Politician, planter, poet, essayist. Grayson was born in Beaufort District on November 12, 1788, the son of William John Grayson and Susannah Greene. He spent much of his youth on Parris Island, the inspiration for his later pastoral verse. An avid reader, Grayson attended boarding schools in the North and graduated at the top of his class in 1809 from South Carolina College. He married Sarah Matilda Somarsall of Charleston in 1814 and amassed a fortune as the owner of two Wando River plantations and 170 slaves. Throughout his life he held numerous public offices, serving terms in the S.C. House of Representatives (1813\u20131815 and 1822\u20131826); the S.C. Senate (1826\u20131831); the U.S. House of Representatives (1833\u20131837); and as Charleston\u2019s customs collector (1841\u20131853).<\/p>\n
While editor of the Beaufort Gazette, <\/em>Grayson promoted nullification, winning his Congressional seat in 1832 on the states\u2019 rights ticket. He experienced a change of heart after his return to South Carolina and joined the Whig Party, fearful that the South\u2019s dependence on cotton would lead to economic disaster. The stridency of Robert Barnwell Rhett and other \u201cfire-eaters\u201d also appears to have chastened Grayson\u2019s earlier flirtation with radical political theory. He despaired over the high emotion in American public life and particularly the debates about slavery. As a devoted classicist, Grayson believed that Romanticism\u2019s celebration of \u201chuman folly and madness\u201d portended cultural decline, a theme he frequented in his late-antebellum essays for Russell\u2019s Magazine. <\/em>On the eve of disunion, Grayson\u2019s defense of classicism, \u201cWhat is Poetry?\u201d (1859), articulated his view that in all human endeavor, reason and order must guide behavior and expression.<\/p>\n Grayson is best remembered for his proslavery verse, The Hireling and the Slave <\/em>(1854), a rejoinder (structured in heroic couplets) to Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s depiction of slavery in Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin. <\/em>Like George Fitzhugh, Grayson found abhorrent the wage labor systems of England and the North, characterizing them as an even greater injustice than slavery. But Grayson was also a Unionist, and vigorously defended the principles of America\u2019s founding throughout the sectional crises of the 1850s. In a pamphlet (1850) addressed to Governor Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, Grayson prophesied, \u201cUnion is the source of peace, prosperity, and power to the Nation.\u201d Secession would herald the victory of abolitionism, the triumph of anarchy. Only the \u201cimprudence\u201d of the southern people and \u201cthe rashness\u201d of their leaders, warned Grayson, could make manifest such a catastrophe. For this and his satirical essay, The Letters of Curtius <\/em>(1851), in which he ridiculed the South\u2019s material inability to wage war with the federal government, Grayson was removed from the office of customs collector in 1853.<\/p>\n In his Autobiography, <\/em>written during the early years of the Civil War, Grayson mourned the destruction of the United States, whose repair he could not foresee. \u201cI witnessed the death of the great Republic with sorrow. I was born with it and I survive it. It seemed to me an unnatural event for an individual to be longer lived than a powerful State.\u201d Grayson also prepared biographies of his friends William Lowndes (the manuscript is believed to have been destroyed in the Charleston fire of 1861), and fellow Unionist James Louis Petigru. His attenuated war diary (May\u2013November 1862) captures the emotional tautness of Charleston during the Union Army\u2019s first sustained attempt to capture the city.<\/p>\n Grayson died at his daughter\u2019s home in Newberry on October 4, 1863, and was buried in Charleston\u2019s Magnolia Cemetery.<\/p>\n Calhoun, Richard J., ed. Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson. <\/em>Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature, 1607\u20131900. <\/em>Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Politician, planter, poet, essayist. Grayson was born in Beaufort District on November 12, 1788, the son of William John Grayson and Susannah Greene. He spent much of his youth on Parris Island, the inspiration for his later pastoral verse. An avid reader, Grayson attended boarding schools in the North and graduated at the top of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-6723","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-african-americans","ecms-beaufort-county","ecms-colonial-unrest-american-revolution-and-new-republic-1765-1789","ecms-early-republic-and-war-of-1812-1790-1815","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-g","ecms-government-and-law","ecms-literature","ecms-lowcountry","ecms-politics","ecms-the-antebellum-south-1816-1860","ecms-u-s-civil-war-1861-1865"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n