South Carolina's Last Royal Governor: Lord William Campbell

The last royal governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, arrived in Charleston (Charlestown) in June 1775. It was an inauspicious time. The previous royal governor, Charles Montagu, had been greeted with the ringing of church bells, large cheering crowds, saluting cannonades, and a sumptuous dinner at Dillon’s Tavern. Now there were no crowds and no cheers. No welcoming dinner, either. 

The waterfront was eerily quiet as his ship, HMS Scorpion, glided up to the wharf near The Exchange. A detachment of blue-coated soldiers stood ready to escort Lord William, whether as dignitary or prisoner was not clear. None of the leading gentlemen of the town had come out to welcome him.

Lord William had been to Charleston before, during the French and Indian War. In 1762 the Royal Navy assigned him to serve there as captain of a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Nightingale. 

On that occasion the citizens had treated him as a hero. He fell in love with and married the daughter of a wealthy local family, Sarah Izard. Their wedding in 1763 was a great event. After all, he was a son of the Duke of Argyll, the most powerful man in Scotland. [Image:  Sarah Izard Campbell, by Charles Fraser, said to be a copy of painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds] 

After the wedding, the couple returned to Britain. Lord William served in Parliament, then as royal governor of Nova Scotia. In that position he had earned a reputation for fair and honest governance. 

A couple of months before he arrived, in April 1775, the simmering conflict between the colonies and the mother country had boiled over into open rebellion in Massachusetts. Other colonies, including South Carolina, had established provisional governments, and begun to prepare for war.

Lord William had another disadvantage as royal governor. He was a Scot. Soon after George III had come to the British throne in 1760, his political opponents concocted a story that liberty hating Scots were conspiring to gain control of the government, and intent on reducing English liberty. English Whigs accused the king’s former tutor, Lord Bute, of being the chief plotter. 

Initially a favorite of the young king, Bute had become Prime Minister in 1762. In order to pay the enormous expenses of the recent war with France, he proposed to levy new taxes in Britain and its colonies. The attacks on Bute caught on in America, and lasted for years after Bute lost all influence over government policy. 

In 1772, another Scot, Lord Mansfield, gave the conspiracy theory more life. As Chief Justice of the King’s Bench Court in London, he ruled that slavery had no basis in English law. The Somerset ruling sent shock waves through the American colonies.

The shock was especially severe true in the southern colonies, heavily dependent as they were on enslaved African labor for their wealth. Southern planters feared that Parliament could extend the Mansfield ruling to the empire. The solution they embraced was to deny Parliament’s power to legislate for the colonies, which led to rebellion.

The Scottish conspiracy theory was bogus, but the Crown had appointed many Scots to colonial offices after the accession of George III, posts that some colonial leaders, like William Henry Drayton, had sought. 

Another colonial leader, Christopher Gadsden, threatened to use "imported Scotchmen" as a foundation for the wharf he was building in Charleston. Gadsden resented having to compete with newly arrived Scottish merchants.  

Soon after landing in Charleston, Lord William learned that he was virtually powerless. Most local leaders refused to cooperate with him or treat him as anything but suspicious. Some of the more extreme  Carolina “Whigs” (later “Patriots”) had even considered preventing him from landing in the first place.

Charleston was awash with rumors of Indian attacks and slave rebellions allegedly fomented by the British government. Colonel John Stuart, the British Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Southern Region, had already been forced to flee to Florida, pursued by a liberty mob and false charges that he was organizing Native American risings in the backcountry. 

Shortly after Lord William arrived, local authorities arrested several blacks on suspicion of plotting a slave rebellion. They charged one of them, Thomas Jeremiah, and tried him in a slave court, although he was a free man. The court found him guilty on flimsy evidence and sentenced him to be hanged and burned.

Lord William intervened, calling the trial a farce. He tried to have Jeremiah pardoned but discovered his complete lack of authority. Worse, “Liberty Boy” rioters accused him of being involved in the plot. They threatened him and attacked other royal officials, some of whom left the colony.

Convinced of the danger, he fled his residence at 34 Meeting Street in the dead of a September night. He took refuge on HMS Tamar, a British naval sloop stationed in the harbor. His wife Sarah joined him there later after being harassed herself. [Image: 34 Meeting Street, Charleston, where Lord William Campbell lived during his brief governorship]

 

 

Lord William remained close to the city for a couple of months, commanding a flotilla of three small naval vessels. In November they fought an inconclusive engagement with a rebel ship commanded by William Henry Drayton near Hog Island.

Meanwhile, Lord William landed some of his men on Sullivan’s Island at the entrance to the harbor. Enslaved black runaways soon joined them and together, they conducted raids on plantations in Christ Church Parish (now Mt. Pleasant) to secure food and supplies.

Just before Christmas 1775, Patriot leaders decided to end this threat before the island became the center of a slave rebellion. They sent a force of two hundred Whig Rangers to clear the enemy off the island. Disguised as "Indians," they attacked shortly before dawn. They achieved complete surprise, killed dozens of runaways and captured others, including a few whites. Some of those in the camp escaped to the British ships or to Morris Island across the harbor.

After the attack, Lord William sailed off to the British stronghold at St. Augustine in Florida. From there he returned to Britain. In reports, he referred to the execution of Jeremiah as a “judicial murder” and called those responsible “barbarians.”

Lord William was not yet through with South Carolina. In June 1776, he was present when a British fleet attacked the rebels hastily built palmetto log fort on Sullivan’s Island. The Battle of Sullivan’s Island ended in disaster for the British, and for Lord William. He was wounded in the leg by a flying splinter of wood. The wound never healed properly, and he died, probably of infection, in 1778. He was 48. [Image: The Battle of Sullivan's Island, by John Blake White]

Lord Williams' wife Sarah remained in England, where she died in 1784, aged 39. Her brother, Ralph Izard, became a prominent Patriot. 

[The portrait of Lord William Campbell in his naval uniform is by Thomas Gainsborough]

e is wearing his naval uniform]

Further Reading: 

J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty (Yale University Press, 2009)

William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution 2 vols., (Charleston, 1821) 

The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. Volumes dealing with the 1760s and 1770s.)

Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies & Sparked the American Revolution (Naperville, Illinois: Source Books, 2005)