Pierce Butler (July 11, 1744 – February 15, 1822) was an Irish-born American politician who was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

[1] As one of the largest slaveholders in the United States, he frequently defended American slavery for both political and personal motives, even though he had private misgivings about the institution and particularly about the Atlantic slave trade.

He introduced the Fugitive Slave Clause into a draft of the Constitution, which gave a federal guarantee to the property rights of slaveholders.

In early 1779, Governor John Rutledge asked Butler to help reorganize South Carolina's defenses.

Their forces in the northern and middle colonies had reached a stalemate with Washington's Continentals, more adequately supplied and better trained after the hard winter at Valley Forge.

They believed that the many Loyalists in the southern states (with whom the British had an active trade through cotton, rice and tobacco) would rally to the Crown if supported by regular troops.

Butler served as a volunteer aide to General Lachlan McIntosh during the operation, which climaxed with an attempted attack on Savannah.

The hastily raised and poorly prepared militia troops could not compete with the well-trained British regulars, and the Patriots' effort to relieve Savannah were defeated.

As adjutant general, Butler worked with former members of the militia and Continental Army veterans such as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter to integrate the partisan efforts into a unified campaign.

Throughout the closing phases of the southern campaign, he personally donated cash and supplies to help sustain the American forces and assisted in the administration of prisoner-of-war facilities.

He enrolled his son Thomas in a London school run by Weeden Butler and engaged a new minister from among the British clergy for his Episcopal church in South Carolina.

Attesting to his growing political influence, the South Carolina legislature asked Butler to represent the state at the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in 1787.

[2] At the convention, he urged that the president be given the power to initiate war but did not receive a second proponent for his motion, and all the other delegates overwhelmingly rejected his proposal.

[8] Following his wife's death in 1790, Butler sold off the last of their South Carolina holdings and invested in Georgia Sea Island plantations.

But unlike Washington or Thomas Jefferson, for example, Butler never acknowledged the fundamental inconsistency in simultaneously defending the people's freedom and supporting slavery.

She was the orphaned daughter of Thomas Middleton, a South Carolina planter and slave importer, and was heiress to a large fortune.

Until the grandsons came of age, Butler's other surviving daughters, Frances and Anne Elizabeth ("Eliza"), had use of the most productive lands.

She expressed extreme horror at the state of life of enslaved people and deconstructed contemporary arguments attempting to justify slavery.

Kemble was shocked at the enslaved people's living and working conditions and complained to him about their overwork and the manager Roswell King Jr.'s treatment of them.

[13] Kemble waited until 1863, after the start of the American Civil War and her daughters had come of age, to publish Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839.

In the social and economic disruption of the postwar years, Pierce Mease Butler was unsuccessful in adapting to the free labor market.

By mid-century, Pierce Mease Butler was among the richest men in the United States, but he squandered a fortune estimated at $700,000.

He wrote about the post-Civil War South in his 1906 novel, Lady Baltimore, which romanticized "the lost aristocrats of antebellum Charleston."

Wister's friend and former Harvard classmate, President Theodore Roosevelt, wrote to him criticizing the novel for making "nearly all the devils Northerners and the angels Southerners.

"[6] Pierce Butler and many of his descendants are buried in a vault in the cemetery of Christ Church, Philadelphia, built in 1727–1744 and a National Historic Landmark.

[15] This article incorporates public domain material from Robert K. Wright Jr. and Morris J. MacGregor Jr. "Pierce Butler".