Signing Their Rights Away Read online

  The war damaged Pinckney’s finances, but, unlike many of the founding fathers, he managed to recover; he was dazzlingly wealthy to the end of his days. People said his law practice didn’t bill clients who were widows, meaning that he was kind and charitable to damsels in distress, but the truth is that he didn’t need the money. While some of the signers of the Constitution were raising families on incomes of a few hundred pounds a year, Pinckney was raking in more than four thousand! No wonder he’s smiling in his most famous portrait.

  In the spring of 1787, Pinckney arrived in Philadelphia with his new bride, Mary Stead, and soon became one of the more influential men at the Constitutional Convention. (Charles Pinckney, his second cousin, also attended.) He had an excellent grasp of law and wasn’t afraid to speak up. As a man of his time, Pinckney believed that no senator should receive a salary, which would have ensured that only wealthy men would serve in that capacity. Moreover, he insisted on provisions in the document to protect religious freedom.

  But Pinckney is best known as an unabashed defender of the southern way of life. If his southern compatriots were to support the Constitution, they had to be sure not to sign away their rights to a government that would later abolish slavery at will. That meant having a strong voice—and thus lots of representatives—in Congress. Pinckney thought that slaves should be counted 100 percent toward a state’s total population. The larger a state’s population, the more power it would wield in the new Congress. But nonslaveholding delegates saw this stance as hypocritical. Enslaved blacks were not free humans; they were property. Pinckney was willing to compromise on this point, if only someone would meet him and his fellow southern delegates halfway. In the end, of course, the Convention met them three-fifths of the way. Later, when the founders agreed not to interfere with the slave trade until 1800, Pinckney pressured them to adopt the later date of 1808. Doing so had profound consequences, since tens of thousands of new slaves were brought into the United States between 1800 and 1808.

  After signing, Pinckney supported the Constitution and pushed South Carolina to become the eighth state to ratify. When asked why the Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights, the canny lawyer responded frankly, “Such bills generally begin with declaring that men are by nature born free. Now, we would make that declaration with very bad grace when a large part of our property consists in men who are actually born slaves.”

  President Washington thrice offered Pinckney powerful posts—he declined every time. Only an offer to return to France as his nation’s envoy galvanized him. But when he crossed the pond with his family in late 1796, he received a snooty welcome from the French. Unfortunately, tensions had been building between the United States and its former ally; people feared war was imminent. His new hosts told Pinckney not to let the French doors hit him in the derrière on the way out of la nation. As soon as John Adams became president, he sent John Marshall and Elbridge Gerry—a signer of the Declaration of Independence—to help Pinckney smooth things over. The Americans were approached by a French trio who demanded bribes in exchange for brokering peace between the two nations. Furious, Pinckney exclaimed: “It is no, no! Not a sixpence!” The incident became known as the XYZ Affair.

  Returning home in the fall of 1798, Pinckney was pressed into service in the new American army as the United States prepared for an inevitable war with France. Both Washington—now a former president—and Alexander Hamilton would lead troops, with Pinckney as their number three. But before anyone could rename their French fries, a fresh group of American envoys got a friendlier response from the French, and everything blew over as easily as a storm at sea.

  Now a hero for his defiant rebuke of the French, Pinckney might have seemed like a smart pick as John Adams’s running mate in the difficult 1800 election, but the pair lost to Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Adams quit politics forever, Hamilton took a bullet in a duel, and Pinckney was now heir apparent of the Federalist Party. He ran for president in 1804 and 1808, losing both times. He finally threw in the towel and retired to his estate on Pinckney Island, on the coast of South Carolina. Following in his mother’s footsteps, he began experimenting with plants. A fellow botanist and friend named an attractive deciduous shrub found in the Southeast in his honor: the Pinckneya. Pinckney stayed active in his local community, even joining a group that distributed Bibles to slaves. When he died in 1825, at the age of seventy-nine, he was buried in the graveyard of Charleston’s prettiest church, in the shade of its gleaming white steeple.

  The Ghost Writer of the Constitution?

  BORN: October 26, 1757

  DIED: October 29, 1824

  AGE AT SIGNING: 29

  PROFESSION: Lawyer

  BURIED: St. Philip’s Church, Charleston, South Carolina

  Young, active, and maybe a little too aggressive, Charles Pinckney was a man with a plan—the Pinckney Plan, that is. His proposal for the new government, presented at the Constitutional Convention, had been almost completely lost and forgotten until some twentieth-century sleuthing helped shed light on his contributions to the Constitution—and what some believe to be a possible smear job by James Madison.

  Born in Charleston to a wealthy lawyer, planter, and militia colonel, Pinckney enjoyed the life of a privileged child of the coastal south. He had servants, tutors, books, and every conceivable advantage. After studying law, he was admitted to the bar and began his practice in Charleston. He decided to take up the political mantle but went in a much more revolutionary direction than his father, Charles Sr., who had been politically active, too, but was not a patriot.

