History of South Carolina
Encyclopedia
South Carolina
is one of the 13 original colonies of the United States
. European exploration
began in 1540, but the explorers brought European diseases that decimated the local Indian population. It was founded in 1663. The English colony of the Province of Carolina
was started in Charleston
in 1670, with wealthy planters and their slaves, coming from the British Caribbean colony of Barbados
. Colonists overthrew the proprietors after the Yamasee War
, pushing back the American Indians in 1715-1717. In 1719 the colony was officially made a crown colony
, and North Carolina
was split off and made into a separate colony in 1729.
South Carolina banded together with the other colonies to oppose British taxation in the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765, and played a major role in resisting Britain. It became independent in March 1776 and joined the United States of America. The Revolution was bloody and hard fought in 1780-81, as the British invaded, captured the American army and finally was driven out.
The cotton gin made the rich soil of the lowlands very profitable for plantations operated by black slaves. The hilly upland areas, with few slaves, were much poorer and a regional conflict underlay the political system. With outspoken leaders such as John C. Calhoun
, the state it vied with Virginia as the dominant political and social force in the South. It fought federal tariffs in the 1830s and demanded that its rights to practice slavery be recognized in the territories. With the 1860 election of Republicans under Abraham Lincoln
, who vowed to prevent slavery's expansion, the voters demanded secession. In December 1860, the state seceded from the Union and in February 1861 it joined the new Confederate States of America
. In April 1861 the American Civil War
began when Confederate forces attacked the American fort at Fort Sumter
in Charleston harbor. The Civil War proved devastating to the whites, but freed the blacks from slavery. From 1865 to 1877, South Carolina underwent Reconstruction. Congress shut down the civilian government in 1867, put the Army in charge, gave Freedmen (freed slaves) the vote and prevented ex-Confederates from holding office. A Republican legislature supported by Freedmen, northern Carpetbaggers and white Southern Scalawags created and funded a public school system, and created social welfare institutions. The constitution they passed was kept nearly unaltered for 27 years, and most legislation passed during the Reconstruction years lasted longer than that. By 1877 the white conservatives, called "Redeemers" had regained political power. In the 1880s Jim Crow laws
were passed that were especially severe in the state, to create public segregation and control movement of African American laborers. After 1890 almost all blacks lost their vote, not to regain it until 1965.
The Civil War ruined the economy, making it one of the two or three poorest states for the next century. Educational levels were low as public schools were underfunded, especially for African Americans. Most people lived on small farms and grew cotton. The more affluent were landowners, who subdivided the land into farms operated by tenant farmers or sharecroppers, along with land operated by the owner using hired labor. Gradually more industry moved into the Piedmont area
, with textile factories that turned the state's raw cotton into yarn and cloth for sale on the international market. Wave after wave of revivals made most people quite religious; most people, white and black alike, were Baptists.
Politically the state was part of the Solid South
. Because African Americans were disenfranchised, no black officials were elected between 1900 and the late 1960s. Many went to northern cities during the Great Migration
after 1910. Whites rigidly enforced segregation
in the Jim Crow era, limiting African Americans' chances for education, representation and free public movement. The Civil Rights laws of the 1960s ended segregation and protected the voting rights of African Americans. The blacks had been affiliated with the Republican Party, but after 1964 became intensely loyal Democrats, while most whites moved in the opposite direction.
The cotton regime ended by the 1950s. As factories were built across the state, the great majority of farmers left agriculture. Service industries, such as tourism, education and medical care grew rapidly, as the textile factories faded after 1970. By 2000 the white majority of South Carolina voted solidly Republican
in presidential elections, but state and local government elections were contested by the two parties. The population continued to grow, reaching 4 million in 2000, as coast areas became prime locations for tourists and retirees. With a poverty rate of 13.5%, the state was slightly worse than the national average of 11.7%.
and the piedmont
developed. There is evidence of plant domestication and pottery in the late Archaic. The Woodland period
brought more serious agriculture, more sophisticated pottery, and the bow and arrow. By the time of the first European exploration, twenty-nine tribes or nations of Native Americans
lived within the boundaries of what became South Carolina.
By the end of the 16th century, the Spanish and French had left the area of South Carolina
after several reconnaissance missions and failed colonization attempts. In 1629, Charles I
, King of England
, granted his attorney general a charter to everything between latitudes 36 and 31. He called this land the Province of Carlana, which would later be changed to "Carolina" for pronunciation, after the Latin
form of his own name.
In 1663, Charles II
gave the land to eight nobles, the Lords Proprietors, who ruled the Province of Carolina
as a proprietary colony. After the Yamasee War
of 1715-1717, the Lords Proprietors came under increasing pressure and were forced to relinquish their charter to the Crown in 1719. The proprietors retained their right to the land until 1719, when the colony was officially split into the provinces of North Carolina
and South Carolina
, crown colonies.
In April 1670 settlers arrived at Albemarle Point, at the junction of the Ashley River
and Cooper River
. They founded Charles Town
, named in honor of King Charles II. Throughout the Colonial Period
, the Carolinas participated in many wars against the Spanish and the Native Americans
, including the Yamasee
and Cherokee
tribes. In its first decades, the colony's plantations were relatively small and its wealth came from Indian trade, mainly in Indian slaves and deerskins
. The slave trade affected tribes throughout the Southeast, and historians estimate that Carolinians exported 24,000-51,000 Indian slaves from 1670–1717, sending them to markets ranging from Boston
to the Barbados
. Planters financed the purchase of African slaves by their sale of Indians.
(1715–1717) and nearly destroyed the colony. But the Yamasee were defeated and with exposure to European infectious disease
s, the backcountry's Yamasee population was greatly reduced.
to regulate water for the rice culture.
The Gullah
people comprised a large fraction of the enslaved people who were brought to South Carolina. The distinctive Gullah/Geechee culture was a product not of isolation, but rather of interaction with American society with non-African alternatives in full view. The Gullah adapted to multiple factors in American society, while at the same time marketing or otherwise using their distinctive lifeways, products, and language to perpetuate their unique ethnic and racial identity.
s. They first transported white indenture
d servants as laborers, mostly teenage youth from England who came to work off their passage in hopes of learning to farm and buying their own land. Planters also imported African laborers to the colony. In the early colonial years, social boundaries were fluid between indentured laborers and slaves, and there was considerable intermarriage. Gradually the terms of enslavement became more rigid and slavery became a racial caste. With a decrease in English settlers as the economy improved in England before the beginning of the 18th century, the planters began to rely chiefly on enslaved Africans for labor.
The market for land functioned efficiently and reflected both rapid economic development and widespread optimism regarding future economic growth. The frequency and turnover rate for land sales were tied to the general business cycle; the overall trend was upward, with almost half of the sales occurring in the decade before the American Revolution. Prices also rose over time, parallel with the rise in the price for rice. Prices dropped dramatically, however, in the years just before the war, when fears arose about future prospects outside the system of English mercantilist trade.
and North British migrants who had quickly moved down from Pennsylvania
and Virginia
. The immigrants from Ulster, the Scottish lowlands and the north of England (the border counties) comprised the largest group from the British Isles before the Revolution. They came mostly in the 18th century, later than other colonial immigrants. Such "North Britons were a large majority in much of the South Carolina upcountry." The character of this environment was "well matched to the culture of the British borderlands." Such immigrants settled in the backcountry throughout the South and relied on subsistence farming. They mostly did not own slaves. Given the differences in background, class, slaveholding, economics and culture, there was longstanding competition between the Low Country and Upcountry that played out in politics.
, both of which relied on cultivation by slave labor. Historians no longer believe that the blacks brought the art of rice cultivation from Africa. Exports of these crops led South Carolina to become one of the wealthiest colonies prior to the Revolution. Near the beginning of the 18th century, planters began rice culture along the coast, mainly in the Georgetown and Charleston areas. The rice became known as Carolina Gold, both for its color and its ability to produce great fortunes for plantation owners.
began indigo culture and processing in coastal South Carolina. Indigo was in heavy demand in Europe for making dyes for clothing. An "Indigo Bonanza" followed, with South Carolina production approaching a million pounds (400 plus Tonnes) in the late 1750s. This growth was stimulated by a British bounty of six pence per pound. South Carolina did not have a monopoly of the British market, but the demand was strong and many planters switched to the new crop when the price of rice fell. Carolina indigo had a mediocre reputation because Carolina planters failed to achieve consistent high quality production standards. Carolina indigo nevertheless succeeded in displacing French and Spanish indigo in the British and in some continental markets, reflecting the demand for cheap dyestuffs from manufacturers of low-cost textiles, the fastest-growing sectors of the European textile industries at the onset of industrialization.
In addition, the colonial economy depended on sales of pelts
(primarily deerskins), and naval stores and timber
. Coastal towns began shipbuilding to support their trade, using the prime timbers of the live oak
.
, where they had been involved in slavery and in the rum and sugar trades. In 1800, Charleston had the largest Jewish population in the United States.
Prior to the American Revolution
, the British
began taxing American colonies to raise revenue
. Residents of South Carolina were outraged by the Townsend Acts that taxed tea, paper, wine, glass, and oil. To protest the Stamp Act, South Carolina sent wealthy rice planter Thomas Lynch
, twenty-six-year-old lawyer John Rutledge
, and Christopher Gadsden
to the Stamp Act Congress
, held in 1765 in New York. Other taxes were removed, but tea taxes remained. Soon South like the Boston Tea Party
, began to dump tea into the Charleston Harbor, followed by boycotts and protests.
South Carolina set up its state government and constitution on March 26, 1776. Because of the colony's longstanding trade with Great Britain, the Low Country cities had numerous Loyalists. Many of the battles fought in South Carolina during the American Revolution were against loyalist
Carolinians and the Cherokee tribe allied with the British. This was to British General Henry Clinton
's advantage, as his strategy was to march his troops north from St. Augustine
and sandwich George Washington
in the North. Clinton alienated Loyalists and enraged Patriots
by attacking and nearly annihilating
a fleeing army of Patriot soldiers who posed no threat.
White colonists were not the only ones with a desire for freedom. Estimates are that about 25,000 slaves escaped, migrated or died during the disruption of the war, 30 percent of the state's slave population. About 13,000 joined the British, who had promised them freedom if they fought with them. From 1770 to 1790, the proportion of the state's population made up of blacks (almost all of whom were enslaved), dropped from 60.5 percent to 43.8 percent.
On October 7, 1780, at Kings Mountain
, John Sevier and William Campbell, assaulted the 'high heel' of the wooded mountain, the smallest area but highest point, while the other seven groups, led by Colonels Shelby, Williams, Lacey, Cleveland, Hambright, Winston and McDowell attacked the main Loyalist position by surrounding the 'ball' base beside the 'heel' crest of the mountain. North and South Carolinians and attacked British Major Patrick Ferguson
and his body of Loyalists on a hilltop. This was a major victory for the patriots, especially because it was won by militiamen and not trained Continentals. Thomas Jefferson called it "The turn of the tide of success." It was the first patriot victory since the British had taken Charleston. While tensions mounted between the Crown and the Carolinas, some key southern Pastors became a target of King George: "...this church (Bullock Creek) was noted as one of the "Four Bees" in King George's bonnet due to its pastor, Rev. Joseph Alexander, preaching open rebellion to the British Crown in June 1780. Bullock Creek Presbyterian Church was a place noted for being a Whig party stronghold. Under a ground swell of such Calvin protestant leadership, South Carolina moved from a back seat to the front in the war against tyranny. Patriots went on to regain control of Charleston
and South Carolina with untrained militiamen by trapping Colonel Banastre "No Quarter" Tarleton's
troops along a river.
In 1787, John Rutledge
, Charles Pinckney
, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
, and Pierce Butler
went to Philadelphia where the Constitutional Convention
was being held and constructed what served as a detailed outline for the U.S. Constitution. The federal Constitution was ratified by the state in 1787. The new state constitution was ratified in 1790 without the support of the Upcountry.
the Scots Irish in the back country in most states were noted as strong patriots. One exception was the Waxhaw settlement on the lower Catawba River along the North Carolina-South Carolina boundary, where Loyalism was strong. The area experienced two main settlement periods of Scotch Irish. During the 1750s-1760s, second- and third-generation Scotch Irish Americans moved from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. This particular group had large families, and as a group they produced goods for themselves and for others. They generally were patriots.
Just prior to the Revolution, a second stream of immigrants came directly from northern Ireland via Charleston. This group was forced to move into an underdeveloped area because they could not afford expensive land. Most of this group remained loyal to the crown or neutral when the war began. Prior to Charles Cornwallis's march into the backcountry in 1780, two-thirds of the men among the Waxhaw settlement had declined to serve in the army. British victory at the Battle of the Waxhaws resulted in anti-British sentiment in a bitterly divided region. While many individuals chose to take up arms against the British, the British themselves forced the people to choose sides.
It was South Carolina
alone that attempted to thwart national law during the Nullification Crisis
, and South Carolina was the first state to declare its secession
in 1860 in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln
.
and Mississippi
, allowed more political equality among whites. Although all white male residents were allowed to vote, property restrictions for office holders were higher in South Carolina than in any other state. South Carolina had the only state legislature where slave owners had the majority of seats. It was the only state where the legislature elected the governor, all judges and state electors. The state's chief executive was a figurehead who had no authority to veto legislative law.
The majority of the population in South Carolina was black: by 1860 the population of the state was 703,620, with 57 percent or slightly more than 402,000 classified as enslaved African Americans. Free blacks numbered slightly less than 10,000. Unlike Virginia
, where most of the plantations and slaves were concentrated in the eastern part of the state, in South Carolina plantations and slaves were common throughout most of the state. After 1794, Eli Whitney
's cotton gin
allowed cotton plantations to grow throughout South Carolina. By 1830, 85 percent of inhabitants of rice plantations along the coast were slaves. When rice planters left the malarial low country for cities such as Charleston
, up to 98 percent of the low country residents were slaves. By 1830, two-thirds of South Carolina's counties had populations with 40 percent or more enslaved; in the two counties with the lowest rates of slavery, 23 percent of the population were slaves.
In 1822, a black freedman named Denmark Vesey
and compatriots around Charleston organized a plan for thousands of slaves to liberate themselves through an armed uprising. Vesey's plan, inspired by the 1791 Haitian Revolution
, called for thousands of armed black men to kill their slaveholders, seize the city of Charleston, and then escape from the United States by sailing to Haiti
. The plot was discovered when two slaves opposed to the plan leaked word of it to white authorities. Charleston authorities charged 131 men with participating in the conspiracy. In total, the state convicted 67 men and killed 35 of them by hanging, including Denmark Vesey. White fear of slave insurrections after the Vesey conspiracy led to a 9:15 pm curfew for slaves in Charleston, and the establishment of a municipal guard of 150 white men in Charleston, with half the men stationed in an arsenal called the Citadel.
