Background
BARNWELL, Robert Woodward was born on August 10, 1801 in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States, United States. Son of Robert and Elizabeth Wigg (Hayne) Barnwell. His father was a Revolutionary War veteran and U.S. congressman.
congressman educator lawyer politician senator
BARNWELL, Robert Woodward was born on August 10, 1801 in Beaufort, South Carolina, United States, United States. Son of Robert and Elizabeth Wigg (Hayne) Barnwell. His father was a Revolutionary War veteran and U.S. congressman.
Private school, southern university, northern university, university graduate.
He graduated with high honors from Harvard College in 1821 and received his M.A. from South Carolina College in 1823, which awarded him an honorary L.L.B. in 1842. He read law and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1822. On August 9, 1827, he married his second cousin, Eliza Barnwell.
He was an Episcopal vestryman, planter, and lifelong Democrat. Barnwell served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1826 to 1829 and in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1829 to 1833. He was a delegate to the South Carolina nullification convention in 1832, and he signed the Ordinance of Nullification.
He became president of South Carolina College in 1835 and served until 1841, when he retired because of poor health. Barnwell became a U.S. senator in 1850 and served at the Southern rights convention in 1852 where he favored cooperation among the Southern states. After 1852, he retired to his family plantation and wrote often in defense of slavery.
A cautious secessionist, he was a delegate to the South Carolina secession convention in 1860, where he served on the committee to write the Declaration of Immediate Causes of Secession. He went to Washington, D.C., as a secession delegate in December 1860 to try to convince Southern congressmen to urge their states to secede. In 1861, he served as temporary chairman of the provisional Confederate Congress in Montgomery, Alabama, and helped to draft the Confederate Constitution.
He was a signer of the Confederate Constitution. Barnwell was offered the post of secretary of state in the Confederacy by President Davis, but he refused it, considering himself unworthy of the post. He remained a loyal Confederate and a Davis supporter throughout the war, serving in the first and second Confederate Senates.
He held posts on the Conference, Impressments, Territories, and Finance Committees. An active member of the Finance Committee, Barnwell was a staunch defender of Secretary Christopher G. Memminger’s policies. He opposed the peace movement in Congress in 1864.
Since his property was destroyed during the war, Barnwell moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in 1865. He never again sought public office. From 1865 to 1873, he was chairman of the faculty of the University of South Carolina.
He operated a school for girls in Columbia from 1873 to 1877 and was librarian of the University of South Carolina from 1877 until his death on November 24,1882, in Columbia.
"Peculiar institution" of slavery was not only expedient but also ordained by God and upheld in Holy Scripture.
Stands for preserving slavery, states' rights, and political liberty for whites. Every individual state is sovereign, even to the point of secession.
