Commissioned, like many younger sons, into the British army as a teenager, Butler was by 1767 stationed in South Carolina, where in 1771 he married Mary Middleton, the heiress to substantial plantations. Taking up the cause of liberty, he fought as an American in the Revolution of 1776 and became one of the 39 signatories of the nation’s constitution.
Yet Butler was also an extraordinarily successful southern planter with 632 enslaved people toiling across his cotton and rice plantations by 1811. His principal plantation lay at Hampton Point on St Simon’s Island, one of Georgia’s many barrier low-lying sea islands, where fractal creeks were interspersed with oak, pine and myrtle groves.
Ideologically opposed to slavery on paper, he benefited thoroughly from its extraordinary material advantages in practice. To do this he alternated between his two personas – the freedom-loving revolutionary and the autocratic southern planter.
The radical Philadelphia publisher Thomas Stephens dedicated his 1795 Proceedings of the United Irishmen to Butler as a “senator of the United States of United States; an enemy of Aristocracy, and a Friend of Man”, introducing the United Irishmen as “a band” of Butler’s “countrymen, who not debased by slavery” had “preserved their freedom of mind in the midst of chains”.
But the frontispiece carried no mention of the contradiction of a slaveholding revolutionary that forced Butler to adopt some tortured reasoning in his letters home, where abolition was gathering momentum. He penned a conversation to London in 1788: “You may naturally ask me: ‘Why, with these sentiments, do you hold so many in bondage’. I answer you, that I would free every one of them tomorrow if I could do it, that is if the Legislature would permit it. I ardently wish I never had anything to do with such property.”
In 1791, pleased with the “generous opinion” one Irish Quaker held of his “treatment of the wrettched Affricans”, he tried to place the blame on the enslaved: “Had it pleased God to allow the benign beam of Civilization to reach their Country, it would not be in the power of Europe to enslave them. I am not a friend to the trafick in Human kind. Yet upon strict enquiry I much doubt if their situation in their own Country is freer or better ... Indeed I wish I had never owned one of them.”
In the south Butler’s other persona emerged. Because he considered slavery an inappropriate sight for his children, Butler set out to arrange “his troublesome kind of property”, a euphemism for slavery, in a way that did not require his presence. To be “saved the necessity of ever going to see [his] Estate” and witnessing what took place there, he became an absentee, ruling by proxy and conveying decisions to his agent Roswell King in letters and drawings. A drawing could represent a complex, messy, real place as an ideal, abstract space and it also enabled its legal registration as private property.