Plantations in older Southern states such as South Carolina wore out the soil to such an extent that 42 percent of state residents left the state for plantations with newer soil in the lower South. The remaining South Carolina plantations were especially hard hit when world wide cotton markets turned down in 1826-32 and again in 1837-49. Economic hardships caused many South Carolinians to believe that a Forty Bale theory explained their problems.
of 1820, and attempts at emancipation in the form of the Ohio Resolutions of 1824 and the American Colonization Petition of 1827. South Carolina's first attempt at nullification occurred in 1822, when South Carolina adopted a policy of jailing foreign black sailors at South Carolina ports. This policy violated a treaty between the United Kingdom
and the United States
, but South Carolina defied a complaint from Britain through American Secretary of State John Quincy Adams
and a United States Supreme Court justice's federal circuit decision condemning the jailings.
Foreign blacks from Santo Domingo
previously communicated with Vesey's conspirators, and the South Carolina state Senate declared that the need to prevent insurrections was more important than laws, treaties or constitutions.
South Carolinian George McDuffie
popularized the Forty Bale theory to explain South Carolina's economic woes. According to this theory, tariffs that became progressively higher in 1816, 1824 and 1828 had the same effect as if a thief stole forty bales out of a hundred from every barn. The tariffs applied to imports of things like iron, wool and finished cotton products. The Forty Bale theory was based on faulty math in that Britain could sell finished cotton goods made from Southern raw cotton around the world, not just to the United States. Still, the theory was a popular explanation for economic problems that were caused in large part by overproduction of cotton in the lower South, and less cotton production from South Carolina's depleted soil. South Carolinians, rightly or wrongly, blamed the tariff for the fact that cotton prices fell from 18 cents a pound to 9 cents a pound over the 1820s. While the effects of the tariff were exaggerated, manufactured imports from Europe were cheaper than American-made products without the tariff, and the tariff did reduce British imports of cotton to some extent. These were largely short-term problems that existed before United States factories and textile makers could compete with Europe. Also, the tariff replaced a tax system where slave states previously had to pay more in taxes for the increased representation they got in the U.S. House of Representatives under the three-fifths clause.
The Tariff of 1828
, which South Carolina agitators called the Tariff of Abominations, set the tariff rate at 50 percent. Although John C. Calhoun
previously supported tariffs, he anonymously wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest
, which was a states' rights
argument for nullifying the tariff. Calhoun's theory was that the threat of secession would lead to a "concurrent majority" that would possess every white minorities consent, as opposed to a "tyrannical majority" of Northerners controlling the South. Both Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett foresaw that the same arguments could be used to defend slavery when necessary.
President Andrew Jackson
successfully forced the nullifiers to back down and allowed a gradual reduction of tariff rates. Calhoun and Senator Henry Clay
agreed upon the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which would lower rates over 10 years. Calhoun later supported national protection for slavery in the form of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
and federal protection of slavery in the territories conquered from Mexico
, in contradiction to his previous support for nullification and states rights.
literature in the mail, and refused to deliver it. Slave owners seized the mail and built a bonfire with it, and other Southern states followed South Carolina's lead in censoring abolitionist literature. South Carolina's James Henry Hammond
started the gag rule
controversy by demanding a ban on petitions for ending slavery from being introduced before Congress in 1835. The 1856 caning of Republican Charles Sumner by the South Carolinian Preston Brooks after Sumner's Crime Against Kansas speech heightened Northern fears that the alleged aggressions of the slave power
threatened republican government for Northern whites.
in 1860. South Carolina adopted the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union on December 20, 1860. All of the violations of the alleged rights of Southern states mentioned in the document were about slavery. President Buchanan protested but made no military response aside from a failed attempt to resupply Fort Sumter via the ship Star of the West
, which was fired upon by South Carolina forces and turned back before it reached the fort.
Fort Sumter
in Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Monroe
in Virginia, and Fort Pickens
and the partially built Fort Taylor
in Florida were the remaining Union-held forts in the Confederacy (or what would become the Confederacy after Virginia joined), and Lincoln was determined to hold Fort Sumter. Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis
, troops controlled by the Confederate government under P. G. T. Beauregard
bombarded the fort with artillery on April 12, forcing the fort's capitulation and beginning the American Civil War
. The Union controlled forts Monroe, Pickens and Taylor throughout the war, but secessionists were more extreme in Charleston than elsewhere.
as an option. Whites feared that if blacks, a majority in most parts of the state, were freed, they would try to "Africanize" the whites' cherished society
and culture
. This was what they believed had happened after slave revolutions in some areas of the West Indies. South Carolina's white politicians were divided between devoted Unionists
who opposed any sort of secession
, and those who believed secession was a state's right.
John C. Calhoun
noted that the dry and barren West could not support a plantation system and would remain slaveless. Calhoun proposed that Congress should not exclude slavery from territories but let each state
choose for itself whether it would allow slaves within its borders. After Calhoun's death in 1850, however, South Carolina was left without a leader great enough in national standing and character to prevent action by those more militant South Carolinian factions who wanted to secede immediately. Andrew Pickens Butler
argued against Charleston publisher Robert Barnwell Rhett
, who advocated immediate secession and, if necessary, independence. Butler won the battle, but Rhett outlived him.
When people began to believe that Abraham Lincoln
would be elected President, states in the Deep South
organized conventions to discuss their options. South Carolina was the first state to organize such a convention, meeting in December following the national election. On December 20, 1860, delegates convened in Charleston and voted unanimously to secede from the Union. President James Buchanan
declared the secession illegal but did not act to stop it.
Six days later, on the day after Christmas, Major Robert Anderson
, commander of the U.S. troops in Charleston, withdrew his men against orders into the island fortress of Fort Sumter
in Charleston Harbor. South Carolina militia swarmed over the abandoned mainland batteries and trained their guns on the island. Sumter was the key position to preventing a naval invasion of Charleston, so the Confederacy could not afford to allow federal forces to remain there indefinitely. More important, having a foreign country (the USA) control its largest harbor meant that the Confederacy was not really independent—which was Lincoln's point.
On February 4, a congress of seven cotton states met in Montgomery, Alabama
, and approved a new constitution for the Confederate States of America
. Lincoln argued that the United States were "one nation, indivisible," and denied the Southern states' right to secede. South Carolina entered the Confederacy on February 8, 1861, thus ending fewer than six weeks of being an independent State of South Carolina. Virginia politician Roger Pryor
told Charleston that the only way to get Old Dominion to join the Confederacy was for South Carolina to instigate war with the United States. The obvious place to start was right in the midst of Charleston Harbor.
About 6,000 men were stationed around the rim of the harbor, ready to take on the 60 men in Fort Sumter. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, after two days of intense negotiations, and with Union ships just outside the harbor, the firing began. The decision was made by President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. Edmund Ruffin
is usually credited with being given the honor firing the first shot. Thirty-four hours later, Anderson's men raised the white flag and were allowed to leave the fort with colors flying and drums beating, saluting the U.S. flag with a 50-gun salute before taking it down. During this salute, one of the guns exploded, killing a young soldier—the only casualty of the bombardment and the first casualty of the war.
area, and established an important base for the men and ships who would obstruct the ports at Charleston and Savannah
. Many plantation owners had already fled to distant refuges, sometimes taking their slaves with them.
Those African Americans who remained on the Sea Islands became the first "freedmen" of the war. The Sea Islands became a laboratory for education, with Northern missionary teachers finding former enslaved adults as well as children eager for learning, and subsistence farming by African Americans, as they took over land for their own use.
Despite South Carolina's important role, and the Union's unsuccessful attempt to take Charleston from 1863 onward, few military engagements occurred within the state's borders until 1865. Having completed his March to the Sea at Savannah, Sherman
took his Army to Columbia, then north into North Carolina. There was little resistance to his advance. Sherman's 1865 march through the Carolinas resulted in the burning of Columbia and numerous other towns.
On February 21, 1865, with the Confederate forces finally evacuated from Charleston, the black 55th Massachusetts Regiment, led by Thomas Baker, Albert Adams, David Adams, Nelson R. Anderson, William H. Alexander, Beverly Harris, Joseph Anderson, Robert Abram, Elijah Brown, Wiley Abbott, marched through the city. At a ceremony at which the U.S. flag was once again raised over Fort Sumter, former fort commander Robert Anderson was joined on the platform by two men: African-American Union hero Robert Smalls and the son of Denmark Vesey.
Poverty would mark the state for generations to come. There was an agricultural depression, and changes in the labor market disrupted agriculture. Also, proportionally South Carolina lost more of its young men of fighting age than did any other Southern state. Recorded deaths were 18,666 but fatalities may have reached 21,146. This was 31-35% of the total of men of ages 18–45 recorded in the 1860 census for South Carolina.
, believed that white citizens would do well to accept President Johnson
's terms for full reentry to the Union. However, the state legislature, in 1865, passed "Black Codes", angering Northerners, who accused the state of imposing semi-slavery on the Freedmen. The South Carolina Black Codes have been described:
The Black Codes outraged northern opinion and apparently were never put into effect in any state.
After winning the 1866 elections, the Radical Republicans took control of the Reconstruction process. The Army registered all male voters, and elections returned a Republican government composed of a coalition of freedmen, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. The federally mandated new Constitution of 1868 brought democratic reforms, including the state's first public school system. Native white Republicans supported it, but white Democrats viewed the Republican government as representative of black interests only and were largely unsupportive.
Adding to the interracial animosity was the sense of many whites' that their former slaves had betrayed them. Before the war, slaveholders had convinced themselves that they were treating their slaves well and had earned their slaves' loyalty. When the Union Army rolled in and slaves deserted by the thousands, slaveholders were stunned. The black population scrambled to preserve its new rights while the white population attempted to claw its way back up the social ladder by denying blacks those same rights.
The Ku Klux Klan
raids began shortly after the end of the war, a first stage of insurgency. They terrorized and murdered blacks and their sympathizers in an attempt to reestablish white supremacy
. These raids were particularly prevalent in the upstate and they reached a climax in 1870-71. Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts aimed at curbing Klan activity and the Grant administration eventually declared martial law in the upstate counties of Spartanburg, York, Marion, Chester, Laurens, Newberry, Fairfield, Lancaster, and Chesterfield in October 1870. The declaration was followed by mass arrests and a series of Congressional hearings to investigate the violence in the region. Though the federal program resulted in over 700 indictments, there were few successful prosecutions and many of those individuals later received pardons. The ultimate weakness of the response helped to undermine federal authority in the state, though formal Klan activity declined precipitously following federal intervention. The violence in the state did not subside, however, and would reach a new climax during the political season of 1876.
—white Democrats
determined to win the upcoming elections by any means possible. The Red Shirts turned the tide in South Carolina, convincing whites that this could indeed be the year they regain control and terrorizing blacks to stay away from voting. Because of the violence, Republican Governor Chamberlain
requested assistance from Washington
to try to keep control. President Ulysses S. Grant
sent federal troops to try to preserve order and ensure a fair election.
Using as a model the "Mississippi Plan", which had redeemed that state in 1874, South Carolina whites used intimidation, violence, persuasion, and control of the blacks. Armed with heavy pistols and rifles, they rode on horseback to every Republican meeting, and demanded a chance to speak. The Red Shirts milled among the crowds. Each selected a black man to watch, privately threatening to shoot him if he raised a disturbance. The Redeemers organized hundreds of rifle clubs. Obeying proclamations to disband, they sometimes reorganized as missionary societies or dancing clubs — with rifles. They set up an ironclad economic boycott against Black activists and scalawags who refused to vote the Democratic ticket. People lost jobs over their political views. They beat down the opposition — but always just within the law. Wade Hampton made more than forty speeches across the state. Some Black Republicans joined his cause; donning the Red Shirts, they paraded with the whites. Most scalawags "crossed Jordan", as switching to the Democrats was called.
On election day, there was intimidation on all sides, employed by both parties, and the returns were disputed all the way to Washington, where they played a central role in the Compromise of 1877
. Both parties claimed victory. For a while, two separate state assemblies did business side by side on the floor of the State House (their Speakers shared the Speaker's desk, but each had his own gavel), until the Democrats moved to their own building. There the Democrats continued to pass resolutions and conducted the state's business, just as the Republicans were doing. The Republican State Assembly tossed out results of the tainted election and reelected Chamberlain as governor. A week later, General Wade Hampton III took the oath of office for the Democrats.
Finally, in return for the South's support of his own convoluted presidential "victory" over Samuel Tilden, President Rutherford B. Hayes
withdrew federal troops from Columbia. The Republican government dissolved and Chamberlain headed north, as Wade Hampton and his Redeemers took control.
The Democrats were led by General Wade Hampton III
and other former Confederate veterans who espoused a return to the policies of the antebellum period. Known as the Conservatives, or the Bourbons
, they favored a minimalist approach by the government and a conciliatory policy towards blacks while maintaining white supremacy
. Also of interest to the Conservatives was the restoration of the University of South Carolina
to its prominent prewar status as the leading institution of higher education in the state and the region.
Once in power, the Democrats quickly consolidated their position and sought to unravel the legacy of the Radical Republicans. They pressured Republicans to resign from their positions and within a year both the legislative and judiciary were firmly in the control of the Democrats. They launched investigations into the corruption and frauds committed by eminent Republicans during Reconstruction. All charges were dropped when the Federal government dropped its charges against white participants accused of violence
in the 1876 election campaign.
With their position secure, the Democrats next tackled the state debt. Reconstruction government had established public education and new charitable institutions, together with improving prisons. There was corruption, but it was mostly white Southerners who benefited. Taxes had been exceedingly low before the war because the planter class refused to support public programs like education. The exigencies of the postwar period caused the state debt to climb rapidly. When Republicans came to power in 1868, the debt stood at $5.4 million. By the time Republicans lost control in 1877, state debt had risen to $18.5 million. Many Democrats from the upcountry, led by Martin Gary
, pushed for the entire state debt to be canceled, but Gary was opposed by Charleston holders of the bonds. A compromise moderated by Wade Hampton was achieved and by October 1882, the state debt was reduced to $6.5 million.
Other legislative initiatives by the Conservatives benefited its primary supporters, the planters and business class. Taxes across the board were reduced, and funding was cut for public social and educational programs that assisted poor whites and blacks. Oral contracts were made to be legally binding, breach of contract was enforced as a criminal offense, and those in debt to planters could be forced to work off their debt. In addition, the University of South Carolina along with The Citadel
were reopened to elite classes and generously supported by the state government.
By the late 1880s, the agrarian movement
swept through the state and encouraged subsistence farmers to assert their political rights. They pressured the legislature to establish an agriculture college. Reluctantly the legislature complied by adding an agriculture college to the University of South Carolina in 1887. Ben Tillman
inspired the farmers to demand a separate agriculture college isolated from the politics of Columbia. The Conservatives finally gave them one in 1889.
