Governor Richard Irvine Manning

RICHARD IRVINE MANNING was born in Camden District, South Carolina and educated at South Carolina College. After serving as a Captain in the South Carolina Militia during the War of 1812, he became a planter. He the served in the state legislature prior to being elected governor. During his gubernatorial administration, the legislature fully committed to the doctrine of nullification, which held that states had the power to nullify federal law, although Manning himself opposed what he felt was this extreme theory of states’ rights. Although he was later defeated as the Union candidate for a seat in the U.S. Congress and lost a bid for reelection as governor, he remained active in politics, serving as a leader of the opposition to the nullification movement and as a Union Party delegate to the South Carolina Convention of 1832, where he voted against the Nullification Ordinance.. Mann eventually succeeded to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1834, to which he was later elected in his own right.