John Belton O'Neall

O'Neall, John Belton (Apr. 10, 1793 - Dec. 27, 1863), author and jurist, was born on Bush River, Newberry District, S. C. The son of Anne (Kelly) and Hugh O'Neall, he was of Irish ancestry on both sides. He was a descendant of Hugh O'Neill or O'Neale who, about 1730, deserted from a British ship at anchor in the Delaware River and settled on the Susquehanna River, where he is said to have changed his name to O'Neall in order to escape detection. As a child John Belton O'Neall possessed a precocious mind with a remarkable memory, and he acquired a sufficient mastery of Latin and Greek at the Newberry academy to enable him to enter the junior class at the South Carolina College, where he graduated in 1812.

He entered the militia, in which he rose to the rank of major-general by the time he was thirty-two. When he was twenty-three he became a representative from Newberry District in the state legislature, but he was defeated for reëlection because of his support of a measure increasing the salaries of judges. In 1822, however, he was again elected to the legislature, where he sat for three consecutive terms and served as speaker during the last two terms. In 1827 he was known to favor a financial measure regarded by his constituents as extravagant, although as speaker he did not vote upon it, and he was not reëlected the next year. His second retirement from the legislature opened for him a wider field, the one in which his greatest reputation was achieved. He had been admitted to the bar in 1814, and the legislature elected him circuit judge in 1828. Two years later he was advanced to the South Carolina court of appeals. Together with David Johnson and William Harper he performed the duties of this court until 1835, when its decision in the cases of The State ex relatione Ed. McCready vs. B. F. Hunt and of The State ex relatione James McDaniel vs. Thos. McMeekin (2 Hill, 1), declaring unconstitutional the test oath devised by the nullifiers, incurred the hostility of the dominant party in the state and caused the court to be abolished. The judges, however, were transferred to the other courts of the state, and he was assigned to the court of law appeals. In this capacity he served for the remainder of his life. Upon the death of John S. Richardson in 1850 he was elected president of the court of law appeals and of the court of errors, and in 1859 he became chief justice of South Carolina.

As a leader in the cause of temperance he exerted a profound influence upon the state. In his early youth, when he sold rum over the counter of his father's grocery to half-pint customers, he acquired an aversion to the traffic in intoxicating liquor, and this was intensified into hatred when indulgence on the part of his father led the latter to bankruptcy and the temporary loss of his mind. In 1832 he took a pledge to abstain from liquor and, in 1833, to abstain from tobacco. He forthwith plunged into the cause of temperance reform. He allied himself with the Head's Spring temperance society, which affiliated with the "Washington movement," a national temperance organization that was then making its appearance in South Carolina, and in 1841 he was appointed president of the South Carolina Temperance Society. In 1849 he joined the Sons of Temperance, in October 1850 was elected president of that body in South Carolina, and at the Richmond meeting in 1852 was elected president of the Sons of Temperance of North America. He delivered numerous addresses for the cause and for a time conducted a column, "The Drunkard's Looking-Glass," in the South Carolina Temperance Advocate, a weekly paper published at Columbia.

He was an active and many-sided man; he was president of the Columbia and Greenville railroad, was greatly interested in scientific agriculture and was for many years president of the Newberry agricultural society, one of the earliest of its kind in the state, and served as a trustee of the South Carolina College for forty years. Although of Quaker ancestry he became a member of the Baptist Church and served successively as president of the Newberry Baptist Bible Society, of the Bible board of the state Baptist Convention, and of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. He delivered many addresses on education, Sunday schools, and railroads; among them the two following especially set forth his views on temperance and education, "Address to Lawyers," in A Course of Lectures on . . . Temperance . . . before the Charleston Total Abstinence Society by Fourteen of its Members . . . 1851 (1852) and Oration Delivered before the Clariosophic Society . . . 1826 (1827). A writer of ease and facility, he contributed dozens of fugitive essays and letters to the newspapers of the state. His longer works include The Negro Law of South Carolina (1848), a paper originally read before a meeting of the state agricultural society; The Annals of Newberry, Historical, Biographical, and Anecdotal (1859), that contains a good deal of information about his early life; and The Biographical Sketches of the Bench and Bar of South Carolina (2 vols., 1859), a collection still regarded as authoritative. Opposed to both nullification and secession, he was active in the deliberations and conventions of the Union party in 1832, but owing to his advanced age he took no steps against the secession movement in 1860. He was a handsome man. His voice was remarkably clear, and on the bench his charges are said to have been eloquent and impressive. He was married, on June 25, 1818, to Helen Pope of Edgefield. Several years later, upon the death of his grandmother, Hannah (Belton) Kelly, he inherited "Springfield," an estate near Newberry, and resided there until his death.