In 1890, Ben Tillman set his sights on the gubernatorial contest
. The farmers rallied behind his candidacy and Tillman easily defeated the conservative nominee, A.C. Haskell
. The conservatives failed to grasp the strength of the farmers' movement in the state. The planter elite no longer engendered automatic respect for having fought in the Civil War. Not only that, but Tillman's "humorous and coarse speech appealed to a majority no more delicate than he in matters of taste."
The Tillman movement succeeded in enacting a number of Tillman's proposals and pet projects. Among those was the crafting of a new state constitution and a state dispensary system
for alcohol. Tillman held a "pathological fear of Negro rule."
White elites created a new constitution with provisions to deprive blacks and poor whites of voting rights without violating the Fifteenth Amendment
. This was chiefly accomplished through provisions related to making voter registration more difficult, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, which adversely affected African Americans and poor whites. After promulgation of the new Constitution of 1895, voting was essentially restricted to whites for more than 60 years.
During Reconstruction, black legislators had been a majority in the lower house of the legislature. The new requirements meant that only about 15,000 of the 140,000 blacks could qualify to register. In practice, many more blacks were prohibited from voting by the subjective voter registration process controlled by white registrars. In addition, the Democratic Party primary was restricted to whites only. By October 1896 there were 50,000 whites registered, but only 5,500 blacks, in a state in which blacks were the majority.
The 1900 census demonstrated the extent of disfranchisement: African Americans comprised more than 58% of the state's population, with a total of 782,509 citizens essentially without any representation. The political loss affected educated and illiterate men alike. It meant that without their interests represented, blacks were unfairly treated within the state. They were unable to serve on juries; segregated schools and services were underfunded; law enforcement was dominated by whites. African Americans did not recover the ability to exercise suffrage and political rights until the Civil Rights Movement
won passage of Federal legislation in 1964 and 1965.
The state Dispensary, described as "Ben Tillman's Baby", was never popular in the state, and violence broke out in Darlington
over its enforcement. In 1907, the Dispensary Act was repealed. In 1915, the legal sale of alcohol was prohibited by referendum.
Tillman's influence on the politics of South Carolina began to wane after his move to the U.S. Senate in 1895. The Conservatives recaptured the legislature in 1902. Aristocratic planter Duncan Clinch Heyward
won the gubernatorial election
. They made no substantial changes and in fact Heyward continued to enforce the Dispensary Act at great difficulty. The state continued its rapid pace of industrialization and this gave rise to a new class of voters, the cotton mill workers.
White sharecroppers and mill workers coalesced behind the candidacy of Tillmanite Cole Blease in the gubernatorial election of 1910
. They believed that Blease was making them an important part of the political force of the state. Once in office, however, Blease did not initiate any policies that were beneficial to the mill workers or poor farmers. Instead, his four years in office were highly erratic in behavior. This helped to pave the way for a progressive, Richard I. Manning
, to win the governorship in 1914
.
", a South based on the modern industrial model. By now, the idea had already struck some enterprising South Carolinians that the cotton they were shipping north could also be processed in South Carolina mills. The idea was not new; in 1854, De Bow's Commercial Review of the South & West, edited by Charleston-born Bold textMikaela L. Watt had boasted to investors of South Carolina's potential for manufacturing, citing its three lines of railroads, inexpensive raw materials, non-freezing rivers, and labor pool. Slavery was so profitable before 1860 that it absorbed available capital and repelled Northern investors, but now the time for industrialization was at hand. By 1900 the textile industry was established in upland areas, which had water-power and an available white labor force, comprising men, women and children willing to move from hard-scrabble farms to mill towns.
In 1902, the Charleston Expedition drew visitors from around the world. President Theodore Roosevelt
, whose mother had attended school in Columbia, called for reconciliation of still simmering animosities between the North and the South.
The Progressive Movement came to the state with Governor Richard Irvine Manning III
in 1914. The expansion of bright-leaf tobacco around 1900 from North Carolina brought an agricultural boom. This was broken by the Great Depression startting in 1929, but the tobacco industry recovered and prospered until near the end of the 20th century. Cotton remained by far the dominant crop, despite low prices. The arrival of boll weevil
infestation sharply reduced acreage, and especially yields. Farmers shifted to other crops.
Black sharecroppers and laborers began heading North in large numbers in the era of World War I, a Great Migration
that continued for the rest of the century, as they sought higher wages and much more favorable political conditions.
went rather smoothly during the 1950s and 1960s in South Carolina. As early as 1948, however, when Strom Thurmond
ran for president
on the States Rights ticket, South Carolina whites were showing discontent with the Democrats' post–World War II
continuation of the New Deal
's federalization of power.
South Carolina blacks had problems with the Southern version of states rights; by 1940 the implementation of disfranchisement written into the 1895 constitution had the practical effect of still limiting registration of African Americans to 3,000 - only 0.8 percent of those of voting age in the state. African Americans had not been able to elect a representative since the 19th century. By 1960, during the Civil Rights Movement, South Carolina had a population of 2,382,594, of whom nearly 35%, or 829,291 were African Americans, who had been without representation for 60 years.
Non-violent action began in Rock Hill
in 1961, when nine black Friendship Junior College students took seats at the whites-only lunch counter
at a downtown McCrory's and refused to leave. When police arrested them, the students were given the choice of paying $200 fines or serving 30 days of hard labor in the York County
jail. The Friendship Nine
, as they became known, chose the latter, gaining national attention in the American Civil Rights Movement because of their decision to use the "jail, no bail" strategy.
In 1962, federal courts ordered Clemson University
to admit African-American Harvey Gantt
into its classes. The state and the college's board of trustees had exhausted legal recourse to prevent it; influential whites ensured that word was widespread that no violence or otherwise unseemly behavior would be tolerated. Gantt's entrance into the school occurred without incident. The March 16, 1963, Saturday Evening Post praised the state's handling of the crisis, with an article titled "Desegregation with Dignity: The Inside Story of How South Carolina Kept the Peace". Twenty years later, Gantt was elected as mayor
of Charlotte, North Carolina
.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater
's platform galvanized South Carolina's conservative Democrats and led to major defections of whites into the Republican Party, led by Senator Thurmond. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, finally South Carolina blacks could participate in public life and regained the power of suffrage. Since then African Americans have been regularly elected to national, state and local offices.
In 1968, the tragic shooting at Orangeburg
shattered the state's peaceful desegregation. When police overreacted to the violence of students' protesting a segregated bowling
alley, they killed three students and wounded more than 30 others.
In 1970, when South Carolina celebrated its Tricentennial, more than 80% of its residents had been born in the state. Since then, however, Northerners have discovered South Carolina's golf
courses, beaches and mild climate. The state, particularly the coastal areas but increasingly inland as well, has become more popular as a tourist destination and magnet for new arrivals. Even some descendants of black South Carolinians who moved out of the South during the Jim Crow years have moved back. Despite these new arrivals, about 69% of residents are native born.
Fritz Hollings, governor 1959–1963, was a key supporter of development, executed a campaign to promote industrial training programs and implemented a state-wide economic development strategy. The end of the Cold War in 1990 brought the closing of military installations, such as the naval facilities in North Charleston
that Rep. Mendel Rivers had long sponsored. The quest for new jobs became a high state priority, Starting in 1975 the state used its attractive climate, lack of powerful labor unions and low wage rates to attract foreign investment in factories, including Michelin, which located its U.S. headquarters in the state. The stretch of Interstate 85 from the North Carolina line to Greenville became "UN Alley" as international companies opened operations.
Tourism became a major industry, especially in the Myrtle Beach area. With its semitropical climate and cheap land and low construction costs (because of low wages), the state became developer's dream. Barrier islands such as Kiawah and Hilton Head, became retirement communities for wealthy outsiders. The state's attempts to manage coastal development in an orderly and environmentally sound manner have run afoul of federal court decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court ( in "Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council") ruled that the state, in forbidding construction on threatened beachfront property, had, in effect, seized the plaintiff's property without due process of law. The rush to build upscale housing along the coast paid its price in the billions of dollars as Hurricane Hugo swept through on September 21–22, 1989. Charleston was more used to hurricanes; historical preservation groups immediately stepped in to begin salvage and reconstruction, with the result that one year after Hugo the city was virtually returned to normal.
By the late 1980s, however, the state's economic growth rate flattened. South Carolina's development plan focused on offering low taxes and attracting low-wage industries, but the state's low levels of education failed to attract high wage, high tech industries.
In 2009, the state outbid the state of Washington for a giant new Boeing plant, that will be constructed in North Charleston. Boeing must create at least 3,800 jobs and invest more than $750 million within seven years to take advantage of the various tax inducements worth $450 million.
, a former Democrat who claimed to have undergone a spiritual rebirthwho was elected governor as a Republican. In 1996 Beasley surprised citizens by announcing that he could not justify keeping the Confederate flag flying over the capitol. He said that a "spate of racially motivated violence compelled him to reconsider the politics and symbolism of the Confederate flag, and he concluded it should be moved." Traditionalists were further surprised when Bob Jones III
, head of Bob Jones University
, announced he held the same view.
Beasley was upset for reelection in 1998 by little-known Lancaster State Assemblyman Jim Hodges
. Hodges attacked Beasley's opposition to the creation of a state lottery
to support education. Hodges called for a fresh tax base to improve public education
. Despite Hodges' unwillingness to join Beasley in his opposition to flying the Confederate flag, the NAACP announced its support for Hodges. (At the same time the NAACP demanded a boycott of conferences in the state over the same issue). Hodges reportedly accepted millions in contributions from the gambling industry, which some estimated spent a total of $10 million in its own campaign to defeat Beasely.
After the election, however, with public opinions steadfastly against video gambling, Hodges asked for a statewide referendum
on the issue. He claimed that he would personally join the expected majority in saying "no" on legalized gambling, but vowed not to campaign
against it. Critics in both parties suggested that Hodges' debts to the state's gambling interests were keeping him from campaigning against legalized gambling. The state constitution does not provide for referendums except for ratification of amendments
. State legislators shut down the state's video casinos soon after Hodges took office.
Upon his election, Hodges announced that he agreed with Beasley's increasingly popular compromise proposal on the Confederate flag issue. He supported the flag's transfer to a Confederate monument on the State House's grounds. Many South Carolinians agreed with this position as the only solution. Further, they admired Hodges' solution to nuclear waste shipments to the state. Hodges alienated moderate voters sufficiently so that in 2002, most of the state's major newspapers supported Republican Mark Sanford
to replace him. Hodges was held responsible for the state's mishandling of the Hurricane Floyd
evacuation in 1999. By 2002, most of the funds from Hodges' "South Carolina Education Lottery" were used to pay for college scholarships, rather than to improve impoverished rural and inner-city schools.
Religious leaders denounced the lottery as taxing the poor to pay for higher education for the middle class.
In the lottery's first year, Hodges' administration awarded $40 million for "LIFE Scholarships", granted to any South Carolinian student with a B average, graduation
in the top 30% of the student's high school class, and an 1,100 SAT
score. Hodges' administration awarded $5.8 million for "HOPE Scholarships", which had lower g.p.a. requirements.
Hodges lost his campaign for reelection in 2002 against Republican conservative Mark Sanford
, former U.S. congressman from Sullivan's Island.
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
is one of the 13 original colonies of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. European exploration
European colonization of the Americas
The start of the European colonization of the Americas is typically dated to 1492. The first Europeans to reach the Americas were the Vikings during the 11th century, who established several colonies in Greenland and one short-lived settlement in present day Newfoundland...
began in 1540, but the explorers brought European diseases that decimated the local Indian population. It was founded in 1663. The English colony of the Province of Carolina
Province of Carolina
The Province of Carolina, originally chartered in 1629, was an English and later British colony of North America. Because the original Heath charter was unrealized and was ruled invalid, a new charter was issued to a group of eight English noblemen, the Lords Proprietors, in 1663...
was started in Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina
Charleston is the second largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It was made the county seat of Charleston County in 1901 when Charleston County was founded. The city's original name was Charles Towne in 1670, and it moved to its present location from a location on the west bank of the...
in 1670, with wealthy planters and their slaves, coming from the British Caribbean colony of Barbados
Barbados
Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles. It is in length and as much as in width, amounting to . It is situated in the western area of the North Atlantic and 100 kilometres east of the Windward Islands and the Caribbean Sea; therein, it is about east of the islands of Saint...
. Colonists overthrew the proprietors after the Yamasee War
Yamasee War
The Yamasee War was a conflict between British settlers of colonial South Carolina and various Native American Indian tribes, including the Yamasee, Muscogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Catawba, Apalachee, Apalachicola, Yuchi, Savannah River Shawnee, Congaree, Waxhaw, Pee Dee, Cape Fear, Cheraw, and...
, pushing back the American Indians in 1715-1717. In 1719 the colony was officially made a crown colony
Crown colony
A Crown colony, also known in the 17th century as royal colony, was a type of colonial administration of the English and later British Empire....
, and North Carolina
History of North Carolina
The history of North Carolina from prehistory to the present covers the experiences of the people who have lived in the territory that now comprises the U.S. state of North Carolina....
was split off and made into a separate colony in 1729.
South Carolina banded together with the other colonies to oppose British taxation in the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765, and played a major role in resisting Britain. It became independent in March 1776 and joined the United States of America. The Revolution was bloody and hard fought in 1780-81, as the British invaded, captured the American army and finally was driven out.
John C. Calhoun
John Caldwell Calhoun was a leading politician and political theorist from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun eloquently spoke out on every issue of his day, but often changed positions. Calhoun began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent...
, the state it vied with Virginia as the dominant political and social force in the South. It fought federal tariffs in the 1830s and demanded that its rights to practice slavery be recognized in the territories. With the 1860 election of Republicans under Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
, who vowed to prevent slavery's expansion, the voters demanded secession. In December 1860, the state seceded from the Union and in February 1861 it joined the new Confederate States of America
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
. In April 1861 the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
began when Confederate forces attacked the American fort at Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter is a Third System masonry coastal fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The fort is best known as the site upon which the shots initiating the American Civil War were fired, at the Battle of Fort Sumter.- Construction :...
in Charleston harbor. The Civil War proved devastating to the whites, but freed the blacks from slavery. From 1865 to 1877, South Carolina underwent Reconstruction. Congress shut down the civilian government in 1867, put the Army in charge, gave Freedmen (freed slaves) the vote and prevented ex-Confederates from holding office. A Republican legislature supported by Freedmen, northern Carpetbaggers and white Southern Scalawags created and funded a public school system, and created social welfare institutions. The constitution they passed was kept nearly unaltered for 27 years, and most legislation passed during the Reconstruction years lasted longer than that. By 1877 the white conservatives, called "Redeemers" had regained political power. In the 1880s Jim Crow laws
Jim Crow laws
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly "separate but equal" status for black Americans...
were passed that were especially severe in the state, to create public segregation and control movement of African American laborers. After 1890 almost all blacks lost their vote, not to regain it until 1965.
