At the Pinckney Plantation II

While visiting Snee Farm Plantation, one of seven owned by Governor Charles Pinckney before his fiancial world collapsed while he was away from home as Thomas Jefferson's Ambassador to Spain (1801-05), I not only tried to get the ambience of the place but also to understand some of the family and national issues which made him a "forgotten" and, indeed, despised person for generations. Only in the past few years, thanks to Marty Matthews' 2004 biography, has someone tried to "rehabilitiate" Pinckney's reputation. This essay will lay out some of the issues that make Pinckney at once so fascinating as well as potentially off-putting.

First, a point about names. Our Charles Pinckney was the fourth so named to have sprung from the loins of the "Urvater" Thomas Pinckney, who made it to the SC Coast in 1691. At that time SC was a proprietary plantation; it was only in the next decade that the Episcopal Church would extend its gracious sway over the area, so that each "county" along the coast would be designated a "parish." The Snee Plantation, acquired by our Charles' father, also Charles, in 1752, was in Christ Church Parish. The Pinckneys were Anglicans. The custom of the time was to have one's plantations in the country with a city home on the Charleston peninsula.

For example, in the mid-19th century, John C. Calhoun, the most signficant "name" in South Carolina history, had his city home in Charleston and his country plantation in Clemson. Actually, the site of Clemson University is Calhoun's plantation. His son-in-law, Thomas Green Clemson, willed the land to the state for an agricultural college after his death. This explains why Clemson University is a relatively "new" college (Thomas died in the 1880s) and isn't one of the Morrill "land grant" colleges that arose from congressional action in the early 1860s. Indeed, while I was in Clemson last week, I noted that the two big Churches abutting the campus, the Presbyterian and, of course, Southern Baptist, both trace their origins to the late 1890s--when those other than the Calhoun clan began in earnest to settle the area.

Returning to Our Charles Pinckney

Three things that add to the mystery and the appeal of the youngest Charles Pinckney were: (1) his being 1/2 generation younger than his cousins, who seemed always to get the "plumb" appointments; (2) his not being able to study at Oxford and the Middle Temple for law because of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War; and (3) his influence in making sure that his cousin, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (born in 1746) didn't become President of the United States. Charles' "relative deprivation" compared with his high-achieving cousins drove him to heights of ambition and self-expression that would have made Donald Trump blush. It also led to considerable blindness about people, culminating in his leaving his plantations in the care of someone who "ran them into the ground" while Charles was Ambassador in Spain. The result was that, when he returned, he had to face dozens of lawsuits (actions of debt) against him that eventually led to handing over all his plantations to trustees in 1816, who sold them in 1817 to satisfy outstanding debts.

I can only highlight a few of these things in this essay. Consult Matthews' book or the online resource from the National Park Service for more information. Let's begin with that fact often underestimated by historians--his date of birth relative to other males in his larger "family." As we know, even a birthdate a few years after another can lead to great disproportion of opportunities. In Charles' case he did have an illustrious father, a Colonel in the American Revolution and wealthy planter, but the real power in the family was in the hands of the scions of his father's older cousins. In Charles' generation there were the brothers Charles Cotesworth (1746-1825) and Thomas (1750-1828) who always, because they were older by seven to 11 years than Charles, seemingly favored. For example, CC was appointed as Washington's Ambassador to France in 1795. Even though the French refused to recognized the appointment, he had the honor of this kind of recognition.

Second, the older cousins were able to secure the finest education that money could buy. Both were educated at Christ Church Oxford and then studied law in the Middle Temple in London. When they returned to SC after their European jaunts, they were ready to assume leadership in SC society. Our Charles, in contrast, would have been prepared to make his European journey beginning in 1773 or 1774. However, by that time the relationships between England and the Colonies had become so strained that he couldn't do so. Instead of Oxford and London, then, our Charles had to be content with private tutors in Charleston; he studied law with his father. While this was nothing unusual in the colonies and, indeed, would have put Charles near the top of the colonial world in education, it paled in significance to the education obtained by his relatives.

Charles compensated for these lacks by redoubling efforts to excel. He studied five other languages (Latin, Greek, French, and two others--Spanish? German? Dutch?), became a whiz in political theory, and began to publish his thoughts widely in the early 1780s about the inadequacy of the Articles of Confederation. As a result of his ambition, he secured one of SC's four appointments to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia. He was 29 at the time, one of the youngest delegates. But he circulated the story that he was only 24, thus showing that the female gender doesn't have a monopoly on claiming these things.

He also submitted to the Convention his "Draught" (draft) of the Constitution. This document doesn't survive, but he "reconstructed" it from memory 31 years later. Many historians have been skeptical about whether the reconstructed document, in which he takes credit for a few dozen of the clauses in the Constitution, really reflected his thoughts in 1787. The debate will rage on this issue. Suffice it to say, however, that our Charles probably thought that he had "made up the stagger" of advantage owned by his older cousins by the time that SC ratified the Constitution in 1788 (oh, CC, his cousin, was also one of SC's four delegates to the Convention).

The Presidential Election of 1800

Perhaps because he always had to "wait in line" and was passed over for appointments in the Washington Administration, our Charles did something unheard of: he ditched his Federalist ancestors and became a Jeffersonian Republican. But, worse than that, in the election of 1800, when electors voted for two people (rather than for President and Vice-President), with the candidate receiving the largest number becoming President and the second, Vice-President, the election was held in the balance by little SC. (States voted at different times in 1800; SC was one of the last to vote). Its 8 electoral votes, if given to Jefferson/Burr, would have resulted in their election. If, however, these 8 votes went to CC Pinckney, Charles' older cousin would have become Vice-President. Our Charles lobbied strongly for Jefferson, and the SC electors went for Jefferson/Burr. As a result, Jefferson/Burr got 73 electoral votes to 64 for Pinckney and 65 for John Adams.

Conclusion

You can readily understand how our Charles, after such conduct, would be honored by Jefferson but despised by his family. This, indeed, is what happened. And then, when the financial problems developed with Charles' plantation, there was no one in the family who "saved" him. His descent into financial oblivion was followed in short order by his death and then, thanks to an 1861 fire that destroyed his papers, to historical oblivion. But, because of the historical site, as well as some tantalizing reconstructions of the "Pinckney Draught" of 1787, we are piecing together the "Founding Father" generation in a slightly different way than previously. And, it is about time.

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