  Among the youngest signers, Pinckney came of age during the height of the Revolutionary War. In 1779, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature and joined the militia. He fought battles in Savannah and Charleston and was captured when the latter city fell to the British in 1780. He was released via a prisoner exchange in 1781.

  At war’s end, Pinckney worked on the state level and, later, was a delegate to the Congress of the Confederation, While there, he began expressing a desire to strengthen the national government, writing pamphlets explaining why the Articles of Confederation needed to be changed. In 1786, he served as a chairman on a congressional subcommittee tasked with drawing up some of the recommendations for amending the articles. With all that under his belt, it was little surprise then that in 1787, at the age of twenty-nine, Pinckney was sent to the Constitutional Convention.

  Although still young, Pinckney was no wallflower at the big dance. He spoke forcefully and often—reportedly more than a hundred times. But he did more than just talk. An early advocate of changing the Articles of Confederation, he had done his homework and drawn up his own detailed plan for what the Constitution might look like.

  And on May 29, according to James Madison’s notes, Pinckney presented his plan. That’s pretty much all Madison records. Curiously, he goes into no detail, nor does he describe the plan, which seems odd.

  Consider that we know a great deal about the Virginia Plan, which was presented by Edmund Randolph. And that we have plenty of documentation regarding William Paterson’s New Jersey Plan. Both proposals were extensively discussed and then passed on to the Committee of Detail, headed by John Rutledge, which considered them while creating the first draft of the Constitution. But to this day no copy exists of the mysterious Pinckney Plan, which explains why most Americans have never heard of Charles Pinckney.

  Here’s where the story gets tricky.

  Later in Pinckney’s life, then secretary of state John Quincy Adams was preparing to publish a journal about the Convention. In notes kept by convention secretary William Jackson, Adams had come across a reference to Pinckney’s plan and wrote asking Pinckney to send him a copy. Pinckney obliged, saying that he had several different copies. He forwarded to Adams the version that he believed to be the one he had presented to Congress.

  The plan was remarkably similar in content and language to the final Constitution.

  When Madison got wind of t
his episode, he was none too pleased. He waited until after Pinckney had died—at least six years, possibly more—before he began raising suspicions about the veracity of the document sent to Adams. It was too similar to the final Constitution, he said. (Subtext: Pinckney faked it.) True, there was no love lost between Madison and Pinckney in life. Madison was modest; Pinckney had a tendency to lay on the charm and was not averse to bragging. Madison was shy and reserved; Pinckney was outspoken, in-your-face, and rumored to be popular with the ladies. In short, Madison was country, and Pinckney was rock ‘n roll.

  After both men were dead, scholars continued investigating the case of the missing plan. And a problem arose: the paper and ink of the version sent to Adams by Pinckney did not date from the time of the Convention. It appeared the document was misdated—and Pinckney was busted.

  Until, that is, early in the twentieth century, when scholars reviewing the papers of James Wilson made a startling discovery. In his papers, Wilson describes Pinckney’s plan, including an outline and extracts from it. Historians discovered that Pinckney’s plan had been presented to the Convention not once but twice, yet the details never made it into Madison’s copious notes. Why the omission? Defenders of Madison say he may have been out of the room. A less charitable view is that Madison was trying to ensure that Pinckney and his ideas were forgotten by history.

  Over the years, countless scholars have tried to reconstruct the missing Pinckney Plan; some estimate that thirty to forty provisions in the Constitution came from Pinckney’s suggestions. It’s believed that he introduced the idea of calling the nation’s leader “president,” the first use of the words “House” and “Senate,” and the idea of the president’s annual State of the Union address.

  Regardless of who contributed what, Pinckney signed the Constitution and worked to get it ratified in South Carolina. In 1788, he married Mary Eleanor Laurens, daughter of Henry Laurens, a former president of the Continental Congress and a very, very rich man. Pinckney was elected governor for the first of four times in 1789, headed up the convention that worked on a new constitution for South Carolina, and took office again in 1791.

  He went to the state legislature in 1792 and abandoned the Federalists to become a Democratic-Republican (this metamorphosis was spurred along by President George Washington’s approval of the Jay Treaty, which seemed to go soft on the nation’s old enemy, Britain). In fact, Pinckney was so opposed to the treaty that he wanted Jay removed from his post as chief justice. Incensed that Pinckney would turn coat, his former Federalist buddies mocked him with the nickname “Blackguard Charlie.” Despite the ribbing from his old pals, he again became his state’s governor in 1796—the first Democratic-Republican to do so—and in 1798 was elected a senator.

  During the heated election of 1800, Pinckney supported Jefferson, even though his cousin, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, was John Adams’s running mate. Jefferson won South Carolina’s electoral votes, and our man Pinckney became minister to Spain. Though he didn’t convince Spain to hand over Florida to the United States, he was considered instrumental in getting that country’s cooperation during the Louisiana Purchase. After returning from Spain, he toggled between the South Carolina state house and the governorship. His last stint in public office was as a U.S. representative.

