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 elected to the South Carolina House of Assembly for St. Philip Parish (Charleston) and served as Speaker of the House from 1736 to 1740. In 1741 he was elected to the South Carolina Royal Council and in 1752 Governor James Glen appointed him Chief Justice of the Province of South Carolina. But, just the following year, word reached the colonies that King 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 (Mount Pleasant) of his friend, Jacob Motte. In 1726, at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, he 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.