Pierce Butler

For other people named Pierce Butler, see Pierce Butler (disambiguation).

Pierce Butler
United States Senator from South Carolina
In office 1789–1796, 1802-1804
Preceded by	None (first term), John E. Colhoun (second term)
Succeeded by	John Hunter (first term), John Gaillard (second term)
Personal details
Born	July 11, 1744(1744-07-11) County Carlow, Ireland
Died	February 15, 1822(1822-02-15) (aged 77) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Political party	Federalist, Democratic-Republican
Profession	soldier, planter
Religion	Episcopalian

Pierce Butler (July 11, 1744 – February 15, 1822) was a soldier, planter, and statesman, recognized as one of United States' Founding Fathers. He represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress, the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Senate. One of the largest slaveholders in the United States, Butler defended American slavery for both political and personal motives, though he had private misgivings about the institution, and particularly about the African slave trade. He introduced the Fugitive Slave Clause – Article 4, Section 2 – of the U.S. Constitution, but his authorship of this clause has been questioned.

Introduction

Butler was born near the village of Tinryland, County Carlow, Ireland and came to America in 1758 as an officer in the British Army. Butler represented South Carolina at the Constitutional Convention, was a man of startling contrasts. As late as 1772 he was a ranking officer in those British units charged with suppressing the growing colonial resistance to Parliament. In fact, a detachment from his unit, the 29th Regiment of Foot, had fired the shots in the "Boston Massacre" of 1770, thereby dramatically intensifying the confrontation between the colonies and Britain. But by 1779 Butler, now an officer in South Carolina's militia and a man with a price on his head, was organizing American forces to fight the invading Redcoats. Butler lost his considerable estates and fortune during the British occupation of South Carolina, but at the end of the American Revolutionary War he was among the first to call for reconciliation with the Loyalists and a renewal of friendly relations with the former enemy. Although an aristocrat to the manor born, Butler became a leading spokesman for the frontiersmen and impoverished western settlers. Finally, this Patriot, always a forceful and eloquent advocate of the rights of the common man during the debate over the Constitution, was a large planter and among the political and social elite of the Southern colonies. In 1793 he held 500 enslaved African-Americans, who worked on his plantation at Butler Island and cotton plantation at St. Simons Island.

The unifying force in this fascinating career was Butler's strong and enduring sense of nationalism. An Irish nobleman, he severed his ties with the old world to embrace the concept of a permanent union of the thirteen states. His own military and political experiences then 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.

Soldier

Although bad health prevented Butler from assuming an active combat role, he offered his military talents to his state, and in early 1779 Governor John Rutledge turned to 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, although he continued to prefer to be addressed as major, his highest combat rank.

The decision to reorganize South Carolina's defenses followed in the wake of a shift in Britain's war strategy. By 1778 the King and his ministers found themselves faced with a new military situation. Their forces in the northern and middle states had reached a stalemate with Washington's continentals, now more adequately supplied and better trained after Valley Forge. The British also faced the prospect of France entering the war as an active partner of the Americans. In response, they adopted a "southern strategy." Assuming that the many Loyalists in the southern states 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 with the capture of Savannah in December 1778.

Butler joined in the effort to mobilize South Carolina's citizen-soldiers to repulse the threatened British invasion and later helped prepare the state units used in the counterattack designed to drive the enemy from Georgia. During the operation, which climaxed with an attempted investiture of Savannah, Butler served as a volunteer aide to General Lachlan McIntosh. The hastily raised and poorly prepared militia troops were no match for the well-trained British defenders, and the effort to relieve Savannah ended in failure. In 1780 the British captured Charleston, and with it most of South Carolina's civil government and military forces. Butler, as part of a command group deliberately left outside the city, escaped. During the next two years he employed his considerable military talents in developing a counterstrategy to defeat the enemy's southern operations. He and his fellow South Carolinians, along with their neighbors in occupied portions of Georgia and North Carolina, refused to submit to London's demand that they surrender. Instead, they organized a resistance movement. Butler, as adjutant general, worked with former members of the militia and Continental Army veterans such as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter to integrate their various partisan efforts into a unified campaign, in conjunction with the operations of the Southern Army under the command of Horatio Gates and later Nathanael Greene.

These partisan tactics involved considerable expense and personal risk for Butler who, as a former Royal officer, remained a special target for the British occupation forces. Several times he barely avoided capture. Once, surprised by the sudden arrival of enemy dragoons in the middle of the night, he escaped by sneaking from his home dressed only in his nightshirt. On another occasion, a British regiment, repeatedly denounced by Butler for plundering civilian properties – he called it a "band of jailbirds" – placed a bounty on his head. Throughout the closing phases of the southern campaign he personally contributed cash and supplies to help sustain the American forces and also assisted in the administration of prisoner-of-war facilities.