The Civil War ruined the economy, making it one of the two or three poorest states for the next century. Educational levels were low as public schools were underfunded, especially for African Americans. Most people lived on small farms and grew cotton. The more affluent were landowners, who subdivided the land into farms operated by tenant farmers or sharecroppers, along with land operated by the owner using hired labor. Gradually more industry moved into the Piedmont area
Piedmont, South Carolina
Piedmont is a census-designated place along the Saluda River in Anderson and Greenville counties in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The population was 4,684 at the 2000 census....
, with textile factories that turned the state's raw cotton into yarn and cloth for sale on the international market. Wave after wave of revivals made most people quite religious; most people, white and black alike, were Baptists.
Politically the state was part of the Solid South
Solid South
Solid South is the electoral support of the Southern United States for the Democratic Party candidates for nearly a century from 1877, the end of Reconstruction, to 1964, during the middle of the Civil Rights era....
. Because African Americans were disenfranchised, no black officials were elected between 1900 and the late 1960s. Many went to northern cities during the Great Migration
Great Migration (African American)
The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million blacks out of the Southern United States to the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1910 to 1970. Some historians differentiate between a Great Migration , numbering about 1.6 million migrants, and a Second Great Migration , in which 5 million or more...
after 1910. Whites rigidly enforced segregation
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the separation of humans into racial groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, or in the rental or purchase of a home...
in the Jim Crow era, limiting African Americans' chances for education, representation and free public movement. The Civil Rights laws of the 1960s ended segregation and protected the voting rights of African Americans. The blacks had been affiliated with the Republican Party, but after 1964 became intensely loyal Democrats, while most whites moved in the opposite direction.
The cotton regime ended by the 1950s. As factories were built across the state, the great majority of farmers left agriculture. Service industries, such as tourism, education and medical care grew rapidly, as the textile factories faded after 1970. By 2000 the white majority of South Carolina voted solidly Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
in presidential elections, but state and local government elections were contested by the two parties. The population continued to grow, reaching 4 million in 2000, as coast areas became prime locations for tourists and retirees. With a poverty rate of 13.5%, the state was slightly worse than the national average of 11.7%.
Early history
Humans arrived in the area of South Carolina around 13,000 BC. [Ref. needed] These people were hunters with crude tools made from stones and bones. Around 10,000 BC, they used spears and hunted big game. Over the Archaic period of 8000 to 2000 BC, nuts, berries, fish and shellfish became part of the diet, and trade between the coastal plainAtlantic Coastal Plain
The Atlantic coastal plain has both low elevation and low relief, but it is also a relatively flat landform extending from the New York Bight southward to a Georgia/Florida section of the Eastern Continental Divide, which demarcates the plain from the ACF River Basin in the Gulf Coastal Plain to...
and the piedmont
Piedmont (United States)
The Piedmont is a plateau region located in the eastern United States between the Atlantic Coastal Plain and the main Appalachian Mountains, stretching from New Jersey in the north to central Alabama in the south. The Piedmont province is a physiographic province of the larger Appalachian division...
developed. There is evidence of plant domestication and pottery in the late Archaic. The Woodland period
Woodland period
The Woodland period of North American pre-Columbian cultures was from roughly 1000 BCE to 1000 CE in the eastern part of North America. The term "Woodland Period" was introduced in the 1930s as a generic header for prehistoric sites falling between the Archaic hunter-gatherers and the...
brought more serious agriculture, more sophisticated pottery, and the bow and arrow. By the time of the first European exploration, twenty-nine tribes or nations of Native Americans
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
lived within the boundaries of what became South Carolina.
Colonial period
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
after several reconnaissance missions and failed colonization attempts. In 1629, Charles I
Charles I of England
Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...
, King of England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, granted his attorney general a charter to everything between latitudes 36 and 31. He called this land the Province of Carlana, which would later be changed to "Carolina" for pronunciation, after the Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
form of his own name.
In 1663, Charles II
Charles II of England
Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...
gave the land to eight nobles, the Lords Proprietors, who ruled the Province of Carolina
Province of Carolina
The Province of Carolina, originally chartered in 1629, was an English and later British colony of North America. Because the original Heath charter was unrealized and was ruled invalid, a new charter was issued to a group of eight English noblemen, the Lords Proprietors, in 1663...
as a proprietary colony. After the Yamasee War
Yamasee War
The Yamasee War was a conflict between British settlers of colonial South Carolina and various Native American Indian tribes, including the Yamasee, Muscogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Catawba, Apalachee, Apalachicola, Yuchi, Savannah River Shawnee, Congaree, Waxhaw, Pee Dee, Cape Fear, Cheraw, and...
of 1715-1717, the Lords Proprietors came under increasing pressure and were forced to relinquish their charter to the Crown in 1719. The proprietors retained their right to the land until 1719, when the colony was officially split into the provinces of North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
and South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
, crown colonies.
In April 1670 settlers arrived at Albemarle Point, at the junction of the Ashley River
Ashley River (South Carolina)
The Ashley River is a blackwater / tidal river in South Carolina, rising from the Wassamassaw and Great Cypress Swamps in western Berkeley County. It consolidates its main channel about five miles west of Summerville, widening into a tidal estuary just south of Fort Dorchester...
and Cooper River
Cooper River (South Carolina)
The Cooper River is a mainly tidal river in the U.S. state of South Carolina. These cities are located along the river, Mt. Pleasant, Charleston, North Charleston, Goose Creek and Hanahan. Short and wide, it is joined first by the blackwater East Branch, then farther downstream, the tidal Wando River...
. They founded Charles Town
Charleston, South Carolina
Charleston is the second largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It was made the county seat of Charleston County in 1901 when Charleston County was founded. The city's original name was Charles Towne in 1670, and it moved to its present location from a location on the west bank of the...
, named in honor of King Charles II. Throughout the Colonial Period
Colonial America
The colonial history of the United States covers the history from the start of European settlement and especially the history of the thirteen colonies of Britain until they declared independence in 1776. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands launched major...
, the Carolinas participated in many wars against the Spanish and the Native Americans
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
, including the Yamasee
Yamasee
The Yamasee were a multiethnic confederation of Native Americans that lived in the coastal region of present-day northern coastal Georgia near the Savannah River and later in northeastern Florida.-History:...
and Cherokee
Cherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...
tribes. In its first decades, the colony's plantations were relatively small and its wealth came from Indian trade, mainly in Indian slaves and deerskins
Deerskin trade
The deerskin trade between Colonial America and the Native Americans was one of the most important trading relationships between Europeans and Native Americans, especially in the southeast. It was a form of the fur trade, but less known, since deer skins were not as valuable as furs from the north...
. The slave trade affected tribes throughout the Southeast, and historians estimate that Carolinians exported 24,000-51,000 Indian slaves from 1670–1717, sending them to markets ranging from Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
to the Barbados
Barbados
Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles. It is in length and as much as in width, amounting to . It is situated in the western area of the North Atlantic and 100 kilometres east of the Windward Islands and the Caribbean Sea; therein, it is about east of the islands of Saint...
. Planters financed the purchase of African slaves by their sale of Indians.
18th century
In the 1700-1770 era the colony possessed many advantages - entrepreneurial planters and businessmen, a major harbor, cost-efficient African slave labor and an attractive physical environment, with rich soil and a long growing season, albeit with endemic malaria. It became one of the wealthiest of the British colonies. Rich colonials became avid consumers of services from outside the colony, such as mercantile services, medical education, and legal training in England. Almost everyone in 18th-century South Carolina felt the pressures, constraints, and opportunities associated with the growing importance of trade.Yamasee war
A pan-Indian alliance rose up against the settlers in the Yamasee WarYamasee War
The Yamasee War was a conflict between British settlers of colonial South Carolina and various Native American Indian tribes, including the Yamasee, Muscogee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Catawba, Apalachee, Apalachicola, Yuchi, Savannah River Shawnee, Congaree, Waxhaw, Pee Dee, Cape Fear, Cheraw, and...
(1715–1717) and nearly destroyed the colony. But the Yamasee were defeated and with exposure to European infectious disease
Infectious disease
Infectious diseases, also known as communicable diseases, contagious diseases or transmissible diseases comprise clinically evident illness resulting from the infection, presence and growth of pathogenic biological agents in an individual host organism...
s, the backcountry's Yamasee population was greatly reduced.
Slaves
After the Yamasee war, the planters turned exclusively to importing African slaves for labor. They used their labor to create rice and indigo plantations as commodity crops. Building dams, irrigation ditches and related infrastructure, enslaved Africans created the equivalent of huge earthworksEarthworks (archaeology)
In archaeology, earthwork is a general term to describe artificial changes in land level. Earthworks are often known colloquially as 'lumps and bumps'. Earthworks can themselves be archaeological features or they can show features beneath the surface...
to regulate water for the rice culture.
The Gullah
Gullah
The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and Georgia, which includes both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands....
people comprised a large fraction of the enslaved people who were brought to South Carolina. The distinctive Gullah/Geechee culture was a product not of isolation, but rather of interaction with American society with non-African alternatives in full view. The Gullah adapted to multiple factors in American society, while at the same time marketing or otherwise using their distinctive lifeways, products, and language to perpetuate their unique ethnic and racial identity.
Low Country
The Low Country was settled first, dominated by wealthy men who became owners of large amounts of land on which they created plantationPlantation
A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...
s. They first transported white indenture
Indenture
An indenture is a legal contract reflecting a debt or purchase obligation, specifically referring to two types of practices: in historical usage, an indentured servant status, and in modern usage, an instrument used for commercial debt or real estate transaction.-Historical usage:An indenture is a...
d servants as laborers, mostly teenage youth from England who came to work off their passage in hopes of learning to farm and buying their own land. Planters also imported African laborers to the colony. In the early colonial years, social boundaries were fluid between indentured laborers and slaves, and there was considerable intermarriage. Gradually the terms of enslavement became more rigid and slavery became a racial caste. With a decrease in English settlers as the economy improved in England before the beginning of the 18th century, the planters began to rely chiefly on enslaved Africans for labor.
The market for land functioned efficiently and reflected both rapid economic development and widespread optimism regarding future economic growth. The frequency and turnover rate for land sales were tied to the general business cycle; the overall trend was upward, with almost half of the sales occurring in the decade before the American Revolution. Prices also rose over time, parallel with the rise in the price for rice. Prices dropped dramatically, however, in the years just before the war, when fears arose about future prospects outside the system of English mercantilist trade.
Back country
In contrast to the Tidewater, the back country was settled chiefly by Scots-IrishScots-Irish American
Scotch-Irish Americans are an estimated 250,000 Presbyterian and other Protestant dissenters from the Irish province of Ulster who immigrated to North America primarily during the colonial era and their descendants. Some scholars also include the 150,000 Ulster Protestants who immigrated to...
and North British migrants who had quickly moved down from Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
and Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
. The immigrants from Ulster, the Scottish lowlands and the north of England (the border counties) comprised the largest group from the British Isles before the Revolution. They came mostly in the 18th century, later than other colonial immigrants. Such "North Britons were a large majority in much of the South Carolina upcountry." The character of this environment was "well matched to the culture of the British borderlands." Such immigrants settled in the backcountry throughout the South and relied on subsistence farming. They mostly did not own slaves. Given the differences in background, class, slaveholding, economics and culture, there was longstanding competition between the Low Country and Upcountry that played out in politics.
Rice
Planters earned wealth from two major crops: rice and indigoIndigo
Indigo is a color named after the purple dye derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and related species. The color is placed on the electromagnetic spectrum between about 420 and 450 nm in wavelength, placing it between blue and violet...
, both of which relied on cultivation by slave labor. Historians no longer believe that the blacks brought the art of rice cultivation from Africa. Exports of these crops led South Carolina to become one of the wealthiest colonies prior to the Revolution. Near the beginning of the 18th century, planters began rice culture along the coast, mainly in the Georgetown and Charleston areas. The rice became known as Carolina Gold, both for its color and its ability to produce great fortunes for plantation owners.
Indigo
In the 1740s, Eliza Lucas PinckneyEliza Lucas
Eliza Lucas Pinckney changed agriculture in colonial South Carolina, where she developed indigo as one of its most important cash crops. Its cultivation and processing as dye produced one-third the total value of the colony's exports before the Revolutionary War. Manager of three plantations at...
began indigo culture and processing in coastal South Carolina. Indigo was in heavy demand in Europe for making dyes for clothing. An "Indigo Bonanza" followed, with South Carolina production approaching a million pounds (400 plus Tonnes) in the late 1750s. This growth was stimulated by a British bounty of six pence per pound. South Carolina did not have a monopoly of the British market, but the demand was strong and many planters switched to the new crop when the price of rice fell. Carolina indigo had a mediocre reputation because Carolina planters failed to achieve consistent high quality production standards. Carolina indigo nevertheless succeeded in displacing French and Spanish indigo in the British and in some continental markets, reflecting the demand for cheap dyestuffs from manufacturers of low-cost textiles, the fastest-growing sectors of the European textile industries at the onset of industrialization.
In addition, the colonial economy depended on sales of pelts
Fur trade
The fur trade is a worldwide industry dealing in the acquisition and sale of animal fur. Since the establishment of world market for in the early modern period furs of boreal, polar and cold temperate mammalian animals have been the most valued...
(primarily deerskins), and naval stores and timber
Timber
Timber may refer to:* Timber, a term common in the United Kingdom and Australia for wood materials * Timber, Oregon, an unincorporated community in the U.S...
. Coastal towns began shipbuilding to support their trade, using the prime timbers of the live oak
Southern live oak
Quercus virginiana, also known as the southern live oak, is a normally evergreen oak tree native to the southeastern United States. Though many other species are loosely called live oak, the southern live oak is particularly iconic of the Old South....
.
Jews
South Carolina's liberal constitution and early flourishing trade attracted Sephardic Jewish immigrants. They were mostly elite businessmen from London and the BarbadosBarbados
Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles. It is in length and as much as in width, amounting to . It is situated in the western area of the North Atlantic and 100 kilometres east of the Windward Islands and the Caribbean Sea; therein, it is about east of the islands of Saint...
, where they had been involved in slavery and in the rum and sugar trades. In 1800, Charleston had the largest Jewish population in the United States.
Revolutionary War
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
, the British
Kingdom of Great Britain
The former Kingdom of Great Britain, sometimes described as the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain', That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall upon the 1st May next ensuing the date hereof, and forever after, be United into One Kingdom by the Name of GREAT BRITAIN. was a sovereign...
began taxing American colonies to raise revenue
Revenue
In business, revenue is income that a company receives from its normal business activities, usually from the sale of goods and services to customers. In many countries, such as the United Kingdom, revenue is referred to as turnover....
. Residents of South Carolina were outraged by the Townsend Acts that taxed tea, paper, wine, glass, and oil. To protest the Stamp Act, South Carolina sent wealthy rice planter Thomas Lynch
Thomas Lynch (statesman)
Thomas Lynch was an American planter and statesman from South Carolina. He was a delegate to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776.-Political career:...
