Background
John Mathews was born in 1744 at Charlestown (now Charleston), South Carolina. He was the son of John and Sarah (Gibbes) Mathews.
John Mathews was born in 1744 at Charlestown (now Charleston), South Carolina. He was the son of John and Sarah (Gibbes) Mathews.
On October 27, 1764, he was admitted to the Middle Temple in London to study lawand on September 22, 1766, was admitted to the bar of South Carolina.
In 1760 he was ensign and then lieutenant in the expedition against the Cherokee. In the quarrel between Great Britain and the colonies he early took the colonial side, served in the first and second provincial congresses from St. George's, Dorchester, was elected as associate justice of the court of general sessions in 1776, and became speaker of the General Assembly under the temporary constitution of 1776 and the first speaker of the House of Representatives under the constitution of 1778. From 1778 to 1782 he represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress, where he voted against the motion privately to instruct the minister to Spain that he might recede from the claim to free navigation of the Mississippi River, bitterly opposed Samuel Huntington of Connecticut, the president of Congress, bent his whole efforts to defeating the proposal to make a separate peace between Great Britain and the other colonies at the price of abandoning the Carolinas and Georgia, and signed the Articles of Confederation. On the committee at headquarters in 1780 he was most active in his efforts to strengthen Washington's authority and greatly injured the Congress' sense of its own dignity by his outspoken expression of impatience at its failure to act. In 1782 he was elected governor by the Jonesborough Assembly. Through the next year of the war, he transacted the business of his office from various places, part of the time from his plantation of "Uxbridge" on the Ashley River, which had been a part of the Ashley barony. He negotiated with the British on the difficult questions of sequestration, confiscation, and destruction of property, struggled with the conflicting interests of the inhabitants and the army that had been impressing the foodstuffs of which it stood in urgent need, and, when at last the British troops sailed out of Charlestown harbor, took possession of his own capital city. He has been accused of the abuse of men and property left behind by the British evacuation and even of permitting the hanging of several Tories, but a recent examination of the evidence seems to indicate that such charges were unfounded. When the court of chancery was established on March 21, 1784, he was appointed by the legislature as chancellor and, after the organization of the courts of law and equity in 1791, continued to serve as a judge of the court of equity. His decisions show his legal capacity and learning as well as his grasp of the principles of fundamental justice. He resigned in November 1797.
In December, 1766 he was married to Mary Wragg, the daughter of William Wragg and the half-sister of Charlotte Wragg who married William Loughton Smith. After the death of his first wife he married, on May 5, 1799, Sarah, the sister of John and Edward Rutledge. No children survived him.
