Signing Their Rights Away (32 page)

He went to the state legislature in 1792 and abandoned the Federalists to become a Democratic-Republican (this metamorphosis was spurred along by President George Washington’s approval of the Jay Treaty, which seemed to go soft on the nation’s old enemy, Britain). In fact, Pinckney was so opposed to the treaty that he wanted Jay removed from his post as chief justice. Incensed that Pinckney would turn coat, his former Federalist buddies mocked him with the nickname “Blackguard Charlie.” Despite the ribbing from his old pals, he again became his state’s governor in 1796—the first Democratic-Republican to do so—and in 1798 was elected a senator.

During the heated election of 1800, Pinckney supported Jefferson, even though his cousin, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, was John Adams’s running mate. Jefferson won South Carolina’s electoral votes, and our man Pinckney became minister to Spain. Though he didn’t convince Spain to hand over Florida to the United States, he was considered instrumental in getting that country’s cooperation during the Louisiana Purchase. After returning from Spain, he toggled between the South Carolina state house and the governorship. His last stint in public office was as a U.S. representative.

One of the last signers to die, Pinckney left this world at the age of sixty-seven. Today, one of his homes is a National Historic Site in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on Sullivan’s Island, and is open to
the public. The signer was originally buried at St. Philip’s Church in Charleston, but the location of his grave remains as mysterious as that of the original draft of his infamous plan.

The Signer Who Turned Coat on the King

BORN
: July 11, 1744

DIED
: February 15, 1822

AGE AT SIGNING
: 43

PROFESSION
: Soldier, planter

BURIED
: Christ Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

When His Majesty’s soldiers arrived in America in the mid- to late 1760s, they came to defend unpopular acts of Parliament and to quell civil unrest. Many were impressed with the lives of the colonists. From what they saw, Americans had it pretty good: Abundant land. Three square meals. Education for their children. Clear, running streams. Pleasant orchards.
Just what were they griping about? Try living in dark, crowded London for a change!

Arriving in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre, one officer from the Crown’s Twenty-ninth Regiment liked the colonies so much he decided to stay. That soldier, Pierce Butler, sold his position in the British army to another wealthy officer wannabe in 1773, only two years after Butler had married Mary Middleton of South Carolina.
He was the son of an Irish baronet who belonged to the very same Parliament that was so agitating the colonists. But young Butler probably felt he had nothing to lose by leaving his Boston post: as his father’s third son, he would never inherit the family property and had been forced to enter the military at the age of eleven. Free from service, he used the cash from his commission to start an empire that included ten thousand acres of plantation in South Carolina and Georgia, plus a fleet of ships. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he worked in his state’s militia against his king and former brothers in arms, pumping money and supplies into the patriot cause.

Like Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Butler found himself on a hit list of British revolutionaries who saw their property and slaves confiscated. After the war, when the British military pulled out, Butler was left to rebuild his fortunes. He sailed to the Netherlands, hocked all his land to a Dutch firm, and received a sizable loan, which he used to buy a fresh batch of slaves and equipment. He thus adroitly sidestepped the high interest being charging by local banks at the end of the war, when everyone was trying to rebuild. Still, the Dutch loan, combined with a few bad rice harvests, nearly ruined him. The only reason his creditors didn’t swoop in to seize his property was that South Carolina passed an emergency law in 1786 to prevent such actions. It also helped that he was then a member of the legislature that passed the ruling.

Butler arrived at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a somewhat desperate man with shaky finances. But you wouldn’t have known it from the gold-laced jacket he wore and the way he crowed about his blue-blood lineage. Yet, for all his pride, he worked diligently on behalf of a strong central government. It was he who suggested that the delegates keep all deliberations secret, a measure that the convention adopted wholeheartedly on day one. At first, Butler wasn’t sure that Congress should abandon the Articles of Confederation, and he fought the Virginia Plan when it was presented in the early days of the convention. His argument was:
Are we really smart
enough, capable enough, and experienced enough to try a form of government never used anywhere on the planet?
But as he listened to James Madison and the other delegates, he changed his mind. Others in attendance were moved by his example and did the same.

Butler spoke about seventy times during the proceedings, and not always with consistency. He’s often remembered as defender of the “common man,” because he charged that the delegates represented only the nation’s elite. And he was right: there were few at the convention who represented the rights of the small tradesmen, farmers, and backwoods folks. But Butler later argued that allowing ordinary people to vote was impractical. He was hardly alone in this position. By serving on the committee that hammered out the details of the Electoral College—which some say was his idea—he and his fellow founders neatly inserted one more “check” between the top offices in the land and the voting public they often feared would be too ill informed to choose wisely.

Butler was sometimes full of contradictions. On one occasion, he said that no Congressman should ever take a salary; on another, he said they should be handsomely paid. He objected to allowing immigrants to sit on Congress, arguing that they were “dangerous,” although he himself was an immigrant, a fact that was not lost on him. Indeed, he admitted that he would’ve made a lousy politician had he been allowed to serve soon after arriving on colonial shores. But he is probably best known as the man responsible for the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, which states that slaves who fled to other states could be returned to their masters.

After the convention, Butler supported the Constitution but didn’t attend the South Carolina convention where the document was ratified. He served as a U.S. senator for three terms and was on the short list to run for his state’s governorship, though he never did. He was not in love with politics and thought it brought out the worst in men. “I am materially disappointed,” he wrote to a friend. “I find men scrambling for partial advantages, State interests, and in
short, a train of those narrow, impolitic measures that must, after a while, shake the Union to its very foundation.” Accordingly, he was always an independent in his politics. He switched parties three times and, even then, still often opposed his allies of-the-moment.

The years immediately after the convention brought Butler good luck and a bountiful harvest, and by 1790 his finances were healthy. Soon he had five hundred slaves working eleven hundred acres in South Carolina and Georgia. By this point he was one of the richest men in America, and he kicked back and watched the checks roll in. He bought homes in Philadelphia and moved there to be with a daughter. He supported slavery, the backbone of his wealth, till the end of his days.

Considering how he’d been maltreated by family inheritance, you’d think Butler would’ve been kind to his own progeny. But no. Instead, he became an odd and controlling old gent. He cut some of his children out of his will and promised to reward a son-in-law who named his own son Pierce Butler. That grandson married a British actress who was so horrified by the slavery practices she witnessed that she filed for divorce and published a tell-all book about her horrific experience in Georgia. Her husband squandered his fortune and was forced to sell his slaves in what was the largest human auction in U.S. history.

Upon his death in 1822, at age seventy-seven, Butler was buried just outside the walls of Christ Church in Philadelphia. And thus the soldier who liked America so much settled in for the long haul.