that April³², Hamilton still had not mentioned her to Laurens.On May 12th, Charleston was surrendered to the British.³³ Laurens’s plan for a black battalion had been rejected, and just as Laurens and Hamilton had predicted, the result was a steady British takeover of South Carolina. John Laurens.
They exchanged many letters during the several years when different assignments and Laurens's capture by the British kept them apart; for example, when the terms of Laurens's parole prevented him from being present at Hamilton's wedding to Stating that "one must tread gingerly in approaching this matter," Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow wrote that it is impossible to say "with any certainty" that Laurens and Hamilton were lovers, noting that such an affair would have required the exercise of "extraordinary precautions" because sodomy was a capital offense throughout the colonies at the time.In contrast to Hamilton's effusive letters, surviving letters from Laurens to Hamilton were notably less frequent and less passionately worded, although some letters written by Laurens have been lost or may have been destroyed.Massey has dismissed speculations on John Laurens's supposed homosexuality and on a Laurens-Hamilton relationship as unsubstantiated, concluding, "Their relationship was platonic, a bond formed by their devotion to the Revolution and mutual ambition for fame. Laurens chose Hamilton as his second.²¹ Hamilton and Laurens arrived late to the duel, despite having chosen the location. Indeed, my friend, it was not well done. On the night of October 14th, Hamilton took redoubt ten with surprisingly few casualties on either side, and Laurens made a British retreat completely impossible. In his letter to Lafayette Hamilton tells him “You know how truly I loved him and will judge how much I regret him.”⁵² Hamilton reveals a bit more of his feelings for Laurens here than he revealed when he wrote to Greene, and this may be another hint that Lafayette understood what was between his two friends.After the letter in which he informed Lafayette of Laurens’s death, Hamilton’s only written mention of Laurens appears to have been a letter to Laurens’s father, written three years later, informing him that a captured runaway slave had insisted that he had been freed years earlier by John Laurens.⁵³ It is not known if Hamilton ever spoke of Laurens. As Washington’s aides de camp, Hamilton and Laurens’s jobs had been reconnaissance for most of the day. His career of virtue is at an end. One was John Laurens.
She attempted to see him when he came to France but they never made the connection. By January 11th, 1781, both men had returned to headquarters.³⁹ Their reunion may have been tinged with awkwardness from everything that had passed between them in their letters of the past several months, and from Hamilton’s marriage.