Lord William Campbell

Who was Lord William Campbell?

Lord William Campbell was from a Scottish family loyal to the British Crown. His father was John Campbell, 4th Duke of Argyll.

From 1752 to 1760, he served in the Royal Navy in India. In 1762, because of the Seven Years' War, he was scheduled to serve in America. He met and married a lady named Sarah Izard from South Carolina in 1763. His father-in-law was a future American rebel and member of the Second Continental Congress, Ralph Izard. In 1764, they returned to Britain where he became a member of Parliament, representing the family seat in Argyllshire. In 1766 he was appointed Governor of Nova Scotia, a position he held until 1773.

In June 1775, at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, Campbell became the last British Governor of South Carolina, a position for which he had lobbied hard, because his wife was from South Carolina.

Charged with bringing in the reins on the colony's revolutionaries, Campbell first decided to ignore the newly established Provincial Congress. The Provincial Congress was created in January 1775 in Charleston by former members of the South Carolina House of Commons as a separate ruling government independent of British authority and influence. Knowing the great rift between the aristocratic low-country and the backwoodsmen commoners of the backcountry, Campbell distributed pamphlets in mass numbers to backcountry citizens. The pamphlets stated that Charleston citizens kept lying and that the Provincial Congress could not be trusted.