Pierce Butler - Introduction

Introduction

Butler was born to an aristocratic Irish family, a son of Sir Richard Butler, 5th Baronet of Cloughgrenan, near the village of Tinryland, County Carlow, in Ireland. As the third son, he could inherit neither the title nor land, so his father purchased a commission for him in the British Army. He went to South Carolina in 1767 as a major with the Twenty-Ninth Regiment of Foot. As late as 1772, he was a ranking officer in British units charged with suppressing the growing colonial resistance to Parliament.

In 1771 he married Mary Middleton, an heiress, a match that brought him great wealth. He sold his commission, which enabled him to buy more land, and settled with her in South Carolina by 1779. He held 10,000 acres by the time of the Revolutionary War, chiefly rice plantations and slaves to work them. As an officer in South Carolina's militia during the American Revolutionary War and a man with a price on his head, he trained and organized American forces to fight the invading Redcoats.

Butler and his wife lost their considerable estates and fortune (based on his wife's inheritance) during the British occupation of South Carolina. At the end of the war, he was among the first to call for reconciliation with the Loyalists, as he believed unifying the country was critical. Similarly, he worked for a renewal of friendly relations and business trading with the former enemy, as Great Britain was the major trading partner of the United States and he wanted to rebuild his wealth. Although one of the planter elite, Butler became a leading spokesman for the frontiersmen and impoverished settlers in the western part of the state.

By the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Butler represented South Carolina. He was an eloquent advocate of the rights of white yeomen during the debate over the Constitution, as well as a proponent of concessions to benefit slaveholders (which he helped win). As a major planter, he was among the political and social elite of the Southern colonies. He was "the most outspoken slave-owning member of the four-man South Carolina delegation." By 1793 he held 500 enslaved African Americans, who lived and worked on his rice plantation at Butler Island and cotton plantation at St. Simons Island (the Sea Islands of Georgia), each several hundred acres in size. Before his death, he acquired more land and held more than 1,000 slaves.

Butler had a strong and enduring sense of nationalism. An Anglo-Irish nobleman, he married an American heiress with sufficient wealth to enable him to sever his ties with the old world. He embraced the new country and the concept of a permanent union of the thirteen states. His military and political experiences led him to the conviction that a strong central government, as the bedrock of political and economic security, was essential to protect the rights not only of his own social class and adopted state but also of all classes of citizens and all the states. after the American revolution, pierce signed the deceleration of independence.