History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States, Vol. 1 / With Notices of Its Principle Framers

by George Ticknor Curtis

CHAPTER XIII.

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, the eldest son of a chief justice of that Colony, distinguished both as a soldier and a civilian, was educated in England, and read law at the Temple. He returned to his native province in 1769, and commenced the practice of his profession; which, like many of the young American barristers of that day, he was obliged to abandon for the duties of the camp, when the troubles of the Revolution began. He became colonel of the first regiment of the Carolina infantry, and served under General Moultrie in the defence of the fort on Sullivan's Island. This gallant resistance having freed the South, for a time, from invasion, Pinckney repaired to the Northern army, and was made aide-de-camp to General Washington; in which capacity he served at the battles of the Brandywine and Germantown. He afterwards acquired great distinction in the defence of South Carolina against the British under Sir Henry Clinton.

On the return of peace, he devoted himself to the law, in which he became eminent. He belonged to that school of public men, who had been trained in the service of the country under the eye of Washington, and who had experienced with him the fatal defects of the successive governments which followed the Declaration of Independence. Of his abilities, patriotism, and purity of character we have the strongest evidence, in the repeated efforts made by Washington, after the establishment of the Constitution, to induce him to accept some of the most important posts in the government.

He was, indeed, one of that order of men to whom Washington gave his entire confidence from the first. A ripe scholar, a profound lawyer, with Revolutionary laurels of the most honorable kind,—wise, energetic, and disinterested,—it is not singular that the people of South Carolina should have selected him as one of their delegates to an assembly, which was to frame a new constitution of government for the country to whose service his earlier years had been devoted.

General Pinckney entered the Convention with a desire to adhere, if possible, to the characteristic principles of the Confederation; but also with the wish to make that government more effective, by giving to it distinct departments and enlarged powers.[444] But in the progress of the discussions, he surrendered these views, and became a party to those arrangements by which mutual concessions between the opposing sections of the Union made a different form of government a practicable result.

He was a strenuous supporter of the interests of the slaveholding States, in all that related to their right to hold and increase their slave population. He contended earnestly against a grant of authority to the general government to prohibit the importation of slaves; for he supposed that his constituents would not surrender that right. But he finally entered into the arrangement, by which the postponement of the power to prohibit the slave-trade to the year 1808 was made a ground of consent on the part of the Southern States to give the regulation of commerce to the Union. He considered it, he said, the true interest of the Southern States to have no regulation of commerce; but he yielded it, in consideration of the losses brought upon the commerce of the Eastern States by the Revolution, and of their liberality towards the interests of the Southern portion of the Confederacy.

The framers of the Constitution of the United States have often been bitterly reproached for permitting the slave-trade to be carried on for twenty years after the period of its formation; and the Eastern States have been especially accused of a sordid spirit of trade in purchasing for themselves the advantage of a national regulation of commerce by this concession. It is the duty of History, however, to record the facts in their true relations.