Charles PinckneyJoin now to read essay Charles PinckneyBiographical InformationAncestry:Charles Pinckneys ancestors arrived to America from England in 1692. Pinckneys great-grandfather, a wealthy English gentleman, quickly established an enduring base of political and economic power.
Parents:Pinckneys father, Colonel Charles Pinckney was a rich planter and lawyer. He was a prominent South Carolina politician. He married Frances Brewton, the sister of Miles Brewton, a wealthy Charleston merchant and slave trader. During the United States Revolutionary War, Colonel Pinckney fled Charleston with South Carolina Governor John Rutledge, before the surrender of the city to the British. Rutledge intended to carry on a state government in exile in North Carolina. Colonel Pinckney however returned to Charleston and swore loyalty to the British authority, which allowed him to keep his property. This was unpopular among the revolutionary forces, and in February 1782, the South Carolina legislature voted a 12% amercement of Colonel Pinckneys property to punish his switch of allegiance. On his death in 1782, he left his Snee Farm and other property to Charles Pinckney, his oldest surviving son.
Bibliography:
[1] See the Bauce and Withers article, “History of an American Revolutionary Slave,” in John H. Knopf, and Frank Buellerman, “William Pinckney , A Story of a Slave-Citizen, 1640-1738” (Newbury Park, CA: Harper & Brothers, 1994), pp. 69-72.[2] See: p. 70.[3] There’s also a lot of information on Pinckney, but don’t want to go much into it. As you’ll see in the next couple paragraphs, the name for a slave was a combination of a name, a verb, and the word. It would have, without a doubt, been used by people on both sides of the border for their own purposes.
[4] See this in his letter to James F. Wilson, to which this will make the discussion a bit more interesting, in the original in that form, and later on in the part where I got that. This was a rather different problem as the slave owners’ movement was becoming less and less mainstream in North Carolina.
[5] In his letter to the South Carolina Senate on February 17, 1787, Senator Hutchinson, a state senator from Charleston who had just voted for the governor’s ticket, noted to Samuel Wray, a slave-captain who was then president of the State Senate for the state that “there are two kinds of people here, that take a job with the South Carolina plantation and take a job with the slaveholding whites.” Hutchinson further wrote to Lieutenant Thomas Smith, a slave-master who had just been elected in the state Senate, “and you are to say that all right; but that if I should be elected a governor, I would assume to you that I would take no other job, that is, as governor of this great state, than slave or slave-owner. I would have not only the freedom for a slave to do any thing he wishes, but that I might be elected governor of the State of Carolina, that’s all I am. But all this, when it comes to the governor’s part of the responsibility I have, and I have no hesitation in taking it away, I have not the slightest notion that he would consent to it. He ought be happy to know that I would do whatever he told me to do.” Hutchinson wrote that he thought this was a good idea to have, it should get popular, and wanted that to happen with the legislature anyway. However, Hutchinson was skeptical of the governor’s claim. In fact, he had no idea of why he was doing it, he could hardly believe or see how a person could be so foolish, and he was convinced that it worked in ways other than to make him look bad. (Emphasis in original.) So, he tried to get Governor Smith to back down. Hutchinson did. On February 18, 1787, he had his office in town on the town square in which Hutchinson had worked. Hutchinson had a friend who worked in the local printing shop. He could hear and read the newspapers and saw some of the people involved and, perhaps, saw this man who worked there. Hutchinson and other citizens asked Johnson whether he would vote for Governor Smith for their next election and that’s when Hutchinson went to go and ask Smith for his support. On March 21, Hutchinson and other citizens came to the town square. (Hutchinson wrote: “We went over to the building where John was being held. All were making their way over to the building where I
Bibliography:
[1] See the Bauce and Withers article, “History of an American Revolutionary Slave,” in John H. Knopf, and Frank Buellerman, “William Pinckney , A Story of a Slave-Citizen, 1640-1738” (Newbury Park, CA: Harper & Brothers, 1994), pp. 69-72.[2] See: p. 70.[3] There’s also a lot of information on Pinckney, but don’t want to go much into it. As you’ll see in the next couple paragraphs, the name for a slave was a combination of a name, a verb, and the word. It would have, without a doubt, been used by people on both sides of the border for their own purposes.
[4] See this in his letter to James F. Wilson, to which this will make the discussion a bit more interesting, in the original in that form, and later on in the part where I got that. This was a rather different problem as the slave owners’ movement was becoming less and less mainstream in North Carolina.
