Address delivered before the Palmetto Society, of South-Carolina, in commemoration of the defence of the Palmetto Fort, on Sullivan's Island, June 28th, 1776.
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Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past and can't be restored." Well, over recent years, The British Library, working with Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collection of 19th century books.
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Further information on The British Library and its digitisation programme can be found on The British Library website.
William Crafts was an American author and lawyer. He was a member of the legislature of South Carolina, and was for some time editor of the Charleston Courier.
Background
William Crafts was born on January 24, 1787 in Charleston, South Carolina, United States. He was the eldest child of William Crafts by his first wife, Margaret Tebout, and the sixth in descent from Griffin Craft, who, with his wife Alice, emigrated in John Winthrop’s company to Massachusetts in 1630 and settled at Roxbury. His father, born in Boston, became an opulent, public-spirited merchant of Charleston. His mother was the daughter of a Beaufort, South Carolina family.
Education
William studied at Harvard College. He was handsome and popular and acquired a precocious reputation as a wit and scholar. Upon his graduation from Harvard College in 1805 he dawdled over Coke and Littleton for three years in a Charleston law office, returned to Cambridge to receive his Master of Arts, and set the college agog with the banter and informality of an oration couched in execrable Latin. He was admitted to the South Carolina bar on January 9, 1809 and set out to win glory in law, politics, and letters.
Career
In 1810 Crafts was elected to the lower house of the legislature entering politics as a Federalist. He was defeated in the next election, but later was reelected for a term or two. His principal achievement as a legislator was a ringing speech on the necessity of public education, which he delivered in November 1813, when some wiseacres proposed in the interest of economy to suspend the free public schools. For the last six years of his life Crafts was a member of the state Senate. His career as a lawyer was handicapped by the fact that his knowledge of law was negligible; Hugh Swinton Legare even denied that he was a lawyer at all. Accordingly he drifted into criminal cases, in which his shortcomings were less conspicuous and his talent for dazzling juries with his rhetoric was of great effect.
As a literary man he achieved a fuller measure of success. He was in constant demand as an orator for public funerals and anniversary celebrations. In 1817 he delivered the Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard. To the Charleston Courier he contributed theatrical criticisms, essays in the manner of Addison, and poems first in the manner of Pope and Gay and later in that of Byron and Moore. His most ambitious effusions were “Sullivan’s Island, ” a descriptive poem modeled too closely on “Windsor Forest, ” “The Raciad, ” a pleasing picture of Charleston social life, and a “Monody on the Death of Decatur, ” which was published the day after the news of Stephen Decatur’s death reached Charleston.
His anacreontics are the best verse written in South Carolina before William Gilmore Simms. He died at Lebanon Springs, New York, whither he had gone for his health, and was buried in King’s Chapel churchyard in Boston.