George Alfred Trenholm (February 25, 1807 – December 9, 1876) was a South Carolina businessman, financier, politician, and slaveholding planter who owned several plantations and strongly supported the Confederate States of America.

After President Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, Trenholm strongly supported the secession of the Confederacy, which South Carolina led among the top six of the major slave states.

[1] When the American Civil War broke out, Trenholm immediately moved his company's head office from New York to the Bahamas and Bermuda.

However, Confederate President Jefferson Davis vetoed Trenholm's suggestion that the Confederacy buy decommissioned British East India Company ships for $10 million.

[11] Trenholm and his Liverpool-based partner Charles K. Prioleau (son of a Charleston lawyer) worked with fellow American James Dunwoody Bulloch as Confederate foreign agents in Britain to manage their arrangements, especially shipping munitions home.

[1] In 1863, he purchased the Annandale Plantation from Andrew Johnstone; located south of Georgetown, it was a highly successful rice operation that had worked 230 enslaved people in the 1850s.

Trenholm deeded the Annandale and Beneventum plantations to Hazzard shortly after the war's end, trying to protect them from potential confiscation by the United States government.

[13][page needed] Confederate Treasury Secretary Christopher Memminger, a fellow Charlestonian and friend, used Trenholm as an unofficial adviser for almost four years.

When Memminger resigned on July 1, 1864 (due to public outcry after he issued millions of Confederate bank notes at one-third the value of the old ones), and moved back to North Carolina, Trenholm succeeded him.

[14] Trenholm had a "never give up the ship" personality but could do little to stop the financial havoc as the rebel government grew insolvent and printing money caused inflation.

[15] Trenholm advocated direct taxation, reducing the circulation of paper currency, further public subscriptions for war bonds, and purchasing blockade runners (rather than continuing to rely on private shippers), but the Confederate Congress refused to pass those measures.

Trenholm arranged for a large loan to the Confederate government from a French consortium, but the proceeds arrived too late to assist their war effort.

[16] The last published account of it reported $86,000 in specie hidden in the false bottom of a carriage and entrusted to James A. Semple, a Naval paymaster and son-in-law of ex-President John Tyler.

[11] Other accounts trace $40,000 used by Major Raphael J. Moses (General Longstreet's commissary officer) to assist Confederate veterans struggling to return home.

Some believe Trenholm ordered the bullion dumped off railroad bridges on the journey described below (noting his son William patented a hydroscope for finding lost items in the water after the war), or had money smuggled to England by Sylvester Mumford (who later returned to Georgia, where it became an endowment to educate orphans), or taken to Canada.

Though ill, George Trenholm (with his wife as his nurse, the only woman among 30 male officials) evacuated Richmond on Sunday night, April 5, 1865, bound for Danville, Virginia, on the same train as the rest of the Confederate government.

[17] Days later, Trenholm was transported by ambulance to another train carrying the Confederate government into North Carolina, where they learned President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated on April 14.

Escorted by his future son-in-law James M. Morgan (or by his son William, under alternate accounts) and carrying a bag of gold pieces, Trenholm drove to Orangeburg, South Carolina.

[20] He was soon joined in jail by Theodore Dehon Wagner, the manager of Trenholm, Fraser & Co. Trenholm was briefly imprisoned at Hilton Head, South Carolina, but General Quincy Gillmore, who knew him and of his kindnesses toward U.S. prisoners during the war and recognizing his physical disability, issued him a written parole on June 25 to allow him to return to his home and the corporate limits of Columbia, South Carolina.

Hunter, former Florida governor A. K. Allison, Charles Clark of Mississippi, A. G. Magrath, and assistant Secretary of War, James A. Campbell—all of whom were allowed liberty around the island after giving their parole of honor on August 21.

On September 29, President Johnson had ordered property returned to Charleston firms, including Trenholm's, over the objection of Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs.

[13] Trenholm's son Fred sailed home from England to attend his sister Helen's wedding to James Morris Morgan.

The U.S. government ultimately confiscated some of these properties based on the failure of the Trenholm firm to pay customs duties on the many items imported by blockade runners during the war.

[22] North Carolina erected a historical highway marker near his estate Solitude, where he and Memminger spent summers during his final years.

[23] Popular legend suggests that Trenholm and his exploits inspired Margaret Mitchell's character of Rhett Butler in her Civil War novel, Gone with the Wind.