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Convention: A Daily Journal

Center for Civics Education

Convention: A Daily Journal

Convention: A Daily Journal is a day-by-day journal of the 1787 Constitutional Convention convened by twelve of the original thirteen states to amend the Articles of Confederation and create a “more perfect union.” It chronicles the daily activities of the Convention, profiles the delegates and their interactions with each other, and looks back to life in America in the 1780s. Writing in the first person, the story is told from an “observer” hearing events as told in contemporary newspaper accounts and delegates’ personal notes and letters.


May 20, 1788

June 21, 2021 - 5 minute read


Siege of Charleston

Like its sister colonies, South Carolina had wrestled against British authority for more than a decade before independence was approved in Philadelphia on July 2, 1776. Years earlier, when the Massachusetts legislature had proposed a meeting of the British North American colonies to “consult together on the present circumstances of the colonies,” South Carolina was one of nine to send delegates. It had been the first meeting to devise a plan to oppose British imposition of new taxes in general and the Stamp Act in particular. Known as the Stamp Act Congress, it had taken place in New York City in October 1765 at the City Hall, later called Federal Hall and the place where George Washington would be inaugurated as the first President of the United States under the Constitution.

The Stamp Act Congress adopted a Declaration of Rights and Grievances, declaring “devotion” and “affection” for “His Majesty’s Person and Government,” while asserting that the people of the colonies “are entitled to all the inherent rights and liberties of his natural born subjects.” It is essential to those rights, it continued, “that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives.”

Opposing British policies was not the only problem facing South Carolinians.  For decades, deep divisions between the “low country” and the “up country” had been escalating. The low country, along the Atlantic seaboard, had been settled a hundred years earlier and developed a plantation economy based on slave labor. In the early 1700s, settlers began moving into the up country from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and other colonies, planting small farms with the need for few, if any, slaves. Religious differences between the official church of South Carolina – the Anglican Church – and religious minorities such as Baptists and Presbyterians exacerbated divisions between the affluent elite of the low country and the more modest farmers in the north.   

Religious dissenters complained of having to pay taxes to the Anglican Church in addition to supporting their own denominations. Moreover, the up country had few government offices or services, including courts and schools, forcing the people to organize their own law enforcement through vigilantes called Regulators and to lobby the legislature to provide essential government services. Although sectional differences continued to be a source of aggravation, opposition to oppressive British policies helped to bridge the gap, at least temporarily. In 1774, elections throughout the colony chose delegates to the First Continental Congress and created a Provisional General Committee, laying the groundwork for new government in South Carolina.

In 1776 and 1779, the British attacked Charleston, the principal southern port city of the American colonies, only to be rebuffed by effective defensive operations under Gen. William Moultrie. But in late December 1779, British Gen. Henry Clinton refocused his efforts from New York and New Jersey and turned his sights to the south, especially to Charleston where he hoped Loyalists could be stirred up to act against the Patriot rebels.. Clinton had already issued a proclamation promising freedom and security to slaves of rebellious Patriots. By February 1780, Clinton’s army, augmented by former slaves known as Black Loyalists, landed about thirty miles south of Charleston and began its assault on the city, now defended by Continental Army troops under the command of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln. On April 13, a force led by British Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton (nicknamed “Bloody Ban” for his ruthlessness) secured an important victory, giving access to the east end of the Cooper River, precursor to the eventual surrender of Charleston and Lincoln’s army of approximately 5,000 men.

The terms of surrender were harsh. Lincoln and his army were denied the honors of war and conditions on British prison ships ravaged the Continentals with sickness, disease, and hunger. The defeat was a serious blow to the Patriot cause, yet Governor John Rutledge managed to evade the British and continued to govern the unconquered parts of South Carolina.

In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, had issued a proclamation establishing martial law in Virginia and granting freedom to slaves who would leave their rebel masters and join the British. Four years later, on June 30, 1779, General Clinton issued a similar proclamation while in his temporary headquarters at the Philipsburg Manor in Westchester County, New York. Like Dunmore’s order, the Philipsburg Proclamation encouraged slaves to desert their masters, but went much further; it applied to all of the colonies and assured freedom to all slaves who escaped their masters whether or not they would choose to fight in the British army.  However, it also provided that “Negroes taken in arms” fighting for the enemy would be sold into bondage. 

News of the Philipsburg Proclamation spread quickly throughout the colonies. When the British captured Charleston in the spring of 1780, thousands of slaves joined them.  Among them were John Kizell and Boston King.  Born in West Africa in about 1760, Kizell had been sold into slavery at age thirteen and transported to Charleston where he was sold in a city whose slaves outnumbered its white citizens.  It was there that he was given the name “John.” Apparently Kizell’s life as a slave was less oppressive, if such can be comprehended, than plantation slaves or others put to hard labor, for Kizell not only learned to read but was a proficient writer.

Boston King was born about the same time as Kizell, but unlike Kizell, King had been born in South Carolina, the son of a literate father who had been “stolen away from his home” in Africa. Evenings of sitting with his father after working in the fields when the two of them would read and pray together came to an end when King was apprenticed to a carpenter whose cruelty was interrupted by his master only when the British threat to Charleston became apparent.

Both Kizell and King chose as their paths to freedom alignment with British forces during the British siege and occupation of Charleston. At the war’s end, British General Guy Carleton, feared that his country’s commitment to the former slaves was at serious risk and ordered the issuance of certificates to blacks confirming they had sought British protection and were authorized to go to Nova Scotia “or wherever else He/She may think proper.” In 1783, Kizell and King, who did know each other, were among nearly three thousand former slaves, in addition to thousands of white Loyalists, who arrived in Nova Scotia, having been transported by ships under the British flag. 

Hailing from Charleston, their stories and stories of other former slaves are significant in the constitutional history of the United States, as we shall see. 

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