Bertram Sutcliffe (16 August 1790-24 October 1852) was an American Whig politician from South Carolina.
Biography[]
Bertram Sutcliffe was born in Denmark, South Carolina in 1790. He resided on his family's "Braintree" plantation in nearby Sweden before founding the "Scane" plantation near Norway in Orangeburg County. Partly influenced by the placenames familiar to him, Sutcliffe became an avid student of Norse mythology and renamed his enslaved butler "Thor" in one of the gods' honor. Sutcliffe affiliated himself with the Whigs due to his support for internal improvements, which he believed would better connect his plantation with markets in Charleston and Augusta. Sutcliffe served as a state representative from 1835 to 1837, capitalizing off of the state's brief revolt against the Democrats amid the Nullification Crisis. Sutcliffe was a staunch conservative throughout his life, though he drifted towards states' rights radicalism as the slavery question heated up in the late 1840s. He died in 1852.