Charles Pinckney (1699-1758)

He was born in Charleston and educated in London, where he met and subsequently married his first wife. Returning to America, his career began in 1729 when he was was elected to the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly for St. Philip Parish (Charleston). From 1736 to 1740 he was unanimously elected Speaker of the House. In 1741 he was appointed to the South Carolina Royal Council. In 1752, Governor James Glen offered him the post of Chief Justice of the Province of South Carolina and he was sworn in that year. But, just the following year word reached the colonies that George II had in fact given the appointment to someone else. Disheartened, Pinckney took his family and left Carolina for London (and afterwards Ripley in Surrey) where they lived for five years during which time he worked as an agent for the colony to the Board of Trade. He returned to Charleston in 1758 and while inspecting his plantations he contracted malaria and died at the plantation house of his friend, Jacob Motte, at Mount Pleasant. In 1726, at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, he'd married his first wife, Elizabeth. They had no children, but became the foster parents of his nephew, Charles Pinckney (1731-1782). In the same year that his first wife died (1744), he married his second wife, Eliza, by whom he had three children who reached adulthood.