Christopher Gadsden, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1724, was sent to England at an early age to receive his education. Returning to America in 1741, he was placed in a Philadelphia counting-house, where he acquired methodical and strict business habits. Upon attaining his majority, he revisited England. Returning in a man-of-war, and the purser dying suddenly, the position was offered to him. He accepted the appointment, remained in the navy two years, and resigned to engage in commercial life on his own account in Philadelphia. Such was his success that he was soon able to buy back the estate in South Carolina which his father had lost in 1733 at play with Admiral Lord Anson. Leaving the North, he took up his residence in the South as a planter, and finally became a factor.

In 1759, when the outrages perpetrated by the Cherokee Indians called for vigorous measures, Gadsden joined the expedition under Governor Lyttleton, organized an artillery company, and introduced the first piece of field ordnance into the colony. Thoroughly republican in his political views, and with a mind capable of looking far ahead for the results of present measures, he was the first to anticipate the struggle that would surely be the outcome of Great Britain’s oppressive policy toward her American colonies. In 1765, when the project of the general Congress in this country was conceived, he was one of the first and most active members. In 1775, he resigned his seat to accept the appointment of colonel in the First South Carolina Regiment. On the 16th of September, 1776, Congress raised him to the rank of brigadier-general. The brilliant victory at Fort Moultrie secured to his native State for several years an immunity from the perils and hardships of war, and he resigned his commission on the 2d of October, 1777.

With the cessation of military duties, Gadsden resumed his legislative cares; and being Lieutenant-Governor of South Carolina at the time of General Lincoln’s surrender of Charleston, he was seized with twenty-eight others and taken in a prison-ship to St. Augustine, Florida. Here he was kept in the castle dungeon for ten months; but beguiling the time by the study of Hebrew, he emerged from captivity a much more learned man than when he entered it. The success of Greene in the South brought him release in 1781. Upon returning to South Carolina he was at once elected to the Assembly, and soon after chosen governor. The latter honor he declined, declaring the “State needed a man in the vigor and prime of life.” At the close of the war he retired to private life; but from time to time and on more than one occasion he continued to take part in public affairs. He died in his native city on the 28th of August, 1805, from the results of a fall.