The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to the Governors of South Carolina
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The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to the Governors of South Carolina

Walter Edgar, Walter Edgar

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eBook - ePub

The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to the Governors of South Carolina

Walter Edgar, Walter Edgar

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The South Carolina Encyclopedia Guide to the Governors of South Carolina documents the lives and careers of the 111 white men and one Indian American woman who have held the Palmetto State's highest office from 1669 to the present. This digital South Carolina edition expands the listings from the print encyclopedia to include entries on appointed as well as elected governors and to update the biographies of more recent holders of the office. From the first proprietary governor, William Sayle, to current governor Nikki Haley, South Carolina's chief executives have wielded the authority to define the preservation and progress of the state through its complex and storied past, with each leaving his or her mark on the dynamic legacy of the governor's office.

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Kyrle, Sir Richard (?–1684). Governor. Born in Ireland, Kyrle was the son of James Kyrle and Ann Waller. He was knighted and received a landgraveship in Carolina, which entitled him to twelve thousand acres in the fledgling province. The Lords Proprietors commissioned Kyrle governor of Carolina on April 29, 1684. A few documents in the proprietary-era public records attest that he received petitions and made some provincial appointments prior to his departure for Charleston. Kyrle landed in the province sometime after July 28 but died on August 30 or 31, 1684, slightly more than a month after his arrival. His will is dated August 18, 1684, and was proved September 19, 1684. He was survived by his wife Dame Margaret (or Mary) Kyrle, who perished early the next month, leaving as orphans a minor son, Robert; five daughters, Mary, Elizabeth, Katherine, Penelope, and Barbara; and another son, William, probably from a previous marriage, who was executor of Margaret Kyrle’s estate. Prior to Kyrle’s appointment, the governorships of Carolina had been in the hands of rival political factions living in the province. Historians speculate that the proprietors appointed Kyrle to alleviate some of the political chaos that plagued their province in the late 1670s and 1680s. However, Kyrle’s death soon after his arrival did little to alleviate the political battles. Kyrle was succeeded in the governorship by Robert Quary. Alexander Moore
Lesser, Charles H. South Carolina Begins: The Records of a Proprietary Colony, 1663–1721. Columbia: South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1995.
Lowndes, Rawlins (1721–1800). Jurist, governor. Lowndes was born in 1721 on St. Kitts in the West Indies, the son of Charles Lowndes and Ruth Rawlins. In 1730 the family migrated to South Carolina, where Lowndes’s extravagant father fell into financial ruin and committed suicide in May 1736. His youngest sons, Charles and Rawlins, became wards of South Carolina’s provost marshal Robert Hall. Under Hall’s tutelage, Rawlins Lowndes learned the intricacies of South Carolina’s legal system. In 1745 Lowndes followed his mentor’s footsteps and became provost marshal, the chief law enforcement officer of the colony.
On August, 15, 1748, Lowndes married Amarinthia Elliott, whose dowry brought him a plantation on Stono River in St. Paul’s Parish. He now qualified for a seat in the Commons House of Assembly and was elected in 1749. After Amarinthia died in childbirth in January 1750, Lowndes acquired Horseshoe Plantation in St. Bartholomew’s Parish and thereafter represented that parish in the assembly for most of the following twenty-five years. He was married two more times: to Mary Cartwright on December 23, 1751 (she died in 1770); and to Sarah Jones from January 1773 until his death. These unions produced seven and three children respectively.
Overburdened by his public and private duties, Lowndes experienced declining health, and he resigned as provost marshal in June 1754. He sailed to England to recover his health, returning to South Carolina in December 1755. After his arrival Lowndes rose to prominence in the Commons House of Assembly and held several important committee assignments. In September 1763 the assembly elected Lowndes to the Speaker’s chair, where he defended the assembly’s prerogatives against encroachments from royal governors, the upper house, and the ministry in England. A political moderate, Lowndes apparently was not daring enough for his colleagues, who replaced him with Peter Manigault in October 1765.
In February 1766 Lowndes was appointed assistant judge, a position he held for six years, and he took legal positions that won him praise. He argued that South Carolina’s courts should be opened, despite the Stamp Act’s provision that legal documents bear the required stamps. In 1773 Lowndes ruled that the upper house, or Royal Council, composed of placemen who served at the pleasure of the crown, was not equivalent to the British House of Lords. This argument struck a devastating political blow against the Royal Council’s prestige and marked the high point of Lowndes’s public career.
In October 1772 Lowndes was again elected Speaker of the Commons House of Assembly, and he retained that post until the dissolution of royal government in 1775. A reluctant revolutionary, Lowndes hoped for an accommodation between the colonies and Britain and reportedly reacted to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with a stream of profanities. Nevertheless, he held important posts in the early years of the Revolutionary War, serving in the Provincial Congress and on the Council of Safety. When John Rutledge resigned as president (governor) of South Carolina in March 1778 to protest the proposed state constitution, the legislature elected Lowndes.