, twenty-six-year-old lawyer John Rutledge
John Rutledge
John Rutledge was an American statesman and judge. He was the first Governor of South Carolina following the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the 31st overall...
, and Christopher Gadsden
Christopher Gadsden
Christopher Gadsden , a soldier and statesman from South Carolina, was the principal leader of the South Carolina Patriot movement in the American Revolution. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress and a brigadier general in the Continental Army during the War of Independence...
to the Stamp Act Congress
Stamp Act Congress
The Stamp Act Congress was a meeting on October 19, 1765 in New York City of representatives from some of the British colonies of North America. They discussed and acted upon the Stamp Act recently passed by the governing Parliament of Great Britain overseas, which did not include any...
, held in 1765 in New York. Other taxes were removed, but tea taxes remained. Soon South like the Boston Tea Party
Boston Tea Party
The Boston Tea Party was a direct action by colonists in Boston, a town in the British colony of Massachusetts, against the British government and the monopolistic East India Company that controlled all the tea imported into the colonies...
, began to dump tea into the Charleston Harbor, followed by boycotts and protests.
South Carolina set up its state government and constitution on March 26, 1776. Because of the colony's longstanding trade with Great Britain, the Low Country cities had numerous Loyalists. Many of the battles fought in South Carolina during the American Revolution were against loyalist
Loyalist
In general, a loyalist is someone who maintains loyalty to an established government, political party, or sovereign, especially during war or revolutionary change. In modern English usage, the most common application is to loyalty to the British Crown....
Carolinians and the Cherokee tribe allied with the British. This was to British General Henry Clinton
Henry Clinton (American War of Independence)
General Sir Henry Clinton KB was a British army officer and politician, best known for his service as a general during the American War of Independence. First arriving in Boston in May 1775, from 1778 to 1782 he was the British Commander-in-Chief in North America...
's advantage, as his strategy was to march his troops north from St. Augustine
St. Augustine, Florida
St. Augustine is a city in the northeast section of Florida and the county seat of St. Johns County, Florida, United States. Founded in 1565 by Spanish explorer and admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, it is the oldest continuously occupied European-established city and port in the continental United...
and sandwich George Washington
George Washington
George Washington was the dominant military and political leader of the new United States of America from 1775 to 1799. He led the American victory over Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, and presided over the writing of...
in the North. Clinton alienated Loyalists and enraged Patriots
Patriot (American Revolution)
Patriots is a name often used to describe the colonists of the British Thirteen United Colonies who rebelled against British control during the American Revolution. It was their leading figures who, in July 1776, declared the United States of America an independent nation...
by attacking and nearly annihilating
Waxhaw massacre
The Battle of Waxhaws took place during the American Revolution on May 29, 1780, near Lancaster, South Carolina, between a Continental Army force led by Abraham Buford and a mainly Loyalist force led by Banastre Tarleton...
a fleeing army of Patriot soldiers who posed no threat.
White colonists were not the only ones with a desire for freedom. Estimates are that about 25,000 slaves escaped, migrated or died during the disruption of the war, 30 percent of the state's slave population. About 13,000 joined the British, who had promised them freedom if they fought with them. From 1770 to 1790, the proportion of the state's population made up of blacks (almost all of whom were enslaved), dropped from 60.5 percent to 43.8 percent.
On October 7, 1780, at Kings Mountain
Battle of Kings Mountain
The Battle of Kings Mountain was a decisive battle between the Patriot and Loyalist militias in the Southern campaign of the American Revolutionary War...
, John Sevier and William Campbell, assaulted the 'high heel' of the wooded mountain, the smallest area but highest point, while the other seven groups, led by Colonels Shelby, Williams, Lacey, Cleveland, Hambright, Winston and McDowell attacked the main Loyalist position by surrounding the 'ball' base beside the 'heel' crest of the mountain. North and South Carolinians and attacked British Major Patrick Ferguson
Patrick Ferguson
Major Patrick Ferguson was a Scottish officer in the British Army, early advocate of light infantry and designer of the Ferguson rifle. He is best known for his service in the 1780 military campaign of Charles Cornwallis, in which he aggressively recruited Loyalists and harshly treated Patriot...
and his body of Loyalists on a hilltop. This was a major victory for the patriots, especially because it was won by militiamen and not trained Continentals. Thomas Jefferson called it "The turn of the tide of success." It was the first patriot victory since the British had taken Charleston. While tensions mounted between the Crown and the Carolinas, some key southern Pastors became a target of King George: "...this church (Bullock Creek) was noted as one of the "Four Bees" in King George's bonnet due to its pastor, Rev. Joseph Alexander, preaching open rebellion to the British Crown in June 1780. Bullock Creek Presbyterian Church was a place noted for being a Whig party stronghold. Under a ground swell of such Calvin protestant leadership, South Carolina moved from a back seat to the front in the war against tyranny. Patriots went on to regain control of Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina
Charleston is the second largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It was made the county seat of Charleston County in 1901 when Charleston County was founded. The city's original name was Charles Towne in 1670, and it moved to its present location from a location on the west bank of the...
and South Carolina with untrained militiamen by trapping Colonel Banastre "No Quarter" Tarleton's
Banastre Tarleton
General Sir Banastre Tarleton, 1st Baronet, GCB was a British soldier and politician.He is today probably best remembered for his military service during the American War of Independence. He became the focal point of a propaganda campaign claiming that he had fired upon surrendering Continental...
troops along a river.
In 1787, John Rutledge
John Rutledge
John Rutledge was an American statesman and judge. He was the first Governor of South Carolina following the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the 31st overall...
, Charles Pinckney
Charles Pinckney (governor)
Charles Pinckney was an American politician who was a signer of the United States Constitution, the 37th Governor of South Carolina, a Senator and a member of the House of Representatives...
, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Charles Cotesworth “C. C.” Pinckney , was an early American statesman of South Carolina, Revolutionary War veteran, and delegate to the Constitutional Convention. He was twice nominated by the Federalist Party as their presidential candidate, but he did not win either election.-Early life and...
, and Pierce Butler
Pierce Butler
Pierce Butler was a soldier, planter, and statesman, recognized as one of United States' Founding Fathers. He represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress, the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Senate...
went to Philadelphia where the Constitutional Convention
Philadelphia Convention
The Constitutional Convention took place from May 14 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to address problems in governing the United States of America, which had been operating under the Articles of Confederation following independence from...
was being held and constructed what served as a detailed outline for the U.S. Constitution. The federal Constitution was ratified by the state in 1787. The new state constitution was ratified in 1790 without the support of the Upcountry.
Scots Irish
During the American RevolutionAmerican Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
the Scots Irish in the back country in most states were noted as strong patriots. One exception was the Waxhaw settlement on the lower Catawba River along the North Carolina-South Carolina boundary, where Loyalism was strong. The area experienced two main settlement periods of Scotch Irish. During the 1750s-1760s, second- and third-generation Scotch Irish Americans moved from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. This particular group had large families, and as a group they produced goods for themselves and for others. They generally were patriots.
Just prior to the Revolution, a second stream of immigrants came directly from northern Ireland via Charleston. This group was forced to move into an underdeveloped area because they could not afford expensive land. Most of this group remained loyal to the crown or neutral when the war began. Prior to Charles Cornwallis's march into the backcountry in 1780, two-thirds of the men among the Waxhaw settlement had declined to serve in the army. British victory at the Battle of the Waxhaws resulted in anti-British sentiment in a bitterly divided region. While many individuals chose to take up arms against the British, the British themselves forced the people to choose sides.
Antebellum South Carolina
South Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
alone that attempted to thwart national law during the Nullification Crisis
Nullification Crisis
The Nullification Crisis was a sectional crisis during the presidency of Andrew Jackson created by South Carolina's 1832 Ordinance of Nullification. This ordinance declared by the power of the State that the federal Tariff of 1828 and 1832 were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within...
, and South Carolina was the first state to declare its secession
Secession in the United States
Secession in the United States can refer to secession of a state from the United States, secession of part of a state from that state to form a new state, or secession of an area from a city or county....
in 1860 in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln
United States presidential election, 1860
The United States presidential election of 1860 was a quadrennial election, held on November 6, 1860, for the office of President of the United States and the immediate impetus for the outbreak of the American Civil War. The nation had been divided throughout the 1850s on questions surrounding the...
.
Politics and slavery
Slave owners had more control over the state government of South Carolina than of any other state, blending aristocratic traditions with democracy. South Carolina's plantation owners played the role of English aristocrats more than the planters of other states, whereas newer Southern states, such as AlabamaAlabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
and Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
, allowed more political equality among whites. Although all white male residents were allowed to vote, property restrictions for office holders were higher in South Carolina than in any other state. South Carolina had the only state legislature where slave owners had the majority of seats. It was the only state where the legislature elected the governor, all judges and state electors. The state's chief executive was a figurehead who had no authority to veto legislative law.
The majority of the population in South Carolina was black: by 1860 the population of the state was 703,620, with 57 percent or slightly more than 402,000 classified as enslaved African Americans. Free blacks numbered slightly less than 10,000. Unlike Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, where most of the plantations and slaves were concentrated in the eastern part of the state, in South Carolina plantations and slaves were common throughout most of the state. After 1794, Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney was an American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of the Antebellum South...
's cotton gin
Cotton gin
A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, a job formerly performed painstakingly by hand...
allowed cotton plantations to grow throughout South Carolina. By 1830, 85 percent of inhabitants of rice plantations along the coast were slaves. When rice planters left the malarial low country for cities such as Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina
Charleston is the second largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It was made the county seat of Charleston County in 1901 when Charleston County was founded. The city's original name was Charles Towne in 1670, and it moved to its present location from a location on the west bank of the...
, up to 98 percent of the low country residents were slaves. By 1830, two-thirds of South Carolina's counties had populations with 40 percent or more enslaved; in the two counties with the lowest rates of slavery, 23 percent of the population were slaves.
In 1822, a black freedman named Denmark Vesey
Denmark Vesey
Denmark Vesey originally Telemaque, was an African American slave brought to the United States from the Caribbean of Coromantee background. After purchasing his freedom, he planned what would have been one of the largest slave rebellions in the United States...
and compatriots around Charleston organized a plan for thousands of slaves to liberate themselves through an armed uprising. Vesey's plan, inspired by the 1791 Haitian Revolution
Haitian Revolution
The Haitian Revolution was a period of conflict in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which culminated in the elimination of slavery there and the founding of the Haitian republic...
, called for thousands of armed black men to kill their slaveholders, seize the city of Charleston, and then escape from the United States by sailing to Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...
. The plot was discovered when two slaves opposed to the plan leaked word of it to white authorities. Charleston authorities charged 131 men with participating in the conspiracy. In total, the state convicted 67 men and killed 35 of them by hanging, including Denmark Vesey. White fear of slave insurrections after the Vesey conspiracy led to a 9:15 pm curfew for slaves in Charleston, and the establishment of a municipal guard of 150 white men in Charleston, with half the men stationed in an arsenal called the Citadel.
Plantations in older Southern states such as South Carolina wore out the soil to such an extent that 42 percent of state residents left the state for plantations with newer soil in the lower South. The remaining South Carolina plantations were especially hard hit when world wide cotton markets turned down in 1826-32 and again in 1837-49. Economic hardships caused many South Carolinians to believe that a Forty Bale theory explained their problems.
Nullification
The white minority in South Carolina felt more threatened than in other parts of the South, and reacted more to the economic Panic of 1819, the Missouri ControversyMissouri Compromise
The Missouri Compromise was an agreement passed in 1820 between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the United States Congress, involving primarily the regulation of slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30'...
of 1820, and attempts at emancipation in the form of the Ohio Resolutions of 1824 and the American Colonization Petition of 1827. South Carolina's first attempt at nullification occurred in 1822, when South Carolina adopted a policy of jailing foreign black sailors at South Carolina ports. This policy violated a treaty between the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, but South Carolina defied a complaint from Britain through American Secretary of State John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams was the sixth President of the United States . He served as an American diplomat, Senator, and Congressional representative. He was a member of the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, and later Anti-Masonic and Whig parties. Adams was the son of former...
and a United States Supreme Court justice's federal circuit decision condemning the jailings.
Foreign blacks from Santo Domingo
Santo Domingo
Santo Domingo, known officially as Santo Domingo de Guzmán, is the capital and largest city in the Dominican Republic. Its metropolitan population was 2,084,852 in 2003, and estimated at 3,294,385 in 2010. The city is located on the Caribbean Sea, at the mouth of the Ozama River...
previously communicated with Vesey's conspirators, and the South Carolina state Senate declared that the need to prevent insurrections was more important than laws, treaties or constitutions.
South Carolinian George McDuffie
George McDuffie
George McDuffie was the 55th Governor of South Carolina and a member of the United States Senate.Born of modest means in Columbia County, Georgia, McDuffie's extraordinary intellect was noticed while clerking at a store in Augusta, Georgia...
popularized the Forty Bale theory to explain South Carolina's economic woes. According to this theory, tariffs that became progressively higher in 1816, 1824 and 1828 had the same effect as if a thief stole forty bales out of a hundred from every barn. The tariffs applied to imports of things like iron, wool and finished cotton products. The Forty Bale theory was based on faulty math in that Britain could sell finished cotton goods made from Southern raw cotton around the world, not just to the United States. Still, the theory was a popular explanation for economic problems that were caused in large part by overproduction of cotton in the lower South, and less cotton production from South Carolina's depleted soil. South Carolinians, rightly or wrongly, blamed the tariff for the fact that cotton prices fell from 18 cents a pound to 9 cents a pound over the 1820s. While the effects of the tariff were exaggerated, manufactured imports from Europe were cheaper than American-made products without the tariff, and the tariff did reduce British imports of cotton to some extent. These were largely short-term problems that existed before United States factories and textile makers could compete with Europe. Also, the tariff replaced a tax system where slave states previously had to pay more in taxes for the increased representation they got in the U.S. House of Representatives under the three-fifths clause.
The Tariff of 1828
Tariff of 1828
The Tariff of 1828 was a protective tariff passed by the Congress of the United States on May 19, 1828, designed to protect industry in the northern United States...
, which South Carolina agitators called the Tariff of Abominations, set the tariff rate at 50 percent. Although John C. Calhoun
John C. Calhoun
John Caldwell Calhoun was a leading politician and political theorist from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun eloquently spoke out on every issue of his day, but often changed positions. Calhoun began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent...
previously supported tariffs, he anonymously wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest
South Carolina Exposition and Protest
The South Carolina Exposition and Protest, also known as Calhoun's Exposition, was written in December 1828 by John C. Calhoun, then vice president under John Quincy Adams and later under Andrew Jackson. Calhoun did not formally state his authorship at the time, though it was known.The document was...
