#38 Choosing Virtue Over Power | Part Two

IDENTITY POLITICS | Mark Boonstra: Pinckney's distribution of Bibles, including to slaves, rejecting the concerns of those who feared that doing so might encourage them to rise from their condition.

Oct 21, 2024

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Charles Cotesworth Pinckney then joined the First South Carolina Regiment of the Continental Army, where he served with Declaration-of-Independence-signer Thomas Lynch Jr. He rose from captain to colonel, participating in many of the ensuing battles. These included the unsuccessful defense of Charleston. When the city fell to British forces in 1780, Pinckney was among those taken prisoner. Although many of his fellow, patriot captives were held in British confinement, Pinckney was offered parole and allowed to spend much of his time in the environs of the Snee Farm Plantation owned by his cousin Charles. Meanwhile, his brother Thomas’s plantation at Ashepoo was burned by the British; The family’s Belmont Plantation, although spared the ravages of fire, was ransacked. When Pinckney refused to renounce the patriot cause, the British seized his possessions and forced his family to vacate their home. An infant son (and namesake) contracted smallpox and died. Pinckney’s ardently-patriotic friend, Rev. Richard Furman, was forced to flee the state with a bounty from Lord Cornwallis placed on his head. Upon Pinckney’s release in 1782, he was made a brigadier general. Despite his travails, he resisted the efforts of more radical elements to confiscate the property of loyalist sympathizers.

VIRTUE OVER POWER (PART TWO)

Following the war, Pinckney returned to his law practice. He took on a law and business partner, Edward Rutledge, who was both a good friend and a brother-in-law—Edward had wed Henrietta Middleton, sister of Pinckney’s wife Sarah. Together, they acquired plantable swampland—the confiscated Tippicutlaw and Charleywood plantations—and a trading sloop they named Charleywood. In 1784, tragedy struck, as Sarah passed away. Two years later, Pinckney wed Mary Stead, the daughter of a Georgia planter. In 1785, Pinckney and Richard Hutson, the intendant (mayor) of Charleston—and a signer of the Articles of Confederation—organized the Mount Zion Society; its mission was to promote the founding of a collegiate educational institution in South Carolina. When Pinckney later shepherded a bill through the legislature, that goal came to fruition. Pinckney then served as an original trustee of South Carolina College (later, the University of South Carolina). Pinckney also furthered his interests in education by serving as president of the Charleston Library Society and as an officer and supporter of the society for the next forty years.

In 1787, Pinckney was chosen as a South Carolina representative to the convention called to consider revisions to the then-governing Articles of Confederation. He was among the leaders at the convention, which adapted its mission and ultimately adopted the new, governing Constitution of the United States. Pinckney affixed his signature to that document and then led the effort to secure its ratification in South Carolina. He also helped frame the South Carolina constitution of 1790. By this time, Rev. Furman was the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church. Pinckney wrote to his friend:

Religion is always venerable, always necessary; and when she is delineated with the beauty and eloquence she was today in the (Baptist) church, we are enraptured with her portrait and sensibly feel that all her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are paths of peace.

Under the new United States Constitution, Pinckney saw his friend, General George Washington, take office as the first President of the United States; Pinckney cast one of South Carolina’s electoral votes for Washington. In 1791, Pinckney had the pleasure of escorting President Washington as he visited Charleston; the choir of St Philip’s Church prepared a selection for the occasion and burst out into a welcoming chorus. President Washington frequently sought out Pinckney for roles in his administration. In 1791, as John Rutledge (Edward’s brother) was preparing to leave the United States Supreme Court, President Washington proposed that either Pinckney or Edward accept the position—leaving them to decide which of them would do so. Both declined for financial reasons. Pinckney also passed up opportunities to serve as secretary of war, as secretary of state, and as commander-in-chief of the army. During this time, Pinckney’s mother, Eliza, became ill and sought out medical treatment in Philadelphia. She died in 1793, so venerable a figure that the sitting President of the United States, George Washington, volunteered and served as a pallbearer at her funeral. Eliza was interred at St. Peter’s (Episcopal) Church in Philadelphia.

In 1796, President Washington again turned to Pinckney and offered him the position of Minister to France. This time, Pinckney accepted. Relations with France were deteriorating, however, and the countries appeared headed for war. Chief Justice John Jay’s efforts to negotiate the Jay Treaty with Great Britain had not been well received. And when Pinckney arrived in Paris, his credentials were rejected. Pinckney was forced to detour to The Hague, in nearby The Netherlands, where he regrouped with Massachusetts’s Elbridge Gerry and Virginia’s John Marshall to plan their strategy for a diplomatic mission to France. The mission proved to be an unsuccessful one; the trio perceived French demands as veiled attempts at bribery, and the subsequent release of correspondence identifying the French negotiators as “X,” “Y,” and “Z” gave rise to what became known as “the XYZ Affair.” Pinckney, for his part, became known for his “no, no, not a sixpence” (or, “no, no, not a penny”) rebuke of French demands—although the phrase “millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute” is often misattributed to him.

In 1798, in the wake of the diplomatic failure, Pinckney boarded a Prussian ship, The Hope of Emdon, for home. Charleston welcomed him with the bells of St. Michael’s Church, as he reentered the city on horseback, clad in full military garb. Named a major general by President John Adams, he was placed third in command of the army (behind George Washington and Alexander Hamilton). Although open warfare with France was averted, Pinckney was left with a less-than-favorable impression of the aftereffects of the French Revolution. Perhaps in part for that reason, he found himself aligning with the Federalist Party.

