Author: OGILVIE, George
Biography:
OGILVIE, George (1748-1801: ancestry.com)
He is probably the George Ogilvie who was baptized at Lonmay, Aberdeenshire, on 19 Nov. 1748, whose father’s name was Alexander. Other sources state the he was only son of Alexander Ogilvie (1723-1791) of Auchiries (19 miles from Lonmay), and his wife, Mary (d 1763), a daughter of George Cumine of Pitullie (the Cumines and Ogilivies fought together in the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion). In the 1760s in London, he articled and lived with his uncle, MP Charles Ogilvie (c. 1731-1788), who owned plantations in South Carolina and for a time was a merchant in Charleston. In 1774, his uncle sent him to America to oversee his South Carolina holdings. With the 50 per cent share of profits his uncle allowed him, he bought his own properties in Georgia and in Crow Island, St Mark parish, near Camden, on which lands he used forty or more slaves to build rice and indigo plantations and to erect canals and dykes. To inform his relatives about life in the wilderness, and “to kill the languor of a winter evening … in the solitude of those forests,” during a stay at his uncle’s Myrtle Grove plantation he composed his historically valuable Carolina; or, the Planter. Through his uncle, he befriended Dr Alexander Garden (1730-1791), a respected botanist and correspondent of Linnaeus. During the Revolution, with another prominent Carolinian he appealed to the British commander-in-chief to protect the welfare and property of Carolinian loyalists. On 12 July 1779 at Rathen, Aberdeen, he married his cousin Rebecca Irvine (1757-1824) of Dumfries. Together they had eleven children. In 1788, he refused to take an Oath to the State. He was banished, his properties (valued at £15,000) were confiscated, and he returned to Scotland. He twice came back to South Carolina, in 1785-86 to contest the confiscation of his property, and, “having met with some losses in trade,” in 1788 to attempt to reestablish his fortunes; he succeeded in neither mission. At the time of his death, in 1801, he was comptroller of customs at Aberdeen. (ancestry.com 29 June 2023; LBS 1 July 2023; University of Aberdeen, Papers of Ogilvie-Forbes GB 0231; PROB 11/1375; J. F. Leslie, Short Account of the Family of Irvine [1893]; E. Berkeley, Dr. Alexander Garden of Charles Town [1969], 276; D. S. Shields, “George Ogilvie’s Carolina; Or, The Planter (1776),” Southern Literary Journal, 18 [1986], 7-82; B. DeWolfe, ed. Discoveries of America [1997], 188-89; T. David, “The Atlantic at Work” Lincoln College PhD dissertation [2011], 195) JC