, which was a states' rights
States' rights
States' rights in U.S. politics refers to political powers reserved for the U.S. state governments rather than the federal government. It is often considered a loaded term because of its use in opposition to federally mandated racial desegregation...
argument for nullifying the tariff. Calhoun's theory was that the threat of secession would lead to a "concurrent majority" that would possess every white minorities consent, as opposed to a "tyrannical majority" of Northerners controlling the South. Both Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett foresaw that the same arguments could be used to defend slavery when necessary.
President Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson was the seventh President of the United States . Based in frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a politician and army general who defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend , and the British at the Battle of New Orleans...
successfully forced the nullifiers to back down and allowed a gradual reduction of tariff rates. Calhoun and Senator Henry Clay
Henry Clay
Henry Clay, Sr. , was a lawyer, politician and skilled orator who represented Kentucky separately in both the Senate and in the House of Representatives...
agreed upon the Compromise Tariff of 1833, which would lower rates over 10 years. Calhoun later supported national protection for slavery in the form of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
The Fugitive Slave Law or Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 between Southern slave holding interests and Northern Free-Soilers. This was one of the most controversial acts of the 1850 compromise and heightened...
and federal protection of slavery in the territories conquered from Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, in contradiction to his previous support for nullification and states rights.
Censorship and slavery
On July 29, 1835, Charleston Postmaster Alfred Huger found abolitionistAbolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...
literature in the mail, and refused to deliver it. Slave owners seized the mail and built a bonfire with it, and other Southern states followed South Carolina's lead in censoring abolitionist literature. South Carolina's James Henry Hammond
James Henry Hammond
James Henry Hammond was a politician from South Carolina. He served as a United States Representative from 1835 to 1836, the 60th Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844, and United States Senator from 1857 to 1860...
started the gag rule
Gag rule
A gag rule is a rule that limits or forbids the raising, consideration or discussion of a particular topic by members of a legislative or decision-making body.-Origin and pros and cons:...
controversy by demanding a ban on petitions for ending slavery from being introduced before Congress in 1835. The 1856 caning of Republican Charles Sumner by the South Carolinian Preston Brooks after Sumner's Crime Against Kansas speech heightened Northern fears that the alleged aggressions of the slave power
Slave power
The Slave Power was a term used in the Northern United States to characterize the political power of the slaveholding class of the South....
threatened republican government for Northern whites.
Secession and war
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union after the election of Abraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
in 1860. South Carolina adopted the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union on December 20, 1860. All of the violations of the alleged rights of Southern states mentioned in the document were about slavery. President Buchanan protested but made no military response aside from a failed attempt to resupply Fort Sumter via the ship Star of the West
Star of the West
The Star of the West was a civilian steamship hired by the United States government to transport military supplies and reinforcements to the garrison of Fort Sumter, but was fired on by Confederates in its effort to do so at the dawning of the American Civil War...
, which was fired upon by South Carolina forces and turned back before it reached the fort.
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter is a Third System masonry coastal fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The fort is best known as the site upon which the shots initiating the American Civil War were fired, at the Battle of Fort Sumter.- Construction :...
in Charleston, South Carolina, Fort Monroe
Fort Monroe
Fort Monroe was a military installation in Hampton, Virginia—at Old Point Comfort, the southern tip of the Virginia Peninsula...
in Virginia, and Fort Pickens
Fort Pickens
Fort Pickens is a pentagonal historic United States military fort on Santa Rosa Island in the Pensacola, Florida, area. It is named after American Revolutionary War hero Andrew Pickens. The fort was completed in 1834 and remained in use until 1947...
and the partially built Fort Taylor
Fort Zachary Taylor
The Fort Zachary Taylor State Historic Site, better known simply as Fort Taylor, , is a Florida State Park and National Historic Landmark centered on a Civil War-era fort located near the southern tip of Key West, Florida....
in Florida were the remaining Union-held forts in the Confederacy (or what would become the Confederacy after Virginia joined), and Lincoln was determined to hold Fort Sumter. Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Finis Davis , also known as Jeff Davis, was an American statesman and leader of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, serving as President for its entire history. He was born in Kentucky to Samuel and Jane Davis...
, troops controlled by the Confederate government under P. G. T. Beauregard
P. G. T. Beauregard
Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was a Louisiana-born American military officer, politician, inventor, writer, civil servant, and the first prominent general of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. Today he is commonly referred to as P. G. T. Beauregard, but he rarely used...
bombarded the fort with artillery on April 12, forcing the fort's capitulation and beginning the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. The Union controlled forts Monroe, Pickens and Taylor throughout the war, but secessionists were more extreme in Charleston than elsewhere.
Prewar tensions
Few white South Carolinians saw emancipationAbolitionism
Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...
as an option. Whites feared that if blacks, a majority in most parts of the state, were freed, they would try to "Africanize" the whites' cherished society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
and culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
. This was what they believed had happened after slave revolutions in some areas of the West Indies. South Carolina's white politicians were divided between devoted Unionists
Union (American Civil War)
During the American Civil War, the Union was a name used to refer to the federal government of the United States, which was supported by the twenty free states and five border slave states. It was opposed by 11 southern slave states that had declared a secession to join together to form the...
who opposed any sort of secession
Secession
Secession is the act of withdrawing from an organization, union, or especially a political entity. Threats of secession also can be a strategy for achieving more limited goals.-Secession theory:...
, and those who believed secession was a state's right.
John C. Calhoun
John C. Calhoun
John Caldwell Calhoun was a leading politician and political theorist from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. Calhoun eloquently spoke out on every issue of his day, but often changed positions. Calhoun began his political career as a nationalist, modernizer, and proponent...
noted that the dry and barren West could not support a plantation system and would remain slaveless. Calhoun proposed that Congress should not exclude slavery from territories but let each state
U.S. state
A U.S. state is any one of the 50 federated states of the United States of America that share sovereignty with the federal government. Because of this shared sovereignty, an American is a citizen both of the federal entity and of his or her state of domicile. Four states use the official title of...
choose for itself whether it would allow slaves within its borders. After Calhoun's death in 1850, however, South Carolina was left without a leader great enough in national standing and character to prevent action by those more militant South Carolinian factions who wanted to secede immediately. Andrew Pickens Butler
Andrew Butler
Andrew Pickens Butler was an United States Senator and one of the authors of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.-Biography:...
argued against Charleston publisher Robert Barnwell Rhett
Robert Rhett
Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr. , was a United States secessionist politician from South Carolina.-Biography:...
, who advocated immediate secession and, if necessary, independence. Butler won the battle, but Rhett outlived him.
When people began to believe that Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
would be elected President, states in the Deep South
Deep South
The Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...
organized conventions to discuss their options. South Carolina was the first state to organize such a convention, meeting in December following the national election. On December 20, 1860, delegates convened in Charleston and voted unanimously to secede from the Union. President James Buchanan
James Buchanan
James Buchanan, Jr. was the 15th President of the United States . He is the only president from Pennsylvania, the only president who remained a lifelong bachelor and the last to be born in the 18th century....
declared the secession illegal but did not act to stop it.
Fort Sumter
Major Robert Anderson
Robert Anderson was an American military leader. He served as a Union Army officer in the American Civil War, known for his command of Fort Sumter at the start of the war. He is often referred to as Major Robert Anderson, referring to his rank at Fort Sumter...
, commander of the U.S. troops in Charleston, withdrew his men against orders into the island fortress of Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter
Fort Sumter is a Third System masonry coastal fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The fort is best known as the site upon which the shots initiating the American Civil War were fired, at the Battle of Fort Sumter.- Construction :...
in Charleston Harbor. South Carolina militia swarmed over the abandoned mainland batteries and trained their guns on the island. Sumter was the key position to preventing a naval invasion of Charleston, so the Confederacy could not afford to allow federal forces to remain there indefinitely. More important, having a foreign country (the USA) control its largest harbor meant that the Confederacy was not really independent—which was Lincoln's point.
On February 4, a congress of seven cotton states met in Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery, Alabama
Montgomery is the capital of the U.S. state of Alabama, and is the county seat of Montgomery County. It is located on the Alabama River southeast of the center of the state, in the Gulf Coastal Plain. As of the 2010 census, Montgomery had a population of 205,764 making it the second-largest city...
, and approved a new constitution for the Confederate States of America
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
. Lincoln argued that the United States were "one nation, indivisible," and denied the Southern states' right to secede. South Carolina entered the Confederacy on February 8, 1861, thus ending fewer than six weeks of being an independent State of South Carolina. Virginia politician Roger Pryor
Roger Atkinson Pryor
Roger Atkinson Pryor was both an American politician and a Confederate politician serving as a congressman on both sides. He was also a jurist, serving in the New York Supreme Court, a lawyer, and newspaper editor...
told Charleston that the only way to get Old Dominion to join the Confederacy was for South Carolina to instigate war with the United States. The obvious place to start was right in the midst of Charleston Harbor.
About 6,000 men were stationed around the rim of the harbor, ready to take on the 60 men in Fort Sumter. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, after two days of intense negotiations, and with Union ships just outside the harbor, the firing began. The decision was made by President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. Edmund Ruffin
Edmund Ruffin
Edmund Ruffin was a farmer and slaveholder, a Confederate soldier, and an 1850s political activist. He advocated states' rights, secession, and slavery and was described by opponents as one of the Fire-Eaters. He was an ardent supporter of the Confederacy and a longstanding enemy of the North...
is usually credited with being given the honor firing the first shot. Thirty-four hours later, Anderson's men raised the white flag and were allowed to leave the fort with colors flying and drums beating, saluting the U.S. flag with a 50-gun salute before taking it down. During this salute, one of the guns exploded, killing a young soldier—the only casualty of the bombardment and the first casualty of the war.
Civil War devastates the state
The South was at a disadvantage in number, weaponry, and maritime skills—few southerners were sailors. Federal ships sailed south and blocked off one port after another. As early as November, Union troops occupied the Sea Islands in the BeaufortBeaufort, South Carolina
Beaufort is a city in and the county seat of Beaufort County, South Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1711, it is the second-oldest city in South Carolina, behind Charleston. The city's population was 12,361 in the 2010 census. It is located in the Hilton Head Island-Beaufort Micropolitan...
area, and established an important base for the men and ships who would obstruct the ports at Charleston and Savannah
Savannah, Georgia
Savannah is the largest city and the county seat of Chatham County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. Established in 1733, the city of Savannah was the colonial capital of the Province of Georgia and later the first state capital of Georgia. Today Savannah is an industrial center and an important...
. Many plantation owners had already fled to distant refuges, sometimes taking their slaves with them.
Those African Americans who remained on the Sea Islands became the first "freedmen" of the war. The Sea Islands became a laboratory for education, with Northern missionary teachers finding former enslaved adults as well as children eager for learning, and subsistence farming by African Americans, as they took over land for their own use.
Despite South Carolina's important role, and the Union's unsuccessful attempt to take Charleston from 1863 onward, few military engagements occurred within the state's borders until 1865. Having completed his March to the Sea at Savannah, Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator and author. He served as a General in the Union Army during the American Civil War , for which he received recognition for his outstanding command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the "scorched...
took his Army to Columbia, then north into North Carolina. There was little resistance to his advance. Sherman's 1865 march through the Carolinas resulted in the burning of Columbia and numerous other towns.
On February 21, 1865, with the Confederate forces finally evacuated from Charleston, the black 55th Massachusetts Regiment, led by Thomas Baker, Albert Adams, David Adams, Nelson R. Anderson, William H. Alexander, Beverly Harris, Joseph Anderson, Robert Abram, Elijah Brown, Wiley Abbott, marched through the city. At a ceremony at which the U.S. flag was once again raised over Fort Sumter, former fort commander Robert Anderson was joined on the platform by two men: African-American Union hero Robert Smalls and the son of Denmark Vesey.
Poverty would mark the state for generations to come. There was an agricultural depression, and changes in the labor market disrupted agriculture. Also, proportionally South Carolina lost more of its young men of fighting age than did any other Southern state. Recorded deaths were 18,666 but fatalities may have reached 21,146. This was 31-35% of the total of men of ages 18–45 recorded in the 1860 census for South Carolina.
Reconstruction 1865–1877
African Americans had long comprised the majority of the state's population. They began to play a prominent role in the South Carolina government for the first time during Reconstruction. Despite the anti-Northern fury of prewar and wartime politics, most South Carolinians, including the state's leading opinion-maker, Wade Hampton IIIWade Hampton III
Wade Hampton III was a Confederate cavalry leader during the American Civil War and afterward a politician from South Carolina, serving as its 77th Governor and as a U.S...
, believed that white citizens would do well to accept President Johnson
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson was the 17th President of the United States . As Vice-President of the United States in 1865, he succeeded Abraham Lincoln following the latter's assassination. Johnson then presided over the initial and contentious Reconstruction era of the United States following the American...
's terms for full reentry to the Union. However, the state legislature, in 1865, passed "Black Codes", angering Northerners, who accused the state of imposing semi-slavery on the Freedmen. The South Carolina Black Codes have been described:
- "Persons of color contracting for service were to be known as "servants", and those with whom they contracted, as "masters." On farms the hours of labor would be from sunrise to sunset daily, except on Sunday. The negroes were to get out of bed at dawn. Time lost would be deducted from their wages, as would be the cost of food, nursing, etc., during absence from sickness. Absentees on Sunday must return to the plantation by sunset. House servants were to be at call at all hours of the day and night on all days of the week. They must be "especially civil and polite to their masters, their masters' families and guests", and they in return would receive "gentle and kind treatment." Corporal and other punishment was to be administered only upon order of the district judge or other civil magistrate. A vagrant law of some severity was enacted to keep the negroes from roaming the roads and living the lives of beggars and thieves."
The Black Codes outraged northern opinion and apparently were never put into effect in any state.
After winning the 1866 elections, the Radical Republicans took control of the Reconstruction process. The Army registered all male voters, and elections returned a Republican government composed of a coalition of freedmen, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. The federally mandated new Constitution of 1868 brought democratic reforms, including the state's first public school system. Native white Republicans supported it, but white Democrats viewed the Republican government as representative of black interests only and were largely unsupportive.
Adding to the interracial animosity was the sense of many whites' that their former slaves had betrayed them. Before the war, slaveholders had convinced themselves that they were treating their slaves well and had earned their slaves' loyalty. When the Union Army rolled in and slaves deserted by the thousands, slaveholders were stunned. The black population scrambled to preserve its new rights while the white population attempted to claw its way back up the social ladder by denying blacks those same rights.
The Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
raids began shortly after the end of the war, a first stage of insurgency. They terrorized and murdered blacks and their sympathizers in an attempt to reestablish white supremacy
White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...