  One of the last signers to die, Pinckney left this world at the age of sixty-seven. Today, one of his homes is a National Historic Site in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on Sullivan’s Island, and is open to the public. The signer was originally buried at St. Philip’s Church in Charleston, but the location of his grave remains as mysterious as that of the original draft of his infamous plan.

  The Signer Who Turned Coat on the King

  BORN: July 11, 1744

  DIED: February 15, 1822

  AGE AT SIGNING: 43

  PROFESSION: Soldier, planter

  BURIED: Christ Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  When His Majesty’s soldiers arrived in America in the mid- to late 1760s, they came to defend unpopular acts of Parliament and to quell civil unrest. Many were impressed with the lives of the colonists. From what they saw, Americans had it pretty good: Abundant land. Three square meals. Education for their children. Clear, running streams. Pleasant orchards. Just what were they griping about? Try living in dark, crowded London for a change!

  Arriving in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre, one officer from the Crown’s Twenty-ninth Regiment liked the colonies so much he decided to stay. That soldier, Pierce Butler, sold his position in the British army to another wealthy officer wannabe in 1773, only two years after Butler had married Mary Middleton of South Carolina. He was the son of an Irish baronet who belonged to the very same Parliament that was so agitating the colonists. But young Butler probably felt he had nothing to lose by leaving his Boston post: as his father’s third son, he would never inherit the family property and had been forced to enter the military at the age of eleven. Free from service, he used the cash from his commission to start an empire that included ten thousand acres of plantation in South Carolina and Georgia, plus a fleet of ships. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he worked in his state’s militia against his king and former brothers in arms, pumping money and supplies into the patriot cause.

  Like Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Butler found himself on a hit list of British revolutionaries who saw their property and slaves confiscated. After the war, when the British military pulled out, Butler was left to rebuild his fortunes. He sailed to the Netherlands, hocked all his land to a Dutch firm, and received a sizable loan, which he used to buy a fresh batch of slaves and equipment. He thus adroitly sidestepped the high interest being charging by local banks at the end of the war, when everyone was trying to rebuild. Still, the Dutch loan, combined with a few bad rice harvests, nearly ruined him. The only reason his creditors didn’t swoop in to seize his property was that South Carolina passed an emergency law in 1786 to prevent such actions. It also helped that he was then a member of the legislature that passed the ruling.

  Butler arrived at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 a somewhat desperate man with shaky finances. But you wouldn’t have known it from the gold-laced jacket he wore and the way he crowed about his blue-blood lineage. Yet, for all his pride, he worked diligently on behalf of a strong central government. It was he who suggested that the delegates keep all deliberations secret, a measure that the convention adopted wholeheartedly on day one. At first, Butler wasn’t sure that Congress should abandon the Articles of Confederation, and he fought the Virginia Plan when it was presented in the early days of the convention. His argument was: Are we really smart enough, capable enough, and experienced enough to try a form of government never used anywhere on the planet? But as he listened to James Madison and the other delegates, he changed his mind. Others in attendance were moved by his example and did the same.

  Butler spoke about seventy times during the proceedings, and not always with consistency. He’s often remembered as defender of the “common man,” because he charged that the delegates represented only the nation’s elite. And he was right: there were few at the convention who represented the rights of the small tradesmen, farmers, and backwoods folks. But Butler later argued that allowing ordinary people to vote was impractical. He was hardly alone in this position. By serving on the committee that hammered out the details of the Electoral College—which some say was his idea—he and his fellow founders neatly inserted one more “check” between the top offices in the land and the voting public they often feared would be too ill informed to choose wisely.

  Butler was sometimes full of contradictions. On one occasion, he said that no Congressman should ever take a salary; on another, he said they should be handsomely paid. He objected to allowing immigrants to sit on Congress, arguing that they were “dangerous,” although he himself was an immigrant, a fact that was not lost on him. Indeed, he admitted that he would’ve made a lousy politician had he been allowed to serve soon after arriving on colonial shores. B
ut he is probably best known as the man responsible for the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause, which states that slaves who fled to other states could be returned to their masters.

  After the convention, Butler supported the Constitution but didn’t attend the South Carolina convention where the document was ratified. He served as a U.S. senator for three terms and was on the short list to run for his state’s governorship, though he never did. He was not in love with politics and thought it brought out the worst in men. “I am materially disappointed,” he wrote to a friend. “I find men scrambling for partial advantages, State interests, and in short, a train of those narrow, impolitic measures that must, after a while, shake the Union to its very foundation.” Accordingly, he was always an independent in his politics. He switched parties three times and, even then, still often opposed his allies of-the-moment.

  The years immediately after the convention brought Butler good luck and a bountiful harvest, and by 1790 his finances were healthy. Soon he had five hundred slaves working eleven hundred acres in South Carolina and Georgia. By this point he was one of the richest men in America, and he kicked back and watched the checks roll in. He bought homes in Philadelphia and moved there to be with a daughter. He supported slavery, the backbone of his wealth, till the end of his days.