Background
Keenly interested in Carolina politics, Middleton was a more radical thinker than his father, Henry Middleton.
Keenly interested in Carolina politics, Middleton was a more radical thinker than his father, Henry Middleton.
He was educated in Britain, at Harrow School, Westminster School, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He studied law at the Middle Temple and traveled extensively in Europe where his taste in literature, music, and art was developed and refined.
In 1764, Arthur and his bride Mary Izard settled at Middleton Place. In 1776, Arthur was elected to succeed his father in the Continental Congress and subsequently was a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence. Also in 1776, he and William Henry Drayton designed the Great Seal of South Carolina.
Despite the time he spent in England, his attitude toward Loyalists was said to be ruthless.
During the American Revolutionary War, Middleton served in the defense of Charleston. After the city"s fall to the British in 1780, he was sent as a prisoner of war to Saint Augustine, Florida (along with Edward Rutledge and Thomas Heyward Junior), until exchanged in July the following year.
Arthur Middleton was also an ancestor of actor Charles B. Middleton, who played Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon movies of the 1930s. Arthur Middleton"s sister, Susannah Middleton, was the great-great-grandmother of Baldur von Schirach, onetime leader of the Hitler Youth and later Governor ("Gauleiter" or "Reichsstatthalter") of the Reichsgau Vienna, who was convicted of "crimes against humanity" at the Nuremberg Trials, through Baldur Von Schirach"s mother Emma Middleton Lynah Tillou (1872–1944).
The United States Navy ship, United States Ship Arthur Middleton (Associated Press-55/APA-25), was named for him.
He was a leader of the American Party in Carolina and one of the boldest members of the Council of Safety and its Secret Committee.