. These raids were particularly prevalent in the upstate and they reached a climax in 1870-71. Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts aimed at curbing Klan activity and the Grant administration eventually declared martial law in the upstate counties of Spartanburg, York, Marion, Chester, Laurens, Newberry, Fairfield, Lancaster, and Chesterfield in October 1870. The declaration was followed by mass arrests and a series of Congressional hearings to investigate the violence in the region. Though the federal program resulted in over 700 indictments, there were few successful prosecutions and many of those individuals later received pardons. The ultimate weakness of the response helped to undermine federal authority in the state, though formal Klan activity declined precipitously following federal intervention. The violence in the state did not subside, however, and would reach a new climax during the political season of 1876.
The 1876 gubernatorial election
From 1868 on, elections were accompanied by increasing violence from white paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts. In 1876, tensions were high, especially in Piedmont towns where the numbers of blacks were fewer than whites. There were numerous demonstrations by the Red ShirtsRed Shirts (South Carolina)
The Red Shirts or Redshirts of the Southern United States were white paramilitary groups in the 19th century, active primarily after the formal Reconstruction era of the United States. They first arose in Mississippi in 1875, when Democratic Party private militias adopted red shirts to make...
—white Democrats
History of the United States Democratic Party
The history of the Democratic Party of the United States is an account of the oldest political party in the United States and arguably the oldest democratic party in the world....
determined to win the upcoming elections by any means possible. The Red Shirts turned the tide in South Carolina, convincing whites that this could indeed be the year they regain control and terrorizing blacks to stay away from voting. Because of the violence, Republican Governor Chamberlain
Daniel Henry Chamberlain
Daniel Henry Chamberlain was a planter, lawyer, author and the 76th Governor of South Carolina from 1874 until 1877....
requested assistance from Washington
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
to try to keep control. President Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant was the 18th President of the United States as well as military commander during the Civil War and post-war Reconstruction periods. Under Grant's command, the Union Army defeated the Confederate military and ended the Confederate States of America...
sent federal troops to try to preserve order and ensure a fair election.
Using as a model the "Mississippi Plan", which had redeemed that state in 1874, South Carolina whites used intimidation, violence, persuasion, and control of the blacks. Armed with heavy pistols and rifles, they rode on horseback to every Republican meeting, and demanded a chance to speak. The Red Shirts milled among the crowds. Each selected a black man to watch, privately threatening to shoot him if he raised a disturbance. The Redeemers organized hundreds of rifle clubs. Obeying proclamations to disband, they sometimes reorganized as missionary societies or dancing clubs — with rifles. They set up an ironclad economic boycott against Black activists and scalawags who refused to vote the Democratic ticket. People lost jobs over their political views. They beat down the opposition — but always just within the law. Wade Hampton made more than forty speeches across the state. Some Black Republicans joined his cause; donning the Red Shirts, they paraded with the whites. Most scalawags "crossed Jordan", as switching to the Democrats was called.
On election day, there was intimidation on all sides, employed by both parties, and the returns were disputed all the way to Washington, where they played a central role in the Compromise of 1877
Compromise of 1877
The Compromise of 1877, also known as the Corrupt Bargain, refers to a purported informal, unwritten deal that settled the disputed 1876 U.S. Presidential election and ended Congressional Reconstruction. Through it, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House over Democrat Samuel J...
. Both parties claimed victory. For a while, two separate state assemblies did business side by side on the floor of the State House (their Speakers shared the Speaker's desk, but each had his own gavel), until the Democrats moved to their own building. There the Democrats continued to pass resolutions and conducted the state's business, just as the Republicans were doing. The Republican State Assembly tossed out results of the tainted election and reelected Chamberlain as governor. A week later, General Wade Hampton III took the oath of office for the Democrats.
Finally, in return for the South's support of his own convoluted presidential "victory" over Samuel Tilden, President Rutherford B. Hayes
Rutherford B. Hayes
Rutherford Birchard Hayes was the 19th President of the United States . As president, he oversaw the end of Reconstruction and the United States' entry into the Second Industrial Revolution...
withdrew federal troops from Columbia. The Republican government dissolved and Chamberlain headed north, as Wade Hampton and his Redeemers took control.
Memory
Whites and blacks created entirely different memories of Reconstruction and used them to justify their politics. The white memory, taught in the schools until the 1960s, said that corrupt Yankee Carpetbaggers controlled for financial profit the mass of ignorant black voters and nearly plunged South Carolina into economic ruin and social chaos. The heroes in this version were the Red Shirts, who rescued the state from misrule and preserved democracy, expelled blacks from the public square, restored law and order, and created a long era of comity between the races. The black version reverses the heroes and villains and provided intellectual support for the Civil Rights Movement. Battles over the display of the Confederate flag reignited memories in the 1980s.Conservative rule 1877–1890
Wade Hampton III
Wade Hampton III was a Confederate cavalry leader during the American Civil War and afterward a politician from South Carolina, serving as its 77th Governor and as a U.S...
and other former Confederate veterans who espoused a return to the policies of the antebellum period. Known as the Conservatives, or the Bourbons
Bourbon Democrat
Bourbon Democrat was a term used in the United States from 1876 to 1904 to refer to a member of the Democratic Party, conservative or classical liberal, especially one who supported President Grover Cleveland in 1884–1888/1892–1896 and Alton B. Parker in 1904. After 1904, the Bourbons faded away...
, they favored a minimalist approach by the government and a conciliatory policy towards blacks while maintaining white supremacy
White supremacy
White supremacy is the belief, and promotion of the belief, that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates the social and political dominance by whites.White supremacy, as with racial...
. Also of interest to the Conservatives was the restoration of the University of South Carolina
University of South Carolina
The University of South Carolina is a public, co-educational research university located in Columbia, South Carolina, United States, with 7 surrounding satellite campuses. Its historic campus covers over in downtown Columbia not far from the South Carolina State House...
to its prominent prewar status as the leading institution of higher education in the state and the region.
Once in power, the Democrats quickly consolidated their position and sought to unravel the legacy of the Radical Republicans. They pressured Republicans to resign from their positions and within a year both the legislative and judiciary were firmly in the control of the Democrats. They launched investigations into the corruption and frauds committed by eminent Republicans during Reconstruction. All charges were dropped when the Federal government dropped its charges against white participants accused of violence
South Carolina civil disturbances of 1876
The South Carolina civil disturbances of 1876 were a series of race riots and civil unrest sparked by the intense emotions developed because of the...
in the 1876 election campaign.
With their position secure, the Democrats next tackled the state debt. Reconstruction government had established public education and new charitable institutions, together with improving prisons. There was corruption, but it was mostly white Southerners who benefited. Taxes had been exceedingly low before the war because the planter class refused to support public programs like education. The exigencies of the postwar period caused the state debt to climb rapidly. When Republicans came to power in 1868, the debt stood at $5.4 million. By the time Republicans lost control in 1877, state debt had risen to $18.5 million. Many Democrats from the upcountry, led by Martin Gary
Martin Witherspoon Gary
Martin Witherspoon Gary was a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War and a Democratic politician in postbellum South Carolina.-Early life and career:...
, pushed for the entire state debt to be canceled, but Gary was opposed by Charleston holders of the bonds. A compromise moderated by Wade Hampton was achieved and by October 1882, the state debt was reduced to $6.5 million.
Other legislative initiatives by the Conservatives benefited its primary supporters, the planters and business class. Taxes across the board were reduced, and funding was cut for public social and educational programs that assisted poor whites and blacks. Oral contracts were made to be legally binding, breach of contract was enforced as a criminal offense, and those in debt to planters could be forced to work off their debt. In addition, the University of South Carolina along with The Citadel
The Citadel (military college)
The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, also known simply as The Citadel, is a state-supported, comprehensive college located in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. It is one of the six senior military colleges in the United States...
were reopened to elite classes and generously supported by the state government.
By the late 1880s, the agrarian movement
Farmers' Alliance
The Farmers Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement amongst U.S. farmers that flourished in the 1880s. One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers after the American Civil War...
swept through the state and encouraged subsistence farmers to assert their political rights. They pressured the legislature to establish an agriculture college. Reluctantly the legislature complied by adding an agriculture college to the University of South Carolina in 1887. Ben Tillman
Benjamin Tillman
Benjamin Ryan Tillman was an American politician who served as the 84th Governor of South Carolina, from 1890 to 1894, and as a United States Senator, from 1895 until his death in office. Tillman's views were a matter of national controversy.Tillman was a member of the Democratic Party...
inspired the farmers to demand a separate agriculture college isolated from the politics of Columbia. The Conservatives finally gave them one in 1889.
Tillman era and disfranchisement, 1890–1914
South Carolina gubernatorial election, 1890
The 1890 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 4, 1890 to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. Ben Tillman was nominated by the Democrats and easily won the general election against A.C...
. The farmers rallied behind his candidacy and Tillman easily defeated the conservative nominee, A.C. Haskell
Alexander Cheves Haskell
Alexander Cheves Haskell was a Colonel in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and a Democratic politician in postbellum South Carolina.-Early life:...
. The conservatives failed to grasp the strength of the farmers' movement in the state. The planter elite no longer engendered automatic respect for having fought in the Civil War. Not only that, but Tillman's "humorous and coarse speech appealed to a majority no more delicate than he in matters of taste."
The Tillman movement succeeded in enacting a number of Tillman's proposals and pet projects. Among those was the crafting of a new state constitution and a state dispensary system
South carolina dispensary
The South Carolina Dispensary system was a state-run monopoly on liquor sales in the United States state of South Carolina which operated from 1893 to 1907 statewide and until 1916 in some counties. The system was the brainchild of Governor Benjamin Tillman, a farmer from Edgefield known as...
for alcohol. Tillman held a "pathological fear of Negro rule."
White elites created a new constitution with provisions to deprive blacks and poor whites of voting rights without violating the Fifteenth Amendment
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits each government in the United States from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude"...
. This was chiefly accomplished through provisions related to making voter registration more difficult, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, which adversely affected African Americans and poor whites. After promulgation of the new Constitution of 1895, voting was essentially restricted to whites for more than 60 years.
During Reconstruction, black legislators had been a majority in the lower house of the legislature. The new requirements meant that only about 15,000 of the 140,000 blacks could qualify to register. In practice, many more blacks were prohibited from voting by the subjective voter registration process controlled by white registrars. In addition, the Democratic Party primary was restricted to whites only. By October 1896 there were 50,000 whites registered, but only 5,500 blacks, in a state in which blacks were the majority.
The 1900 census demonstrated the extent of disfranchisement: African Americans comprised more than 58% of the state's population, with a total of 782,509 citizens essentially without any representation. The political loss affected educated and illiterate men alike. It meant that without their interests represented, blacks were unfairly treated within the state. They were unable to serve on juries; segregated schools and services were underfunded; law enforcement was dominated by whites. African Americans did not recover the ability to exercise suffrage and political rights until the Civil Rights Movement
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
won passage of Federal legislation in 1964 and 1965.
The state Dispensary, described as "Ben Tillman's Baby", was never popular in the state, and violence broke out in Darlington
Darlington, South Carolina
Darlington is a city in and the county seat of Darlington County, in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of South Carolina. It is a center for tobacco farming. The population was 6,720 at the 2000 census and is part of the Florence Metropolitan Statistical Area...
over its enforcement. In 1907, the Dispensary Act was repealed. In 1915, the legal sale of alcohol was prohibited by referendum.
Tillman's influence on the politics of South Carolina began to wane after his move to the U.S. Senate in 1895. The Conservatives recaptured the legislature in 1902. Aristocratic planter Duncan Clinch Heyward
Duncan Clinch Heyward
Duncan Clinch Heyward was the 88th Governor of South Carolina from January 20, 1903, to January 15, 1907.Heyward was born in Richland County to Edward Barnwell Heyward and Catherine Maria Clinch after his parents moved from Colleton County to avoid the Union Army during the Civil War...
won the gubernatorial election
South Carolina gubernatorial election, 1902
The 1902 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 4, 1902 to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. Duncan Clinch Heyward won the Democratic primary and ran unopposed in the general election to become the 88th governor of South Carolina.-Democratic primary:The South...
. They made no substantial changes and in fact Heyward continued to enforce the Dispensary Act at great difficulty. The state continued its rapid pace of industrialization and this gave rise to a new class of voters, the cotton mill workers.
White sharecroppers and mill workers coalesced behind the candidacy of Tillmanite Cole Blease in the gubernatorial election of 1910
South Carolina gubernatorial election, 1910
The 1910 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 8, 1910 to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. Coleman Livingston Blease won the Democratic primary and ran unopposed in the general election to become the 90th governor of South Carolina.-Democratic primary:By...
. They believed that Blease was making them an important part of the political force of the state. Once in office, however, Blease did not initiate any policies that were beneficial to the mill workers or poor farmers. Instead, his four years in office were highly erratic in behavior. This helped to pave the way for a progressive, Richard I. Manning
Richard Irvine Manning III
Richard Irvine Manning III was a politician from the U.S. state of South Carolina. He served as a state legislator and as the 92nd Governor of South Carolina.-Early life and career:...
, to win the governorship in 1914
South Carolina gubernatorial election, 1914
The 1914 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 3, 1914, to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. Richard Irvine Manning III emerged from the crowded Democratic primary to win in the runoff and won the general election to become the 92nd governor of South...
.
Economic booms and busts
In the 1880s 1886, Atlanta editor [Mikaela L. Watt] won attention in the state for his vision of a "New SouthNew South
New South, New South Democracy or New South Creed is a phrase that has been used intermittently since the American Civil War to describe the American South, after 1877. The term "New South" is used in contrast to the Old South of the plantation system of the antebellum period.The term has been used...
", a South based on the modern industrial model. By now, the idea had already struck some enterprising South Carolinians that the cotton they were shipping north could also be processed in South Carolina mills. The idea was not new; in 1854, De Bow's Commercial Review of the South & West, edited by Charleston-born Bold textMikaela L. Watt had boasted to investors of South Carolina's potential for manufacturing, citing its three lines of railroads, inexpensive raw materials, non-freezing rivers, and labor pool. Slavery was so profitable before 1860 that it absorbed available capital and repelled Northern investors, but now the time for industrialization was at hand. By 1900 the textile industry was established in upland areas, which had water-power and an available white labor force, comprising men, women and children willing to move from hard-scrabble farms to mill towns.
In 1902, the Charleston Expedition drew visitors from around the world. President Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...
, whose mother had attended school in Columbia, called for reconciliation of still simmering animosities between the North and the South.
The Progressive Movement came to the state with Governor Richard Irvine Manning III
Richard Irvine Manning III
Richard Irvine Manning III was a politician from the U.S. state of South Carolina. He served as a state legislator and as the 92nd Governor of South Carolina.-Early life and career:...
in 1914. The expansion of bright-leaf tobacco around 1900 from North Carolina brought an agricultural boom. This was broken by the Great Depression startting in 1929, but the tobacco industry recovered and prospered until near the end of the 20th century. Cotton remained by far the dominant crop, despite low prices. The arrival of boll weevil
Boll weevil
The boll weevil is a beetle measuring an average length of six millimeters, which feeds on cotton buds and flowers. Thought to be native to Central America, it migrated into the United States from Mexico in the late 19th century and had infested all U.S. cotton-growing areas by the 1920s,...
infestation sharply reduced acreage, and especially yields. Farmers shifted to other crops.
