His father, Francis, was a member of the royal council for South Carolina from 1717 till 1757, and at one time its president, and his grandfather, James, came from Scotland about 1700. Francis, the son, was first educated in Charleston, but was sent to London in 1768, after his father's death, and placed at Eton. In 1774, after travelling through France, Italy, and Switzerland, he remained in Geneva with his friend Johannes von Müller, a Swiss historian. Though at first he had sympathized with the Tories, at the beginning of the American Revolutionary War he returned to Charleston, and received a captain's commission in the South Carolina militia. He was on Gen. Isaac Huger's staff at the attack on Savannah in 1779, and received a bullet wound. He then served on Gen. William Moultrie's sta