‘We none of us can expect the honours of state; they are all given away, to worthless, poor sycophants.’

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 23.

After ten years in England, William Henry Drayton returned home and in March 1764 he married an heiress, Dorothy Golightly, who was even richer. In his political career he was more vocal than his friend Arthur Middleton. His views, over time, ran the gamut from a staunch defense of the rights of the Crown to flaming revolutionary ideology, and at no time was there doubt about where he stood. As a King’s Friend he became so unpopular that he left again for England, where he was presented at court as a defender of British rights. As a Rice King, William Henry Drayton was at the top of the heap in South Carolina and accustomed to deference. In England he was just another colonial, and it has been suggested that he returned home in 1772 with the bitter taste reserved by the British aristocracy for colonials whatever their status at home.

Back in South Carolina William Henry Drayton was appointed an assistant judge by his uncle, Lieutenant Governor William Bull. But he was enraged when he discovered that he was subject to being replaced by an Englishman. The same thing had happened to Charles Pinckney, who in the 1750s had been replaced as Chief Justice by an English appointee of the Crown. Such men were called placemen, English political hacks receiving patronage from English sponsors, a practice that was just one more nail in the coffin of the first British Empire. More than one Rice King spoke with bitterness of such appointments to the New Englander Josiah Quincy, Jr. “The council, judges, and other great officers are all appointed by mandamus from Great Britain,” Quincy recorded in his journal entry of 25 March 1773. “Nay, even the clerk of the board, and assembly! Who are, and have been thus appointed. Persons disconnected with the people and obnoxious to them. I heard several planters say, ‘We none of us can expect the honours of state; they are all given away, to worthless, poor sycophants.’"

The men who in less than a century had achieved great wealth and most of its trappings seethed over such treatment and hankered after power in their own right. The causes of the American Revolution are beyond the scope of this book, but of the Rice Kings some explanation is required. Although various factors influence historical events of great consequence, a taproot usually exists, and we would not be led astray if we consider the observation made as early as 1681 by French planters on Guadalupe and Martinique. They asked permission of Colbert, Louis XIV’s Minister for Finance, to trade with the English colonies: West Indian rum and molasses for New England provisions. In their plea to Colbert, they maintained that “the English who dwell near Boston will not worry themselves about the prohibition which the King of England may issue, because they hardly recognize his authority.” (A good mercantilist, Colbert refused permission.)

This growing apart, which eventually led to American insistence on self-government within the empire while the British were bent on tightening the screws of empire, was exacerbated in South Carolina by men who, presumably aside from their maker, came to recognize no authority but their own. Ten years before the Civil War, a writer in the Constitutional Union of Georgia found in them “an overweening pride of ancestry; a haughty defiance of all restraints not self-imposed; an innate hankering after power, and self opinionated assumption of supremecy.” The speculation that William Henry Drayton bitterly resented his treatment in England and by placemen comes to mind when considering a conclusion by Frederick R Bowes in his excellent study, The Culture of Early Charleston (1942): “Theirs was an intellectual decision, founded on their concepts of right and honor and the best interests of their class. Proud, cultivated, sensitive, they could not tolerate interference to accept the inferior status imposed on them by the British government. Rather than submit to this indignity they resolved to take up arms, fortified in their minds with the conviction that they were defending the inestimable Rights of Life, Liberty, and property.