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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 22, 1788

July 05, 2021 - 5 minute read


Slave Auction in Richmond Virginia 1861

Debate over ratification of the Constitution in South Carolina actually began several months before its ratification convention convened in Charleston.  Beginning on January 16, the State House of Representatives held a three-day debate on the Constitution as part of its process for calling a convention. Debating the Constitution in the legislature was peculiar because, as everyone knew, the ratification convention would be the body responsible for determining whether South Carolina would endorse or oppose it. However, all four delegates to the Constitutional Convention from South Carolina were members of the House and debate at this time would provide an opportunity for the House to hear directly from men who had actually helped to draft the document. 

On January 11, the House ordered the printing of 1,000 copies of “the Report of the Convention lately assembled in Philadelphia.” Each member of the House would receive three copies. The “Report” included the letter of transmittal George Washington had included with the proposed Constitution when it had been forwarded to Congress at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention. Soon after the Convention adjourned, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney wrote a letter to Sir Matthew White Ridley, an old friend and classmate from Oxford and a member of the British Parliament. Enclosing both a copy of the letter and the Constitution, Pinckney advised that Ridley “read the letter before you read the Constitution” as it “there briefly stated our reasons for having made it such as it is.” Considering Ridley as “both a philosopher and a politician,” Pinckney asked if he would “be so obliging as to favour me with your remarks on it.”  

Pinckney’s letter to Ridley also expressed his belief that there “is no doubt that the Constitution will be adopted by a majority of the States,” but that was in September. By January, Jean-Baptiste Petry was writing to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs that opponents of the Constitution in Philadelphia had “spared neither money nor effort in order to flood this State [South Carolina] and its neighbors with its pamphlets and writings against this Constitution.” By January 11, five States had ratified the Constitution, but nine were required for its adoption and ratification was by no means assured.

Remarkably, a debate was prompted by a simple resolution in the House expressing “thanks to Hon. John Rutledge, Gen. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Charles Pinckney, and Pierce Butler, Esquires, for the services which they had rendered to their country by their attendance” at the Constitutional Convention. Gen. Pinckney moved to postpone consideration of the resolution and was seconded by Charles Pinckney. Asserting that there is “no higher honor than the approbation of his fellow citizens,” Gen. Pinckney nevertheless opined that such an honor was premature; it should wait until the Constitution had been fully discussed. If the people would reject the Constitution, he said, “instead of the delegates being entitled to thanks, they would become objects of censure.” If, on the other hand, the Constitution were approved “upon mature investigation of its merits…then there would be a propriety” in thanking the delegates.

Rawlins Lowndes disagreed. “Thanks must now be given,” he insisted and suggested that thanks be limited to the delegates’ “point of attendance.” After all, “was it nothing that the delegates had left their families…for fulfilling what the House had directed?” Rutledge, Pinckney, Butler and Patrick Calhoun all weighed in with the opposite opinion and the resolution was postponed. The move to postpone was not frivolous; it was designed by Gen. Pinckney to link the Constitution to the prestige of the leading men of South Carolina, and Lowndes knew it.

On January 16, the House resolved itself into a committee of the whole to begin considering the Constitution. South Carolina’s four delegates to the Constitutional Convention, John Rutledge, Charles Pinckney, Pierce Butler, and Gen. Pinckney, were in attendance and prepared to explain the Constitution and answer questions. The Charleston City Gazette and Columbian Herald were also on hand to report the proceedings to the public.

Gen. Pinckney was the first to speak. Beginning with a survey of the deficiencies in the Articles of Confederation and the events leading up to the Constitutional Convention, including the failed meeting in Annapolis in September 1786, he then addressed major features of the Constitution and how many important differences had been overcome by compromise. “Upon the whole,” he asserted, “we should be astonishingly pleased that a government so perfect could have been formed from such discordant and unpromising materials.”

Should “the spirit of disunion” prevail, Pinckney continued, its effects would “weaken the consistency of all public measures” against a united enemy. With respect to the current union, the only remedy to cure its defects was a strong government. The form of government proposed, he concluded, “is better calculated to answer the great ends of public happiness than any that has yet been devised.” A “warm debate” ensued as Rutledge, Butler and the two Pinckneys responded to questions, clarified meanings of various provisions of the Constitution, and summarized how compromises had been obtained and the arguments supporting them.

Lowndes was the first to raise serious objections. “It has been said that this new government was to be considered as an experiment,” he said. “An experiment! What, risk the loss of political existence on experiment? No, sir, if we are to make experiments, rather let them be such as may do good, but which cannot possibly do any injury to us or our posterity…when this new Constitution should be adopted, the sun of the Southern States would set, never to rise again.”

Lowndes believed South Carolina’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention “possessed much integrity” and that “they had done everything in their power to procure for us a proportionate share in this new government, but the very little they had gained proved what we may expect in the future – that the interests of the Northern States would so predominate as to divest us of any pretensions to the title of a republic.”  Clearly, the issues were slavery and the slave trade. Why did the Northern States care about “our importing negroes?” he demanded. “Why confine us to twenty years, or rather why limit us at all?”  Six of the Eastern States will form a majority in the House of Representatives, he argued, “but they don’t like our slaves, because they have none themselves…why should the Southern States allow this?....Without negroes, this state would degenerate into one of the most contemptible in the Union.”  The ensuing debate would not be about slavery, but only whether it was threatened by the new Constitution.

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