Charles Cotesworth Pinckney

 Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Painted by Henry Benbridge (1743-1812)
Oil on canvas, circa 1773
National Portrait Gallery

 
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (February 14, 1745 - August 16, 1825). Born to one of the wealthier South Carolina families, Pinckney family moved to London when he was eight, and he was raised and educated there. He matriculated both Oxford and Middle Temple in 1764, and became a lawyer in 1769, before returning to South Carolina. In London, he had protested against the Stamp Act (1765), and on his return to South Carolina, he was elected to the Commons House (the South Carolina assembly), where he became a leader of the Whig opposition to British imperial policy. Pinckney helped lead South Carolina into the war for independence, helped draft its new constitution in 1776, and led the efforts to end tax support for the Anglican church. During the war he served as an officer in the patriot cause, was captured, and remained a British prisoner on parole until 1782.


After the war, Pinckney, whose marriage in 1773 had made him among the wealthiest men in the colony, defended the interests of the rich low country planters (against the smaller planters of the piedmont region and the farmers of the backcountry) and, more generally, supported conservative efforts to assure political and economic stability in the state. (For example, like Hamilton, Wilson, and Morris, he was among those who defended the rights of those who had supported the British (Loyalists) during the war.) Pinckney realized that efforts to form a stronger national government would help assure political stability in Carolina.


He was elected a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. In Philadelphia, he sought to support the interests of the low country planters and merchants of Carolina. He opposed giving the government power to tax exports (as Carolina's economy depended on the export of rice and indigo), opposed a ban on the slave trade (but proposed the compromise that allowed Congress to ban slave trading in 1808), and opposed popular election of the House of Representatives (reflecting his commitment to a hierarchical, elite-led government as in South Carolina). He then returned to South Carolina and became the leader of the ratification efforts.


In the 1790s, Pinckney served as Washington's minister to France, and was one of three ministers (appointed by John Adams) from whom the French demanded bribes in 1797 before beginning negotiations over outstanding differences (the famed "XYZ Affair").. He would run as Federalist candidate for vice president in 1800, and even more unsuccessfully for president on the Federalist ticket in 1804 and 1808. By that time, South Carolina, and the rest of the nation south of New England, had swung securely to Jefferson's Republican Party,