Andrew Gordon Magrath was an American jurist. Also, he was the governor of South Carolina and served as Secretary of the State of South Carolina from 1860 to 1862.
Background
Andrew Gordon was born on February 8, 1813, in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. His father, John Magrath, was a soldier in the Irish rebellion of 1798 who, captured by the British, escaped and fled to Charleston, his mother, Maria Gordon, came to Charleston from Scotland in 1792.
Education
Magrath received his early education at the private school of Bishop England in Charleston and graduated in 1831 from the South Carolina College (now University of South Carolina).
He also studied law in the office of James L. Petigru and spent a few months at the Harvard Law School.
In 1835, Andrew Gordon Magrath began the practice of law in Charleston, with the exception of brief intervals in 1840 and 1842 when he represented the parishes of St. Philip and St. Michael in the South Carolina House of Representatives, continued in this profession until 1856. He insisted on the right of slaveholders to take their property into the newly acquired territory of the United States, and in 1848, he supported Taylor against Cass for president on the ground that the former, although a Whig, was a Southerner and a slaveholder.
In 1856, he was elected as a delegate to the National Democratic Convention at Cincinnati, but he resigned before the meeting of the convention to accept an appointment as a judge of the United States district court, then in great disfavor in South Carolina and rarely resorted to.
He won for the court the confidence of the bar of the state, raised it to a position of commanding distinction, and together with James Connor, the district attorney, won a national reputation in the cases of the Echo and the Wanderer, vessels accused of violating the law against the African slave trade.
On November 7, 1860, he resigned his position as United States district judge with the dramatic declaration that "the Temple of Justice, raised under the Constitution of the United States, is now closed". He was immediately afterward elected a delegate to the secession convention, where he was active in influencing the withdrawal of the state from the Union.
On December 30, 1860, he was appointed a secretary of state in the executive council of Governor Pickens and directed much of the correspondence of the governor with President Buchanan and Major Anderson regarding the disposition of Fort Sumter. Shortly after the establishment of the Confederate government, he was appointed a judge of the Confederate district court in South Carolina.
Although he upheld the validity of the Confederate sequestration and conscription acts, some of his decisions, particularly the one declaring the Confederate war tax upon state securities unconstitutional, ran counter to the policy of the government at Richmond and appear to have excluded him from its confidence and deprived him of its favor.
In 1864, he resigned from the moribund Confederate court and was elected governor by the legislature, the last governor of South Carolina to be elected in this manner. As governor he took an extreme states-rights position, stating in his inaugural address on December 20 that his efforts would be directed equally toward resisting the invaders from the North and the encroachments of the Confederate government upon the powers of the state.
He addressed strong letters to Jefferson Davis criticizing the policy of conscripting South Carolina regiments for the defense of Richmond and even entered into correspondence with Governors Vance of North Carolina and Brown of Georgia with a view to making plans for the defense of their respective states independent of the Confederate government.
After the burning of Columbia, however, he was unable to reorganize the state government, and, on May 22, 1865, he issued a proclamation advising submission to the Federal authorities. On May 28, he was arrested and shortly afterward, upon the order of the President, imprisoned at Fort Pulaski. On November 23 the President directed that he be released upon taking the oath of allegiance as prescribed in the amnesty proclamation.
He resumed the practice of law and lived quietly in Charleston until his death in 1893.
Achievements
Politics
Magrath opposed secession as inexpedient when it was advocated by Robert Barnwell Rhett in 1852, but with the election of Abraham Lincoln as president he accepted the view that there were sufficient grounds for separation and that the dissolution of the relations of South Carolina with the Union was necessary to the welfare of the state.
Personality
Magrath was a man of unusual personal charm and graciousness of manner.
Connections
On March 8, 1843, Magrath was married to Emma C. Mikell, by whom he had five children. During his imprisonment at Fort Pulaski, he entered into a correspondence with Mary McCord, of Columbia, previously unknown to him, and upon his release, they were married. They had no children.