This Constitution Day we remember Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who put both his life and personal fortune on the line as a military officer and aide to Gen. George Washington and later helped shape the future of America as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
When Charles Town fell to British forces in 1780, Pinckney was taken prisoner and held at both Snee Farm under house arrest and at the Haddrell’s Point prison camp. During his incarceration, the British tried to shake his faith in the American cause, to which he responded: “If I had a vein that did not beat with the love of my Country, I myself would open it. If I had a drop of blood that could flow dishonorable, I myself would let it out.”
After the Revolution, Pinckney became a political advocate of the Lowcountry’s planter class. He adamantly opposed his friend Edward Rutledge, who sought to end the importation of slaves to South Carolina, arguing that the state’s economy relied on a continuous infusion of enslaved Africans. As a state Senator he proclaimed: “…the nature of our climate and the flat, swampy situation of our country, obliges us to cultivate our lands with negroes, and that without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste….”
The military connections Pinckney made through Washington and others led to his rise as a prominent national leader as well. As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Pinckney decried that after the Revolutionary War was won, states too often focused on parochial issues rather than on their common cause. He argued the new country needed a strong central government and national military if it were to remain safe and prosper, that the states must band together for their mutual economic and military well-being. Yet at the same time, he sought to establish a political system of checks and balances that would protect citizens from the tyranny found in many European countries.
At the same time, as a planter who owned about 250 slaves, Pinckney defended the interests of slaveholding states while acknowledging it posed an ideological conflict within a country that valued freedom: “Bills of rights generally begin with declaring that all men are by nature born free. Now, we should make that declaration with a very bad grace, when a large part of our property consists in men who are actually born slaves.” Pinckney withheld his support of the Constitution until delegates reached a compromise in its language that protected the institution of slavery and allowed the continued importation of African laborers.
Pinckney went on to stand, unsuccessfully, as the Federalist party’s candidate for Vice President in 1800 and its Presidential nominee in 1804 and 1808, though he never actually campaigned for either office. In the two Presidential elections, he was defeated first by Thomas Jefferson and then by James Madison.
Nevertheless, Pinckney continued to be active in public affairs until his death in 1825. Today he remains one of South Carolina’s most significant historic figures who, along with his cousins Charles and Thomas Pinckney of Snee Farm, was part of perhaps one of the most important families to help shape the design of the United States of America.