Statesman

Military operations in the latter months of the Revolution 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. These economic realities forced him to travel to Europe when the war ended in an effort to secure loans and establish new markets. Betraying a singular tolerance for a foe who had caused him much personal harm, Butler took the occasion to enroll his son in a London school and to engage a new minister from among the British clergy for his church in South Carolina. In late 1785 he returned home, where he became an especially outspoken advocate of reconciliation with former Loyalists and 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.

Butler's experiences as a soldier and planter-legislator influenced his forceful support for a strong union of the states at the Convention. As a military leader during the campaigns in the south he had come to appreciate the need for a national approach to defense. As a planter and merchant, especially after his trip to Europe, he came to understand that economic growth and international respect depended upon a strong central government. At the same time, he energetically supported the special interests of his region.

This dual emphasis on national and state concerns puzzled his fellow delegates, just as other apparent inconsistencies would bother associates throughout the rest of his political career. For example, Butler favored ratification of the Constitution, yet absented himself from the South Carolina convention that approved it. Later, he would serve three separate terms in the United States Senate, but this service was marked by several abrupt changes in party allegiance. Beginning as a Federalist, he switched to the Jeffersonian party in 1795, only to become a political independent in 1804. These changes confused the voters of his state, who rejected his subsequent bids for high public offices, although they did elect him three more times to the state legislature as an easterner who spoke on behalf of the west.

Butler retired from politics in 1805 and spent much time in Philadelphia where he had previously established a summer home. He continued his business ventures, becoming one of the wealthiest men in America with huge 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 or grasped the fundamental inconsistency in simultaneously defending the rights of the poor and supporting slavery.

The contradictions in this fascinating man led associates to label him an "eccentric" and an "enigma." Within his own lights, however, he followed a steady path along lines which were intended to produce the maximum of liberty and respect for those individuals whom he classed as citizens. His later political maneuverings were animated by his desire 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 decided that 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 never wavered from his central emphasis on 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." This was certainly an interesting view, coming as it did from a former member of the British hereditary aristocracy.

Family

Pierce Butler's siblings included Edward Butler (1740–1821), Riley Butler (1742–1825), and John Butler (1745–1812).

In January 1771, Major Pierce Butler married Mary Middleton (c. 1750 – 1790), the orphaned daughter of South Carolina planter and slave-importer Thomas Middleton, and heiress to a vast fortune. He resigned his commission in the British Army two years later. The couple had 8 children:

Sarah (c. 1772 – 1831), married 1800, James Mease of Philadelphia
Anne Elizabeth (1771–1845), unmarried
Fraunces (1774–1836), unmarried
Harriot Percy (c. 1775 – 1815), unmarried
Pierce Jr. (1777–1780)
Thomas (1778–1838), married 1812, Eliza de Mallevault of Paris
3rd son, died young
4th son, died young

Legacy

Following his wife's death, Butler sold off the last of their South Carolina holdings, investing in Georgia sea island plantations. He disinherited his only surviving son, Thomas, along with his French wife and children. Butler initially planned to leave his whole fortune to daughter Sarah Butler Mease's eldest son, Pierce Butler Mease, who died in 1810 at age 9. He then left it in equal parts to her other 3 sons, provided they irrevocably adopt Butler as their surname. Two of her sons, John and (the second-named) Pierce Butler Mease (born 1810), did change their names to inherit.

Renamed grandson Pierce Butler (Mease) married the well-known English actress Frances ("Fanny") Kemble in 1834. Kemble's growing abolitionism was a factor in their 1849 divorce, but she waited until 1863 to publish her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, an eye-witness indictment of slavery. One of the richest men in the United States, Pierce Butler (Mease) squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000, but was saved from bankruptcy by the March 2–3, 1859 sale of his 436 slaves at Ten Broeck Racetrack, outside Savannah, Georgia — the largest single slave auction in American history. He was briefly imprisoned for treason, August–September 1861, and sat out the American Civil War in Philadelphia. Union forces occupied the Butler plantations beginning in February 1862, and a similar number of slaves owned by his brother John were freed by the January 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Later that year John died, and Pierce Butler (Mease) inherited his brother's half of the Butler plantations. Without slave labor, he was unsuccessful in managing his grandfather's plantations. His daughter, Frances Butler Leigh, defended her father in a rebuttal to her mother's journal: Ten Years on a Georgian Plantation since the War (1883). His other daughter, Sarah Butler Wister, was the mother of Owen Wister, the popular American novelist and author of the 1902 western novel, The Virginian. Wister was the last descendant to inherit the Butler plantations, and wrote about the post-Civil War South in his 1906 novel, Lady Baltimore.

