The most prominent and prolific opponent of the Constitution during the debate in the South Carolina legislature was Rawlins Lowndes, a Charleston lawyer and politician who had acquired plantations along the Combahee and Santee Rivers. Although as an associate justice of South Carolina he had declared the odious Stamp Act unlawful and unenforceable; participated the in Committee of Safety with Charles Pinckney, Henry Laurens, and other Patriots; and was among eleven men assigned to draft a new constitution for his State, Lowndes had opposed independence from Britain and the armed rebellion that sparked it.
Nevertheless, in 1778 Lowndes was elected President of South Carolina by the General Assembly, succeeding John Rutledge. When the British first invaded the State and raided a number of plantations, including those owned by Lowndes, Lowndes actively supported the Continental Army’s General Benjamin Lincoln and ordered closing of the colony’s ports. After independence had been secured, he remained active in politics, serving in the State Senate and the House of Representatives where he vehemently opposed ratification of the Constitution.
Lowndes’ opposition ranged from treaties being included as part of “the supreme law of the land” to prohibiting individual States from issuing their own paper currency and authorizing the federal government to imposes taxes. But the fundamental issues driving him were the potential domination by northern States over those in the south and its ultimate impacts on the slave economy. The “Negroes were our wealth,” he pleaded, “our only natural resource; yet behold how our kind friends in the north were determined soon to tie up our hands and drain us of what we had!” Why should southern States allow the north to “exclude us from this great advantage” of slavery, he demanded. For his part, Lowndes “thought the trade could be justified on the principles of religion, humanity, and justice” as well as economic necessity.
Unlike debates in States to the north, no arguments were advanced against slavery in the South Carolina House of Representatives. After all, this was a slave state. Gen. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the Constitution’s most vocal advocate for the Constitution, agreed with Lowndes on at least this one point. “I am as thoroughly convinced as that gentleman is,” he declared, “that the nature of our climate and the flat, swampy situation of our country [South Carolina] obliges us to cultivate our lands with negroes, and that without them South Carolina would soon be a desert waste.” However, he added, under the Constitution “we have secured an unlimited importation of negroes for twenty years” and there is no requirement that it be ended at that time. Moreover, “we have obtained a right to recover our slaves wherever they may take refuge, which is a right we had not before.” In the end, he concluded, “we have made the best terms for the security of this species of property as it was in our power to make.”
Lowndes was not convinced and continued to raise one objection after another, each ably countered by Pinckney, frequently supported by John Rutledge, and occasionally by others. When Lowndes asserted that “we are now under the government of a most excellent constitution [the Articles of Confederation], one that had stood the test of time and carried us through difficulties generally supposed to be insurmountable…that raised us high in the eyes of all nations, and gave to us the enviable blessings of liberty and independence,” Rutledge was stunned, “astonished to hear the honorable gentleman pass such eulogium on the old Confederation.”
The Articles, Rutledge retorted, are “so very weak,” that unless materially altered, “the sun of American independence would indeed set soon.” The American people, he continued, “had felt the consequences of this feeble government, if that deserved the name of government which had no power to enforce laws founded on solemn compact.” John Mathews was even more “astonished at hearing such encomiums on the Articles of Confederation, as if they had carried us victoriously through the war when, in fact, they were not ratified until the year 1781; and if the Confederation had been in force in 1776, this country would have inevitably been lost; because under it Congress had no authority to give General Washington the powers” needed at Valley Forge and beyond. Mathews knew whereof he spoke; he had represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress and endorsed the Articles on behalf of his State.
Pinckney reminded the House of the disadvantages of disunion. The Confederation Congress had not protected Massachusetts during Shays’ rebellion and foreign nations refused to treat with the United States because they knew “our government has no power to enforce obedience to treaties…Without union with other States,” he warned, “South Carolina must soon fall.”
Lowndes ploughed on, finally concluding his litany of objections by thanking the House “for their very great indulgences in permitting him to take up so much time…and those gentlemen on the other side of the question for the candid, fair manner in which they had answered his arguments.” Nevertheless, he closed by announcing that “when he ceased to exist, he wished for no other epitaph than to have inscribed on his tomb, ’Here likes the man that opposed the Constitution, because it was ruinous to the liberty of America.’”
It was an odd closing statement, especially in light of his assertion just two days earlier, in which he reminded his audience that he had been “very much, originally, against a declaration of independence” in 1776 but “as a good citizen” promoted its observance. Now he opposed the Constitution, but, if approved by the people, “it would have his hearty concurrence and support.”
At least one member of the House was persuaded by Lowndes. James Lincoln had listened to the debate intently and declared that “the more he heard, the more he was persuaded of its [the Constitution] evil tendency.” Among its defects, he noted, was the absence of a bill of rights.
On Saturday, January 19, debate in the South Carolina House of Representatives ended as the House voted unanimously to call for a convention “for the purpose of considering and of ratifying or rejecting, the Constitution.” In mid-February, it provided for elections of delegates to the convention be held on April 10 - 12 and the convention itself to convene in Charleston on May 12.
Sensing the inevitable, Rawlins Lowndes chose not to stand for election as a delegate to the ratifying convention, but later that year would be elected mayor of Charleston.