Pierce Butler (American politician)
Pierce Butler was an Anglo-Irish American politician who was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Born in the Kingdom of Ireland, Butler emigrated to the British North American colonies, where he fought in the American Revolutionary War. After the war, he served as a state legislator and was a member of the Congress of the Confederation. In 1787, he served as a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where Butler signed the Constitution of the United States; he was also a member of the United States Senate.
As one of the largest slaveholders in the United States, he frequently defended American slavery for both political and personal motives, even though he had private misgivings about the institution and particularly about the Atlantic slave trade. He introduced the Fugitive Slave Clause into a draft of the Constitution, which gave a federal guarantee to the property rights of slaveholders. Butler also supported counting the entire slave population in state totals for Congressional apportionment. The Constitution's Three-fifths Compromise counted only three-fifths of the enslaved population in state totals but still led to white voters in Southern United States having disproportionate power in the United States Congress.
Early life
Butler was born on July 11, 1744, in Garryhundon, County Carlow, Ireland. He was born into the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy. He was an Anglican until after the American Revolution when he became a member of the Episcopal Church alongside many of America's Founding Fathers. He was the third son of Sir Richard Butler, 5th Baronet, of Cloughgrenan, and his wife, Henrietta Percy. He resigned from a commission in the British Army in 1773 and settled with his wife, Mary, in South Carolina.Revolutionary war soldier
In early 1779, Governor John Rutledge asked Butler 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.Meanwhile, the British were shifting their wartime strategy. By 1778, King George III and his ministers faced a new military situation in the Thirteen 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 a risk that France would enter the war as a partner of the Americans. The British developed a "southern strategy." They believed that the many Loyalists in the southern states would rally to the Crown if supported by regular troops. They planned a reconquest of the rebellious colonies one at a time, moving north from Georgia. They launched their new strategy by capturing Savannah in December 1778.
Butler joined to mobilize South Carolina's militia to resist the British invasion. Later, he helped prepare the state units used in the counterattack which attempted to drive British forces from Georgia. Butler served as a volunteer aide to General Lachlan McIntosh during the operation, which climaxed with an attempted attack on Savannah. The hastily raised and poorly prepared militia troops could not compete with the well-trained British regulars, and the Patriots' effort to relieve Savannah were defeated.
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. Over the next two years, he developed a counterstrategy to defeat the southern operations of. Refusing to surrender, allies in South Carolina and the occupied portions of Georgia and North Carolina organized guerrilla operations against the British. 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.
British forces repeatedly attempted to capture Butler due to his status as a former British Army officer. 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 assisted in the administration of prisoner-of-war facilities.
Politician
Military operations in the final months of the Revolutionary War left Butler poor. Many of his plantations and ships were destroyed, and the international trade on which most of his income depended was in shambles. To secure loans and establish new markets, he traveled to Europe when the war ended. 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.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 backcountry residents. Attesting 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. At the convention, he urged that the president be given the power to initiate war but did not receive a second proponent for his motion, and all the other delegates overwhelmingly rejected his proposal.
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, which established protection for slavery in the Constitution. In addition, while privately criticizing the international trade in enslaved Africans, he supported the passage in the Constitution that prohibited regulation of the trade for 20 years. He advocated counting the entire slave population in the states' totals for Congressional apportionment but compromised to count three-fifths of the enslaved people toward that end. 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 terms in the United States Senate — from 1789 to October 1796, and from November 1802 to November 1804 — but changed his party allegiance: beginning as a Federalist, he switched to the Democratic-Republicans in 1795. In 1804, he declared himself a political independent. Between his tenures as a senator, Butler ran in South Carolina's 2nd congressional district in 1798, but overwhelmingly lost to incumbent John Rutledge Jr. 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.
Vice President Aaron Burr was Butler's guest at his St. Simons plantations in September 1804. Burr was, at the time, lying low after shooting Alexander Hamilton in the July 1804 duel. The states of New York and New Jersey had each indicted Burr for murder in the duel's wake. Burr had traveled during August to Butler's plantation under the pseudonym Roswell King, Butler's overseer's name. During Burr's stay in early September, one of the worst hurricanes in history hit the area, and Burr's firsthand description documents both his stay and this event.
Later years, post-politics
Following his wife's death in 1790, Butler sold off the last of their South Carolina holdings and invested in Georgia Sea Island plantations. 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 the people he enslaved than was King's style. King left in 1820 to operate a 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. Through his business ventures, he became one of the wealthiest men in the nation, with substantial land holdings in several states. Like other Founding Fathers from his region, Butler also continued to support the institution of slavery. But unlike Washington or Thomas Jefferson, for example, Butler never acknowledged the fundamental inconsistency in simultaneously defending the people's freedom and supporting slavery.
Associates called Butler "eccentric" and an "enigma." He followed a path to produce the maximum liberty and respect for people he considered citizens. He wanted to maintain a strong central government but one 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 ordinary person. Late in life, he summarized his view: "Our System is little better than matter of Experiment.... much must depend on the morals and manners of the people at large."
Progeny and succession
In January 1771, Butler married Mary Middleton. She was the orphaned daughter of Thomas Middleton, a South Carolina planter and slave importer, and was heiress to a large fortune. The couple had eight children:- Anne Elizabeth Butler, unmarried
- Sarah Butler, married 1800, James Mease of Philadelphia
- Frances Butler, unmarried
- Harriot Percy Butler, unmarried
- Pierce Butler Jr., died aged three
- Thomas Butler, married 1812, Eliza de Mallevault of Fort-de-France
- 3rd son, died young
- 4th son, died young