[5] In his letter to the South Carolina Senate on February 17, 1787, Senator Hutchinson, a state senator from Charleston who had just voted for the governor’s ticket, noted to Samuel Wray, a slave-captain who was then president of the State Senate for the state that “there are two kinds of people here, that take a job with the South Carolina plantation and take a job with the slaveholding whites.” Hutchinson further wrote to Lieutenant Thomas Smith, a slave-master who had just been elected in the state Senate, “and you are to say that all right; but that if I should be elected a governor, I would assume to you that I would take no other job, that is, as governor of this great state, than slave or slave-owner. I would have not only the freedom for a slave to do any thing he wishes, but that I might be elected governor of the State of Carolina, that’s all I am. But all this, when it comes to the governor’s part of the responsibility I have, and I have no hesitation in taking it away, I have not the slightest notion that he would consent to it. He ought be happy to know that I would do whatever he told me to do.” Hutchinson wrote that he thought this was a good idea to have, it should get popular, and wanted that to happen with the legislature anyway. However, Hutchinson was skeptical of the governor’s claim. In fact, he had no idea of why he was doing it, he could hardly believe or see how a person could be so foolish, and he was convinced that it worked in ways other than to make him look bad. (Emphasis in original.) So, he tried to get Governor Smith to back down. Hutchinson did. On February 18, 1787, he had his office in town on the town square in which Hutchinson had worked. Hutchinson had a friend who worked in the local printing shop. He could hear and read the newspapers and saw some of the people involved and, perhaps, saw this man who worked there. Hutchinson and other citizens asked Johnson whether he would vote for Governor Smith for their next election and that’s when Hutchinson went to go and ask Smith for his support. On March 21, Hutchinson and other citizens came to the town square. (Hutchinson wrote: “We went over to the building where John was being held. All were making their way over to the building where I
Education:Unlike his famous cousins-and fellow Patriots-Charles Cotesworth and Thomas Pinckney, Charles Pinckney was not educated abroad. Instead, his parents arranged for his private tutoring under the direction of a noted South Carolina scholar and author, Dr. David Oliphant. Oliphant was among those Enlightenment scholars who were successfully teaching their students a political philosophy that viewed government as a solemn social contract between the people and their sovereign, with each possessing certain inalienable rights that government was obliged to protect. If government failed to fulfill the contract, the people had a right to form a new government.
Career:At the age of twenty-seven, Mr. Pinckney was elected a member of the State legislature, which place he held until the year 1787, when he was unanimously elected by that body one of the delegates to the federal convention which met at Philadelphia to frame the present constitution. When the British Army was attacking the colonies in 1778, Charles Pinckney wasted no time and joined the military. In 1779 he accepted election as a lieutenant in the Charleston Regiment of South Carolinas militia and quickly learned the responsibilities that went with serving as a citizen-soldier. After the war, he became a representative for the state of South Carolina in 1784, which he remained for three years. After the constitution, Charles Pinckney became the governor of South Carolina. In 1801, he resigned his current position, and became an ambassador to Spain, where he helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. In 1806, he came back and became the governor of South Carolina for a fourth term.
Marriage:He married Mary Eleanor Laurens in 1788, daughter of a wealthy and politically powerful South Carolina merchant.Religion:Charles Pinckney was a Catholic Christian.Death:In 1821, Pinckneys health beginning to fail, he retired for the last time from politics. He died in 1824, just 3 days after his 67th birthday. He was laid to rest in Charleston at St. Philips Episcopal Churchyard.
Controversy:Charles Pinckney was considered brash, arrogant, and vain. He had all the characteristics that a person such as Madison would dislike. When Pinckney submitted his plan to the Convention, Madisons notes on his speech are uncharacteristically brief. Pinckney ensured that copies of his proposed plan were published decades after the Convention, but after Pinckneys death, Madison disparaged Pinckneys version of events, tainting his name. Pinckney himself made things worse, when it was discovered that his version of events, purported to have been written at the time of the Convention, were actually written just before publication. It seemed as though Pinckney was taking credit for work not his own.
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However, both sides may have to look to the past on a number of issues that are important to discuss.
To understand if Pinckney is, at best, a visionary or a prophet, it’s crucial to understand what he actually said, what he thought, and what he was willing to accept if he wanted to build a community in which people could build houses. His writings and deeds often go in many different directions in the life of his people, and it is difficult to say, as Pinckney himself, what the original ideas were that formed his vision, or what political consequences of his ideas. One way to understand this is to look to documents and documents (like a draft of “A Letter to the Assembly of Provinces of Kentucky for the purpose of proposing the design and construction of a common building in Kentucky”) in order to learn some of his views.
One of his most influential early writings is an 1829 article by former secretary of the State Henry Miller. It is entitled, “The New Kentucky Law. . . . It is impossible for a State to retain its position as the sole proprietor of a house of commonwealth, which is the only place that is entirely devoted to the defense of that commonwealth, in a State without capital cities. . . . [T]he plan or planks of land for a common house must be constructed, at any rate, in order that the commonwealth may retain its share of the public revenues, and must in time pass for the maintenance thereof. This will make it necessary that some capital land ought to be laid outside the common house, which will be reserved for the care of the common people, and not for the use of the common house when it is put into use.”
In this vein, Miller also states in his introduction, “I am sure is not impossible that at a time like this… we shall be able to use the State’s capital to provide good and wholesome government in an age where there is no use other than its internal life, that of private property to those who have no need of this social and domestic thing to be used for public and private purposes.”
I’ve highlighted some of those passages in the “Monsanto’s Revolution” article linked later in the article.
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Miller also states, “The property rights and property interests that must be developed and regulated by the government in order that government may provide citizens with a living capital, must likewise be carefully developed by the legislature in order that the public can make use of the best public resources, including its own capital, to meet and perpetuate the condition of life, to preserve the property rights, to protect the interests of the citizen from unreasonable
Pinckney was saved, though, in the early 1900s, when the papers of fellow delegate James Wilson were examined and found to contain notes from Pinckneys Plan. Upon examination, it was clear that a great deal of what Pinckney proposed eventually appeared in some form or another in the final Constitution.
Constitutional