Pierce Butler (11 July 1744 – 15 February 1822) was a US Senator from South Carolina from 4 March 1789 to 25 October 1796, preceding John Hunter, and from 4 November 1802 to 21 November 1804, succeeding John E. Colhoun and preceding John Gaillard. Originally a Federalist Party member, he later joined the Democratic-Republican Party due to his strong pro-slavery views.
Biography[]
Pierce Butler was born in County Carlow, Ireland in 1744 to a family of nobility, and he resigned a commission in the British Army in 1773 to settle in South Carolina with his wife. In 1779, Governor John Rutledge asked Butler to help organize the state's defenses during the American Revolutionary War, and he mobilized the state's militia to repulse a threatened British invasion. He served as a volunteer aide to Lachlan McIntosh during an offensive into Georgia, but the Patriots' attempt to relieve the besieged city of Savannah ended in failure. In 1780, Butler escaped from Charleston after its fall to the British, and he worked with Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter to organize partisan activities into a coordinated campaign. The war left many of his plantations and ships destroyed, and he was left a poor man by the war's end.
In 1785, after travelling to Europe to secure loans and to establish new markets, Butler returned to the United States and advocated for the reconciliation of former American loyalists. Due to his growing political influence, he was elected to serve as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and he supported a strong union of the states. Butler was one of South Carolina's inaugural US Senators, serving from 1789 to 1796 and from 1802 to 1804. He introduced the Fugitive Slave Clause into the US Constitution to protect slavery, as he became one of the largest slaveholders in the new country. He later agreed to the "three-fifths compromise", in which slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person so that their population could affect congressional apportionment in slave states. He died in 1822.