Lowndes’s brief tenure as president proved frustrating. Perhaps influenced by his long service in the legislative branch, he was reluctant to use the powers of his office. Preferring to keep South Carolina’s supplies and militia for state use only, Lowndes did not fully cooperate with Continental army generals Robert Howe and Benjamin Lincoln in their efforts to defend the lower South from British attacks. Lowndes retired to private life in February 1779 and thereafter played no major role in the Revolution.
Lowndes suffered extensive property losses during the British occupation of South Carolina. In late 1780 he petitioned to be restored to the rights of a British subject. Though the South Carolina state legislature did not confiscate Lowndes’s property because of this decision, he was stripped of his full citizenship until the summer of 1783.
Lowndes’s last major public act occurred while he was representing the city parishes in the S.C. House from 1787 to 1790. In 1788 he argued against ratification of the federal constitution and predicted that the South, as a minority section reliant on slavery, would be at the mercy of northern commercial interests. He was elected to his final public office in 1788, serving one term as intendant (mayor) of Charleston. In his final decade, Lowndes recouped the financial losses he had incurred during the Revolution. After a brief illness, he died in Charleston on August 24, 1800, and was buried in St. Philip’s Churchyard. Gregory D. Massey
Vipperman, Carl J. The Rise of Rawlins Lowndes, 1721–1800. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978.
Ludwell, Philip (1638–1723). Governor. Ludwell was born in 1638 in England, the son of Thomas Ludwell and Jane Cottington. By 1663 he had traveled to Virginia, where his cousin William Berkeley was governor. Ludwell utilized this connection and those by marriage with the Bernard, Burwell, and Culpeper families to become a judge (1676), colonial secretary (1676–1677), a member of the Grand Council (1675–1687, 1691–1695), and Speaker of the House of Burgesses (1695–1700). He sided with Berkeley against Nathaniel Bacon, served with distinction during the rebellion, and led the popular, or Assembly, party after Berkeley’s death. In 1689 he journeyed to England to defend the prerogatives of the House of Burgesses against the crown.
While there, he accepted the governorship of North Carolina from the Lords Proprietors, but he spent less than six out of forty-eight months (1690–1694) in residence, appearing only when summoned. He reorganized the North Carolina council; appointed Thomas Jarvis, a popular and able councilman, as his deputy; and instituted long-sought and popular quitrent reform.
In November 1691 the proprietors appointed Ludwell governor of all Carolina and sent him to Charleston to reestablish order. His predecessor, Seth Sothel, had overthrown Governor James Colleton with the support of the Goose Creek Men, the colony’s antiproprietary faction. Sothel challenged Ludwell’s attempts to displace him, while the Goose Creek faction defended the right of the Commons House of Assembly to legislate without permission of the council. They were willing to compromise, but they demanded land and quitrent reform, guarantees for the colony’s French immigrants, protection from arbitrary justice and fees, and pardons for themselves as prerequisites.
Ludwell’s supporters, the proprietary party, were equally contentious. They openly quarreled with the governor, refused to pay his salary, complained to London that he was taking bribes, and charged that he was falling under the control of the Goose Creek Men. The pirate trade continued to flourish during Ludwell’s tenure, but the governor did attempt to curb the illegal Indian slave trade by ordering all traders to remain in Charleston and organizing a conference with Indian leaders to address their grievances.
Despite his limited success in reining in the Indian trade, Ludwell failed to build a base of support within the colony with either the proprietary or antiproprietary faction. With faltering support in both Charleston and London, Ludwell’s attempted reforms were denigrated in Carolina and vetoed by the proprietors. In mid-May 1693, little more than a year after his arrival, he departed the city, leaving Thomas Smith as his deputy. Ludwell resumed his seat on the Virginia Council, prior to being named as Speaker of the House. In 1707 he transferred control of his extensive landholdings to his son, Philip, and moved to England, where he died in 1723. Louis P. Towles
McCrady, Edward. The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government, 1670–1719. New York: Macmillan, 1897.
Sirmans, M. Eugene. Colonial South Carolina: A Political History, 1663–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.
Lyttelton, William Henry (1724–1808). Governor. Lyttelton was born on December 24, 1724, in the London parish of St. Martin’s in-the-Fields, the sixth son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton and Christian Temple, daughter of Sir Richard Temple. He attended Eton College and St. Mary Hall, Oxford. In 1748 he attended Middle Temple at the Inns of Court, and later in life he received an honorary doctor of civil law degree from Oxford. Lyttelton married twice. He wed his first wife, Mary MacCartney, in 1761. She died in 1765, and nine years later he married Caroline Bristowe. Each marriage produced a son. Through education and family connections Lyttelton secured preferment in colonial and diplomatic posts and was raised to the Irish and then the British peerage.
Lyttelton began his career as a colonial administrator when he was appointed governor of South Carolina in 1755. Traveling to his post, Lyttelton was captured at sea by French warships and held briefly as a prisoner of war. He arrived at Charleston on June 1, 1756, and held office until he left the colony on April 4, 1760. Lyttelton’s tenure was marked by frontier warfare with the Cherokee Indians and by political and constitutional conflicts with the colonial Commons House of Assembly. The French and Indian War (1756–1763) was the American phase of the European Seven Years’ War that pitted Britain against France. In America the war was a contest for control of the continent and was fought by European regulars, colonial militias, and rival Native American allies. In South Carolina the Cherokee War of 1759–1761 was a localized campaign in this continental struggle for hegemony.