As the election of 1800 approached, the Federalists were headed by President Adams. And Pinckney was nominated as Adams’s running-mate. But Alexander Hamilton was a competing force within the party. Hamilton concocted a scheme designed to withhold sufficient electoral votes from Adams to throw the election to Pinckney (over the competing ticket of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr), and thus to deny Adams reelection. This result could have been enabled by the electoral system at that time—which afforded each elector two votes, with the highest vote-getter becoming president and the second-highest vote-getter becoming vice president. Indeed, Pinckney’s brother Thomas—who earlier had served as governor of South Carolina and as Minister to Great Britain, and who later served in Congress—had been the Federalist nominee for vice-president in the election of 1796 (as the running-mate of Adams); while Adams secured the most votes and became president, Jefferson of the competing Democratic-Republican Party received the second-most votes and became vice president.

But Pinckney could not abide the duplicity of Hamilton’s scheme, and vowed not to accept votes from electors who did not also vote for President Adams. Pinckney may have lost the presidency (or at least the vice-presidency at the time) as a result, as Jefferson and Burr were elected president and vice-president.

But Pinckney’s virtue remained intact.

The Federalist Party stood little chance of defeating President Jefferson in his bid for reelection in 1804. But it turned to Pinckney to bear the standard of the party; he went down to a resounding defeat, losing even his home state of South Carolina. In 1805, Pinckney assumed the position of president-general of the Society of the Cincinnati (which had been formed by officers of the revolutionary army), succeeding Hamilton; Pinckney continued in that position for the next twenty years.

He also turned his attention—as the survivor of a duel in 1785 and in the wake of Hamilton’s death by duel in 1804—to ending the practice that he deemed unChristian and contrary to public morals.

Indeed, after Hamilton lost his own son to a duel in 1801, Pinckney wrote to him lamenting the “misfortune which only religion & time can alleviate. . . . Sacred be your sorrows.” Pinckney was supported in this effort by his now-good friend, Rev. Furman, who held a public memorial service in honor of Hamilton at the Baptist church in Charleston.

This anti-dueling campaign continued to be the focus of Pinckney’s attention when the Federalist Party again nominated him as its presidential candidate in the election of 1808. Pinckney’s cousin Charles—who was then serving as governor of South Carolina (and who later served in both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, and as Minister to Spain)—had by then firmly aligned himself with Jefferson’s party, and actively opposed Pinckney in the election. The vote resoundingly went in favor of James Madison.

Pinckney retired to Pinckney Island, which is located near Port Royal Harbor, about one hundred miles southwest of Charleston. He continued his religious and philosophical pursuits. In 1810, he became the first president of the Charleston Bible Society, holding the society’s meetings in his own home. He oversaw the distribution of Bibles, including to slaves, rejecting the concerns of those who feared that doing so might encourage them to rise from their condition. Again, he was supported in that effort by Rev. Furman (for whom Furman University was later named).

In 1817, Pinckney became one of twenty vice presidents of the American Bible Society. A longtime member of the American Philosophical Association, he also joined the American Antiquarian Society. He frequently hosted Rev. Samuel Sitgreaves, pastor of St. Luke’s (Episcopal) Church, at his home on Pinckney Island. The son of a Pennsylvania Federalist congressman of the same name—who staunchly defended the Washington administration during the Jay Treaty controversy—Rev. Sitgreaves is said to have virtually made Pinckney Island his parish headquarters. To accommodate parishioners living some distance from the main parish church, St. Luke’s operated several “chapels of ease,” one of which, the Zion Chapel of Ease, was located on the adjacent Hilton Head Island. Pinckney’s many other friends and correspondents in his later years included men of the cloth across the denominational spectrum. These included not only the Episcopal Rev. Sitgreaves and the evangelical Calvinist-turned-Baptist Rev. Furman—who had begun to preach at the age of sixteen and became known as the “boy-evangelist”—but Rev. Christopher Gadsden of St. Philip’s Church and Rev. Jedidiah Morse of the First Congregational Church of Charleston, Massachusetts. Rev. Morse was also a noted geographer, whose textbooks earned him the moniker, “Father of American Geography”; Rev. Morse’s son, Samuel F. B. Morse, is known for inventing the Morse Code.

Pinckney passed away in 1825. The Charleston Bible Society offered the following resolution in his honor:

That they give devout thanks to Almighty God for the invaluable services which the life, influence and example of their late revered President, have rendered to the cause of religion, virtue and good order, to his country and to mankind; and that they submit themselves to this painful dispensation of Providence, with a sorrow mitigated by the grateful remembrance of his virtue, and by a pious trust in Divine mercy.

Pinkcney was buried at St. Michael’s churchyard in Charleston. Both his name and Christian legacy were carried on by his brother Thomas’s grandson, Rev. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, rector of St. James Church of Santee and of Grace Episcopal Church in Charleston.

Next Up: Where Have All the Statesmen Gone?

Identity Politics, with Mark Boonstra & Dr. Stephen Phinney, is an extension of IOM America’s IM Christian Writers Association. The mission of the authors is to restore faith in God & country.