Major Pierce Butler and many of his descendants are buried in a family vault at Christ Church, Philadelphia.

Butler Street in Madison, Wisconsin is named in his honor. He was born in Ireland and came to America in 1758 as an officer in the British Army. Butler represented South Carolina at the Constitutional Convention, was a man of startling contrasts. As late as 1772 he was a ranking officer in those British units charged with suppressing the growing colonial resistance to Parliament. In fact, a detachment from his unit, the 29th Regiment of Foot, had fired the shots in the "Boston Massacre" of 1770, thereby dramatically intensifying the confrontation between the colonies and Britain. But by 1779 Butler, now an officer in South Carolina's militia and a man with a price on his head, was organizing American forces to fight the invading Redcoats. Butler lost his considerable estates and fortune during the British occupation of South Carolina, but at the end of the American Revolutionary War he was among the first to call for reconciliation with the Loyalists and a renewal of friendly relations with the former enemy. Although an aristocrat to the manor born, Butler became a leading spokesman for the frontiersmen and impoverished western settlers. Finally, this Patriot, always a forceful and eloquent advocate of the rights of the common man during the debate over the Constitution, was a large planter and among the political and social elite of the Southern colonies. In 1793 he held 500 enslaved African-Americans, who worked on his plantation at Butler Island and cotton plantation at St. Simons Island.

The unifying force in this fascinating career was Butler's strong and enduring sense of nationalism. An Irish nobleman, he severed his ties with the old world to embrace the concept of a permanent union of the thirteen states. His own military and political experiences then 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.

[edit] SoldierAlthough bad health prevented Butler from assuming an active combat role, he offered his military talents to his state, and in early 1779 Governor John Rutledge turned to 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, although he continued to prefer to be addressed as major, his highest combat rank.

The decision to reorganize South Carolina's defenses followed in the wake of a shift in Britain's war strategy. By 1778 the King and his ministers found themselves faced with a new military situation. Their forces in the northern and middle states had reached a stalemate with Washington's continentals, now more adequately supplied and better trained after Valley Forge. The British also faced the prospect of France entering the war as an active partner of the Americans. In response, they adopted a "southern strategy." Assuming that the many Loyalists in the southern states 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 with the capture of Savannah in December 1778.

Butler joined in the effort to mobilize South Carolina's citizen-soldiers to repulse the threatened British invasion and later helped prepare the state units used in the counterattack designed to drive the enemy from Georgia. During the operation, which climaxed with an attempted investiture of Savannah, Butler served as a volunteer aide to General Lachlan McIntosh. The hastily raised and poorly prepared militia troops were no match for the well-trained British defenders, and the effort to relieve Savannah ended in failure. In 1780 the British captured Charleston, and with it most of South Carolina's civil government and military forces. Butler, as part of a command group deliberately left outside the city, escaped. During the next two years he employed his considerable military talents in developing a counterstrategy to defeat the enemy's southern operations. He and his fellow South Carolinians, along with their neighbors in occupied portions of Georgia and North Carolina, refused to submit to London's demand that

References and external links

 This article incorporates public domain material from the United States Army Center of Military History document "Soldiers and Statesman of the Constitution" by Robert K. Wright, Jr. and Morris J. MacGregor, Jr..

Sources

• The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography Pierce Butler article page 162, volume 2, published 1895 by John T. White.
• Pierce Butler at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• "Pierce Butler," in Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America. Edited by Linda Grant De Pauw et al. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972-) 14: 824-30.
• The Letters of Pierce Butler, 1790-1794: Nation Building and Enterprise in the New American Republic. Edited by Terry W. Lipscomb (University of South Carolina Press, 2007).
• James H. Hutson, "Pierce Butler's Records of the Federal Constitutional Convention," Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 37 (1980): 64-73.
• Malcolm Bell, Jr., Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family (University of Georgia Press, 1987)

External links

• Works by Pierce Butler at Project Gutenberg
• Pierce Butler at Find a Grave

United States Senate
Preceded by Office created	United States Senator (Class 2) from South Carolina 1789–1796 Served alongside: Ralph Izard, Jacob Read	Succeeded by John Hunter
Preceded by John E. Colhoun	United States Senator (Class 3) from South Carolina November 4, 1802 – November 21, 1804 Served alongside: Thomas Sumter	Succeeded by John Gaillard