Meet A South Carolina Native You May Not Know You Know

This is the story of a South Carolina native whose impact is still felt in board meetings of government agencies, garden clubs, nonprofits and churches. To many, however, he’s not a familiar figure, but South Carolina had a significant influence on what became his legacy.
Meet Henry Martyn Robert, born in 1837 on a plantation in the unincorporated community of Robertville, S.C., now in Jasper County. An engineer for the Union Army during the Civil War, he is better known as the author of — wait for it — “Robert’s Rules of Order,” the parliamentary guide of how to make meetings work.
Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell, recognized as South Carolina’s authority on parliamentary procedure from his days in the S.C. Senate, was surprised to learn that Robert was a native of the Palmetto State.
“’Robert’s Rules of Order’ provides you with a method to go from start to finish with a meeting,” he said. “It means you’re able to complete your task. If you didn’t have ‘Robert’s Rules,’ you may wander endlessly. It provides for discussion, closure and action.”
Robert’s story is fascinating. His father, Joseph Thomas Robert (1807-1884), was a physician who inherited a South Carolina plantation and slaves from his father, a prominent planter. But Joseph Robert also became an ordained Baptist preacher.
“Things began to bother him and eventually he came to the conviction that a slave-served society was a bad environment for his children to grow up in,” said Henry Martin Robert III, now 93, of Annapolis, Maryland. The Rev. Robert freed his 26 slaves, sold the plantation and moved the family to Ohio, where he pastored a church.
His son, Henry Martyn Robert, was then about 13. Soon appointed to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point and later commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army, Robert was serving in Oregon when the Civil War started. He struggled with whether to resign his commission and join the Confederacy or remain in the U.S. Army, his grandson said.
“He still regarded himself as a South Carolinian,” Henry III said, adding that he was 2 when his grandfather died. “He went through a chain of reasoning because he didn’t know whether to report for duty or resign.”
In the end, his logical progression of thought — the same kind of reason that ultimately filled his parliamentary rule book — led him to conclude that if any state ever seceded from the Confederacy, as it had from the United States, then states likely would end up acting independently– the very thing that created problems for the country before the U.S. Constitution. So he stuck with the Union.
The Army eventually sent Robert to New Bedford, Mass., where he was asked to chair a town meeting in 1863 on harbor defenses. He didn’t know “beans” about running a meeting, his grandson said, but he felt honor-bound to try. Unfortunately, it turned into a 14-hour tumble after which Robert vowed “never to attend another meeting until I knew something of … parliamentary law,” he wrote in 1916.
So, he found some information in a book on rules for deliberative bodies, copied some notes on motions and their order, and kept them in his wallet.  With Army promotions (he eventually became a brigadier general of the engineering corps), he realized different bodies used different rules and that everyone had a hard time keeping up with them. A standard book of procedure that any group could use would help straighten out the mess.
Robert published his first short rule book in 1875. It became popular. After retiring from the military, he spent his time working on new editions of the “Rules” until his death in 1923. His son and grandson continued the family business. Work is starting on a 12^th edition.
Henry M. Robert III says it’s not a stretch to surmise the moral struggle over slavery that his grandfather witnessed in South Carolina and the later intellectual wrestling over the Civil War likely helped to form the logic that’s integral to “Robert’s Rules.”
The next time you’re in a testy meeting that gets resolved thanks to parliamentary procedure, give a silent tip of the hat to Henry Martyn Robert, a South Carolina native.  He wrote the book!
 
Andy Brack is publisher of Statehouse Report. He can be reached at: brack@statehousereport.com.