James Burrows Edwards (24 June 1927-26 December 2014) was the Republican Governor of South Carolina from 21 January 1975 to 10 January 1979 (succeeding John C. West and preceding Richard Riley) and the United States Secretary of Energy from 23 January 1981 to 5 November 1982 (succeeding Charles Duncan Jr. and preceding Donald P. Hodel).
Biography[]
James Burrows Edwards was born in Hawthorne, Florida in 1927, and he served in the US Maritime Service during World War II and became a dentist in Charleston after the war. He became involved in local Republican politics and narrowly lost in his 1971 bid for the US House of Representatives before being elected Governor in 1974, his state's first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. He focused his efforts on economic development, and he briefly served as President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Energy before resigning to serve as President of the Medical University of South Carolina from 1982 to 1999. He died in 2014.