Background
Hyrne was born in 1748. He was of English ancestry, the son of Col. Henry Hyrne and the grandson of Edward Hyrne who emigrated to America and settled in that section of South Carolina later known as the Parish of St. James.
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Edmund Massingberd Hyrne
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Captain in the 16t South Carolina Continental Regiment in 1775, he was promoted to the rank of major in 1779 and served as deputy adjutantgeneral of the Southern Department from 1778 to the end of the Revolution. He was wounded in the engagement near Gibbes's Farm, March 30, 1780, which was connected with the siege of Charleston. For his valuable service and courageous conduct during the Battle of Eutaw Springs, S. C. , he received the thanks of Congress through Maj. -Gen. Nathanael Greene.
After the Battle of Cowpens, January 17, 1781, he marched six hundred British prisoners to the prison camp at Charlottesville, Va. He was aide-de-camp to Greene in 1781-82 and rendered notable service as liaison officer between him and Gen. Thomas Sumter during the campaigns of 1781 in South Carolina, though his efforts to induce the latter to cooperate more fully were not entirely successful. In the exchange of prisoners, in the Southern Department, at the end of the war, Hyrne served as American commissary and met at Charleston the British commissary, Major Fraser. Regarding his fitness for the position it has been said: "A man better qualified for so important a commission, could not have been selected. He was liberal in all his ideas; and where reason would justify concession, willing to yield and conciliate; but against the encroachments of arrogance and injustice, firm as adamant".
Soon after his military services had ended he was elected a member of the Assembly known as the Jacksonborough legislature, which met January 18, 1782, at Jacksonborough, about thirty-five miles from Charleston. He died in the winter of 1783 on his plantation, "Ormsby, " in St. Bartholomew's Parish.
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He seems to have left no children.
