A native of Ireland who came to Boston as a British Soldier before marrying Mary Middleton in 1771. He was one of the four men from SC who signed the U.S. Constitution.
Bio and Wiki:
One of the most aristocratic delegates at the convention, Butler was born in 1744 in County Carlow, Ireland. His father was Sir Richard Butler, member of Parliament and a baronet.
Like so many younger sons of the British aristocracy who could not inherit their fathers' estates because of primogeniture, Butler pursued a military career. He became a major in His Majesty's 29th Regiment and during the colonial unrest was posted to Boston in 1768 to quell disturbances there.
In 1771 he married Mary Middleton, daughter of a wealthy South Carolinian, and before long resigned his commission to take up a planter's life in the Charleston area. The couple was to have at least one daughter.
-----------
In early 1779, Governor John Rutledge asked the former Redcoat to help reorganize South Carolina's defenses. Butler assumed the post of the state's adjutant general, a position that carried the rank of brigadier general. He preferred to be addressed as major, his highest combat rank.[1]
Meanwhile, Britain was shifting its war strategy. By 1778, King George III and his ministers faced a new military situation in the colonies. Their forces in the northern and middle colonies had reached a stalemate with Washington's Continentals, more adequately supplied and better trained after the hard winter at Valley Forge. There was the risk of France entering the war as a partner of the Americans. The British developed a "southern strategy." They believed that the many Loyalists in the southern states (with whom the British had an active trade through cotton, riceand tobacco) would rally to the Crown if supported by regular troops. They planned a conquest of the rebellious colonies one at a time, moving north from Georgia. They launched their new strategy by capturing Savannah in December 1778.[1]
Butler joined to mobilize South Carolina's militia to repulse the threatened British invasion. Later, he helped prepare the state units used in the counterattack to drive the enemy from Georgia. During the operation, which climaxed with an attempted attack on Savannah, Butler served as a volunteer aide to General Lachlan McIntosh. The hastily raised and poorly prepared militia troops could not compete with the well-trained British regulars, and the Patriots' effort to relieve Savannah ended in failure.[1]
In 1780, the British captured Charleston, South Carolina and with it, most of the colony's civil government and military forces. Butler escaped as part of a command group deliberately located outside the city. During the next two years, he developed a counterstrategy to defeat the enemy's southern operations. Refusing to surrender, allies in South Carolina, and the occupied portions of Georgia and North Carolina, organized a resistance movement. As adjutant general, Butler worked with former members of the militia and Continental Army veterans such as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter to integrate the partisan efforts into a unified campaign. They united with the operations of the Southern Army under the command of Horatio Gates and later Nathanael Greene.[1]
As a former Royal officer, Butler was a special target for the British occupation forces. Several times he barely avoided capture. Throughout the closing phases of the southern campaign, he personally donated cash and supplies to help sustain the American forces and also assisted in the administration of prisoner-of-war facilities.[1]
Politician[edit]
Military operations in the final months of the Revolutionary War left Butler a poor man. Many of his plantations and ships were destroyed, and the international trade on which the majority of his income depended was in shambles. He traveled to Europe when the war ended in an effort to secure loans and establish new markets. He enrolled his son Thomas in a London school run by Weeden Butler, and engaged a new minister from among the British clergy for his Episcopal church in South Carolina.[1][2]
In late 1785 Butler returned to the United States. He became an outspoken advocate of reconciliation with former Loyalists and of equal representation for the residents of the backcountry. Testifying to his growing political influence, the South Carolina legislature asked Butler to represent the state at the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787.[1]
Butler's experiences as a soldier and planter-legislator led to his forceful support for a strong union of the states. At the same time, he looked to the special interests of his region. He introduced the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article 4, Section 2), which established protection for slavery in the Constitution.[1] In addition, while privately criticizing the international trade in African slaves, he supported the passage in the Constitution that prohibited regulation of the trade for 20 years. He advocated counting the full slave population in the states' totals for the purposes of Congressional apportionment, but had to be satisfied with the compromise to count three-fifths of the slaves toward that end.[3] It ensured that the Southern planter elite exerted a strong influence in national politics for decades.
Butler displayed inconsistencies that troubled his associates. He favored ratification of the Constitution, yet did not attend the South Carolina convention that ratified it. Later, he was elected by the South Carolina state legislature to three separate terms in the United States Senate, but changed his party allegiance: beginning as a Federalist, he switched to the Jeffersonian partyin 1795. In 1804 he declared himself a political independent.[1]
Vice President Aaron Burr was Butler's guest at his St. Simons plantations in September 1804. Burr was, at the time, laying low after shooting Alexander Hamilton in the July 1804 duel. The states of New York and New Jersey had each indicted the Vice President for murder in the wake of the post-duel controversy. Burr had traveled during August, to Butler's plantation under the pseudonym Roswell King, which was Butler's overseer's name. During Burr's stay in early September, one of the worst hurricanes in history hit the area, and we have Burr's first-hand description, documenting both his stay and this event.[4] It is interesting to note that Butler's politics and public involvement mirror the political rise and fall of his friend Burr.
After these successive changes, voters did not elect Butler again to national office. They elected him three more times to the state legislature as an easterner who spoke on behalf of the west.[1]
Later years, post-politics[edit]
Following his wife's death in 1790, Butler sold off the last of their South Carolina holdings and invested in Georgia Sea Island plantations. Major Pierce Butler hired Roswell King as the manager of his two plantations on St. Simon's Island and Butler Island. They had some conflicts as Butler wanted more moderate treatment of his slaves than was King's style. King left in 1820 to operate his own plantation near Darien. He also pursued plans in the 1830s to develop cotton mills in the Piedmont of Georgia, where he founded what became Roswell, Georgia in 1839.
Butler retired from politics in 1805 and spent much of his time in Philadelphia where he had previously established a summer home. His oldest daughter, Sarah, lived with her family and had three surviving sons before he died; two of whom would become Butler's heirs by irrevocably taking his surname. More than a decade prior to Butler's death, he disinherited his only surviving son Thomas Butler, together with his French-born wife and children.[3]
Butler became one of the wealthiest men in the United States, with huge land holdings in several states, through his business ventures. Like other Founding Fathers from his region, Butler also continued to support the institution of slavery. Some historians claim that he privately opposed slavery, and especially the international slave trade, but he tried to protect the institution as a politician because of its importance to the Southern economy. But, unlike Washington or Thomas Jefferson, for example, Butler never acknowledged the fundamental inconsistency in simultaneously defending the rights of the poor and supporting slavery.
Associates referred to Butler as "eccentric" and an "enigma." He followed his own path to produce the maximum of liberty and respect for those individuals whom he classed as citizens. He wanted to maintain a strong central government, but a government that could never ride roughshod over the rights of the private citizen. He opposed the policies of the Federalists under Alexander Hamilton because he believed they had sacrificed the interests of westerners and had sought to force their policies on the opposition. He later split with Jefferson and the Democrats for the same reason. Butler emphasized his belief in the role of the common man. Late in life he summarized his view: "Our System is little better than [a] matter of Experiment.... much must depend on the morals and manners of the people at large."
No comments:
Post a Comment