In 1759 Cherokee Indians in the northwestern corner of the colony murdered several British traders and upcountry settlers. Governor Lyttelton refused to meet a delegation of Cherokee headmen who traveled to Charleston seeking peace. Instead, he led a military expedition into the upcountry as a show of force and brought the delegation with him as hostages. At Fort Prince George he negotiated a treaty with the Cherokees to hand over for trial the murderers of the British settlers and provided that hostages be held as surety that the murderers would be handed over. Other provisions called for the unhindered return of English traders to their posts, the execution of any emissaries the French might send to the Cherokees, and the jurisdiction of the South Carolina government in future disputes between Cherokees and South Carolinians. Despite the treaty, warfare broke out in early 1760, but by that time Lyttelton had received appointment to become governor of Jamaica, although he could not start that post until 1762. He left for England in April 1760, and the war was prosecuted by British colonels Archibald Montgomery and James Grant and by Lieutenant Governor William Bull, Jr.
During his tenure a group of French Acadians sought to settle in South Carolina. Exiled from their homes in Nova Scotia by British policies, they dispersed throughout the mainland colonies. Anti-French sentiment made them unwelcome, and few remained in South Carolina and Georgia. Most moved on and settled in Louisiana. Lyttelton and his assembly continued a long-standing dispute over provincial finances. However, in July 1756 the assembly authorized a budget and some of the dissension subsided.
Lyttelton had a long career as a royal governor, an ambassador, and a member of Parliament after he left South Carolina. He was governor of Jamaica from 1762 to 1766 and British ambassador to Portugal until 1771. After his diplomatic service, he returned to England and was a member of Parliament, representing Bewdley until 1790. Raised to the Irish peerage as Baron Westcote of Ballymore in 1776, he was also named Baron Lyttelton of Frankley in 1794. In his later years Lyttelton wrote “An Historical Account of the Constitution of Jamaica,” which was published in a 1792 edition of Jamaican statutes and reprinted in Bryan Edwards’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1794). Lyttelton died in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, England, on September 14, 1808. Alexander Moore
Alden, John Richard. John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier: A Study of Indian Relations, War, Trade, and Land Problems in the Southern Wilderness, 1754–1775. 1944. Reprint, New York: Gordian, 1966.
Attig, Clarence John. “William Henry Lyttelton: A Study in Colonial Administration.” Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, 1958.
Corkran, David H. The Cherokee Frontier, Conflict and Survival, 1740–1762. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.
Lyttelton, William Henry. Papers. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Magrath, Andrew Gordon (1813–1893). Jurist, governor. Magrath was born in Charleston on February 8, 1813, the son of the Irish merchant John Magrath and Maria Gordon. After his graduation from South Carolina College in 1831, Magrath briefly attended Harvard Law School, but he acquired most of his legal training in Charleston under the tutelage of James L. Petigru. He was admitted to the bar in 1835. From 1838 to 1841 Magrath represented the city parishes of St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s in the state House of Representatives. On March 8, 1843, he married Emma D. Mikell of Charleston. The couple had five children. Around 1865 Magrath was married again, this time to Mary Eliza McCord of Columbia. They had no children.
In 1856 Magrath was appointed a federal judge to the District Court of South Carolina, which brought him national attention and controversy. His tenure coincided with increasingly strident calls from some southern nationalists to reopen the African slave trade. Although opposed to the trade personally, Magrath nevertheless handed slave-trade proponents a signal victory in 1860. In a decision associated with the cases surrounding the Echo and the Wanderer, ships seized for illegally transporting African slaves, Magrath stated that the 1820 federal statute on piracy did not apply to the slave trade. “The African slave trade,” he declared, “is not piracy.” In rejecting the piracy statute, which carried the death penalty, Magrath’s decision took some of the teeth out of federal slave-trade laws and was hailed by proslavery and states’ rights advocates. Immediately following the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, Magrath resigned his judgeship. On November 7 he told a crowded Charleston courtroom that the “department of Government, which I believe has best maintained its integrity and preserved its purity, has been suspended.” Admirers later claimed that Magrath’s resignation was “the first overt act and irrevocable step” toward secession.
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Andrew G. Magrath. Courtesy, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina
A cooperationist earlier in his career, Magrath supported secession by 1860, feeling “an assurance of what will be the action of the State.” He sat in the state’s Secession Convention and briefly served as the South Carolina secretary of state. In 1862 he was appointed as a Confederate district judge. His decisions generally opposed the concentration of authority by the Confederate government in Richmond. In December 1864 Magrath was elected governor of South Carolina, the last one chosen by the state legislature. During his brief tenure Magrath was affiliated ...

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