Robert Woodward Barnwell

U. S. House of Representatives, South Carolina, 1829-1833
Confederate Senator, South Carolina, 1861-1865

Born: August 10, 1801, Beaufort, Beaufort County, South Carolina.

• Attended private schools in Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina.
  
• Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, graduate, 1821.
  
• Studied law, was admitted to the bar, 1824
  
• Commenced law practice in Beaufort, South Carolina, 1824.
  
• Member of the South Carolina State House of Representatives, 1826-1828.
  
• Elected from South Carolina as a Democrat to the Twenty-first and Twenty-second U. S. Congresses, March 4, 1829 - March 3, 1833.
  
• Was not a candidate for renomination, 1832.
  
• President of South Carolina College, Columbia, South Carolina (now the University of South Carolina), 1835-1841, when he resigned.
  
• Appointed to the U. S. Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Franklin H. Elmore, serving from June 4 to December 8, 1850, when a successor was elected.
  
• Was not a candidate for election.
  
• Member of the Nashville convention in 1850.
  
• South Carolina Commissioner to the Federal Government regarding the secession of South Carolina, December, 1860.
  
• South Carolina delegate to the convention of the seceding states in Montgomery, Alabama, his being the deciding vote in the South Carolina delegation which carried the State for Jefferson Davis and made him President of the Southern Confederacy.
  
• Member of the Confederate States Senate, 1861-1865.
  Chairman of the faculty of the University of South Carolina, 1866-1872, when he conducted a private school.

Died: November 24, 1882, Columbia, Richland County, South Carolina.
Buried: St. Helena's Churchyard, Beaufort, South Carolina.

(Source: U.S. Congress. House. Biographical Directory Of The American Congress 1774-1949, 85th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Doc. 607 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950), pp. 759-2057.)