Black sharecroppers and laborers began heading North in large numbers in the era of World War I, a Great Migration
Great Migration
Great Migration, Great Migrations, or The Great Migration may refer:In history:* Great Migration of Puritans from England to New England * Great Serb Migrations from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg Monarchy...
that continued for the rest of the century, as they sought higher wages and much more favorable political conditions.
Civil Rights Movement
Compared to hot spots such as Mississippi and Alabama, desegregationDesegregation
Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups usually referring to races. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American Civil Rights Movement, both before and after the United States Supreme Court's decision in...
went rather smoothly during the 1950s and 1960s in South Carolina. As early as 1948, however, when Strom Thurmond
Strom Thurmond
James Strom Thurmond was an American politician who served as a United States Senator. He also ran for the Presidency of the United States in 1948 as the segregationist States Rights Democratic Party candidate, receiving 2.4% of the popular vote and 39 electoral votes...
ran for president
President
A president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...
on the States Rights ticket, South Carolina whites were showing discontent with the Democrats' post–World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
continuation of the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
's federalization of power.
South Carolina blacks had problems with the Southern version of states rights; by 1940 the implementation of disfranchisement written into the 1895 constitution had the practical effect of still limiting registration of African Americans to 3,000 - only 0.8 percent of those of voting age in the state. African Americans had not been able to elect a representative since the 19th century. By 1960, during the Civil Rights Movement, South Carolina had a population of 2,382,594, of whom nearly 35%, or 829,291 were African Americans, who had been without representation for 60 years.
Non-violent action began in Rock Hill
Rock Hill, South Carolina
Rock Hill is the largest city in York County, South Carolina and the fourth-largest city in the state. It is also the third-largest city of the Charlotte metropolitan area, behind Charlotte and Concord, North Carolina. The population was 71,459 as of . Rock Hill has undergone rapid growth between...
in 1961, when nine black Friendship Junior College students took seats at the whites-only lunch counter
Lunch counter
A lunch counter is a small restaurant, much like a diner, where the patron sits on a stool on one side of the counter and the server or person preparing the food serves from the other side of the counter, where the kitchen or limited food preparation area is. As the name suggests, they were most...
at a downtown McCrory's and refused to leave. When police arrested them, the students were given the choice of paying $200 fines or serving 30 days of hard labor in the York County
York County, South Carolina
York County is a county located in the north-central section of the U.S. state of South Carolina. According to the 2010 census, the county's population was 226,073. It is the second largest county in the Charlotte metropolitan area...
jail. The Friendship Nine
Friendship Nine
The Friendship Nine was a group of African American men who went to jail after staging a sit-in at a segregated McCrory's lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina in 1961...
, as they became known, chose the latter, gaining national attention in the American Civil Rights Movement because of their decision to use the "jail, no bail" strategy.
In 1962, federal courts ordered Clemson University
Clemson University
Clemson University is an American public, coeducational, land-grant, sea-grant, research university located in Clemson, South Carolina, United States....
to admit African-American Harvey Gantt
Harvey Gantt
Harvey Bernard Gantt is an American architect and Democratic politician active in North Carolina. He was Mayor of Charlotte from 1983 to 1987, and ran twice for the United States Senate....
into its classes. The state and the college's board of trustees had exhausted legal recourse to prevent it; influential whites ensured that word was widespread that no violence or otherwise unseemly behavior would be tolerated. Gantt's entrance into the school occurred without incident. The March 16, 1963, Saturday Evening Post praised the state's handling of the crisis, with an article titled "Desegregation with Dignity: The Inside Story of How South Carolina Kept the Peace". Twenty years later, Gantt was elected as mayor
Mayor
In many countries, a Mayor is the highest ranking officer in the municipal government of a town or a large urban city....
of Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the seat of Mecklenburg County. In 2010, Charlotte's population according to the US Census Bureau was 731,424, making it the 17th largest city in the United States based on population. The Charlotte metropolitan area had a 2009...
.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater
Barry Goldwater
Barry Morris Goldwater was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. An articulate and charismatic figure during the first half of the 1960s, he was known as "Mr...
's platform galvanized South Carolina's conservative Democrats and led to major defections of whites into the Republican Party, led by Senator Thurmond. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, finally South Carolina blacks could participate in public life and regained the power of suffrage. Since then African Americans have been regularly elected to national, state and local offices.
In 1968, the tragic shooting at Orangeburg
Orangeburg massacre
The Orangeburg massacre was an incident on February 8, 1968, in which nine South Carolina Highway Patrol officers in Orangeburg, South Carolina, fired into an aggravated but unarmed mob protesting local segregation at a bowling alley, hitting most of them in their backs. Three men were killed and...
shattered the state's peaceful desegregation. When police overreacted to the violence of students' protesting a segregated bowling
Bowling
Bowling Bowling Bowling (1375–1425; late Middle English bowle, variant of boule Bowling (1375–1425; late Middle English bowle, variant of boule...
alley, they killed three students and wounded more than 30 others.
In 1970, when South Carolina celebrated its Tricentennial, more than 80% of its residents had been born in the state. Since then, however, Northerners have discovered South Carolina's golf
Golf
Golf is a precision club and ball sport, in which competing players use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a golf course using the fewest number of strokes....
courses, beaches and mild climate. The state, particularly the coastal areas but increasingly inland as well, has become more popular as a tourist destination and magnet for new arrivals. Even some descendants of black South Carolinians who moved out of the South during the Jim Crow years have moved back. Despite these new arrivals, about 69% of residents are native born.
Economic change
The rapid decline of agriculture in the state has been one of the most important developments since the 1960s. As late as 1960 more than half the state's cotton was picked by hand. Over the next twenty years mechanization eliminated tens of thousands of jobs in rural counties. By 2000 only 24,000 farms were left, with fewer than 2% of the population; many others lives in rural areas on what were once farms, but they commuted to non-farm jobs. Cotton was no longer king, as cotton lands were converted into timberlands. Until the 1970s rural areas always controlled the legislature. After 1972, both houses of the state legislature were reapportioned into single-member districts, ending another rural advantage. Coupled with the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, this change transformed South Carolina politics. The South Carolina Democratic party, which dominated the state for a century after Reconstruction, began to decline at the state and county level with the 1994 elections. Republicans won all but one statewide constitutional office and control of the state house of representatives.Fritz Hollings, governor 1959–1963, was a key supporter of development, executed a campaign to promote industrial training programs and implemented a state-wide economic development strategy. The end of the Cold War in 1990 brought the closing of military installations, such as the naval facilities in North Charleston
North Charleston, South Carolina
North Charleston is the 3rd largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina with incorporated areas in Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties. On June 12, 1972 the city of North Charleston incorporated and was the 9th largest city in South Carolina. According to the 2010 Census, North...
that Rep. Mendel Rivers had long sponsored. The quest for new jobs became a high state priority, Starting in 1975 the state used its attractive climate, lack of powerful labor unions and low wage rates to attract foreign investment in factories, including Michelin, which located its U.S. headquarters in the state. The stretch of Interstate 85 from the North Carolina line to Greenville became "UN Alley" as international companies opened operations.
Tourism became a major industry, especially in the Myrtle Beach area. With its semitropical climate and cheap land and low construction costs (because of low wages), the state became developer's dream. Barrier islands such as Kiawah and Hilton Head, became retirement communities for wealthy outsiders. The state's attempts to manage coastal development in an orderly and environmentally sound manner have run afoul of federal court decisions. The U.S. Supreme Court ( in "Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council") ruled that the state, in forbidding construction on threatened beachfront property, had, in effect, seized the plaintiff's property without due process of law. The rush to build upscale housing along the coast paid its price in the billions of dollars as Hurricane Hugo swept through on September 21–22, 1989. Charleston was more used to hurricanes; historical preservation groups immediately stepped in to begin salvage and reconstruction, with the result that one year after Hugo the city was virtually returned to normal.
By the late 1980s, however, the state's economic growth rate flattened. South Carolina's development plan focused on offering low taxes and attracting low-wage industries, but the state's low levels of education failed to attract high wage, high tech industries.
In 2009, the state outbid the state of Washington for a giant new Boeing plant, that will be constructed in North Charleston. Boeing must create at least 3,800 jobs and invest more than $750 million within seven years to take advantage of the various tax inducements worth $450 million.
Politics
In the 1970s, South Carolina elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. In 1987 and 1991, the state elected and reelected Governor Caroll Campbell, another Republican. Many politicians switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP, including David BeasleyDavid Beasley
David Muldrow Beasley is a Republican who served one term as the 113th Governor of South Carolina from 1995 until 1999....
, a former Democrat who claimed to have undergone a spiritual rebirthwho was elected governor as a Republican. In 1996 Beasley surprised citizens by announcing that he could not justify keeping the Confederate flag flying over the capitol. He said that a "spate of racially motivated violence compelled him to reconsider the politics and symbolism of the Confederate flag, and he concluded it should be moved." Traditionalists were further surprised when Bob Jones III
Bob Jones III
Robert Reynolds Jones III , third president of Bob Jones University. The son of Bob Jones, Jr., and the grandson of Bob Jones, Sr., the university's founder, Jones III served as president of BJU from 1971 to 2005.-Biography:...
, head of Bob Jones University
Bob Jones University
Bob Jones University is a private, for-profit, non-denominational Protestant university in Greenville, South Carolina.The university was founded in 1927 by Bob Jones, Sr. , an evangelist and contemporary of Billy Sunday...
, announced he held the same view.
Beasley was upset for reelection in 1998 by little-known Lancaster State Assemblyman Jim Hodges
Jim Hodges
James Hovis "Jim" Hodges is a Democrat who served one term as the 114th Governor of South Carolina from 1999 until 2003.-Early career:...
. Hodges attacked Beasley's opposition to the creation of a state lottery
South Carolina Education Lottery
The South Carolina Education Lottery began in 2002.South Carolina is a member of the Multi-State Lottery Association , best known for Powerball...
to support education. Hodges called for a fresh tax base to improve public education
Public education
State schools, also known in the United States and Canada as public schools,In much of the Commonwealth, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, the terms 'public education', 'public school' and 'independent school' are used for private schools, that is, schools...
. Despite Hodges' unwillingness to join Beasley in his opposition to flying the Confederate flag, the NAACP announced its support for Hodges. (At the same time the NAACP demanded a boycott of conferences in the state over the same issue). Hodges reportedly accepted millions in contributions from the gambling industry, which some estimated spent a total of $10 million in its own campaign to defeat Beasely.
After the election, however, with public opinions steadfastly against video gambling, Hodges asked for a statewide referendum
Referendum
A referendum is a direct vote in which an entire electorate is asked to either accept or reject a particular proposal. This may result in the adoption of a new constitution, a constitutional amendment, a law, the recall of an elected official or simply a specific government policy. It is a form of...
on the issue. He claimed that he would personally join the expected majority in saying "no" on legalized gambling, but vowed not to campaign
Political campaign
A political campaign is an organized effort which seeks to influence the decision making process within a specific group. In democracies, political campaigns often refer to electoral campaigns, wherein representatives are chosen or referendums are decided...
against it. Critics in both parties suggested that Hodges' debts to the state's gambling interests were keeping him from campaigning against legalized gambling. The state constitution does not provide for referendums except for ratification of amendments
Constitutional amendment
A constitutional amendment is a formal change to the text of the written constitution of a nation or state.Most constitutions require that amendments cannot be enacted unless they have passed a special procedure that is more stringent than that required of ordinary legislation...
. State legislators shut down the state's video casinos soon after Hodges took office.
Upon his election, Hodges announced that he agreed with Beasley's increasingly popular compromise proposal on the Confederate flag issue. He supported the flag's transfer to a Confederate monument on the State House's grounds. Many South Carolinians agreed with this position as the only solution. Further, they admired Hodges' solution to nuclear waste shipments to the state. Hodges alienated moderate voters sufficiently so that in 2002, most of the state's major newspapers supported Republican Mark Sanford
Mark Sanford
Marshall Clement "Mark" Sanford Jr. is an American politician from South Carolina, who was the 115th Governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011....
to replace him. Hodges was held responsible for the state's mishandling of the Hurricane Floyd
Hurricane Floyd
Hurricane Floyd was the sixth named storm, fourth hurricane, and third major hurricane in the 1999 Atlantic hurricane season. Floyd triggered the third largest evacuation in US history when 2.6 million coastal residents of five states were ordered from their homes as it approached...
evacuation in 1999. By 2002, most of the funds from Hodges' "South Carolina Education Lottery" were used to pay for college scholarships, rather than to improve impoverished rural and inner-city schools.
Religious leaders denounced the lottery as taxing the poor to pay for higher education for the middle class.
In the lottery's first year, Hodges' administration awarded $40 million for "LIFE Scholarships", granted to any South Carolinian student with a B average, graduation
Graduation
Graduation is the action of receiving or conferring an academic degree or the ceremony that is sometimes associated, where students become Graduates. Before the graduation, candidates are referred to as Graduands. The date of graduation is often called degree day. The graduation itself is also...
in the top 30% of the student's high school class, and an 1,100 SAT
SAT
The SAT Reasoning Test is a standardized test for college admissions in the United States. The SAT is owned, published, and developed by the College Board, a nonprofit organization in the United States. It was formerly developed, published, and scored by the Educational Testing Service which still...
score. Hodges' administration awarded $5.8 million for "HOPE Scholarships", which had lower g.p.a. requirements.
Hodges lost his campaign for reelection in 2002 against Republican conservative Mark Sanford
Mark Sanford
Marshall Clement "Mark" Sanford Jr. is an American politician from South Carolina, who was the 115th Governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011....
, former U.S. congressman from Sullivan's Island.
See also
- History of the East Coast of the United States
- History of the Southern United StatesHistory of the Southern United StatesThe history of the Southern United States reaches back hundreds of years and includes the Mississippian people, well known for their mound building. European history in the region began in the very earliest days of the exploration and colonization of North America...
- List of newspapers in South Carolina in the 18th century
Textbooks and surveys
- Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, (1998) the standard scholarly history
- Edgar, Watler, ed. The South Carolina Encyclopedia, (University of South Carolina Press, 2006) ISBN 1-57003-598-9, the most comprehensive scholarly guide
- Rogers, Jr., George C. "Who is a South Carolinian?," South Carolina Historical Magazine, Oct 2000, Vol. 101 Issue 4, pp 319–329, emphasis on race, ethnicity and identity
- Rogers Jr. George C. and C. James Taylor. A South Carolina Chronology, 1497-1992 2nd Ed. (1994)
- Wallace, David Duncan. South Carolina: A Short History, 1520-1948 (1951) online standard scholarly history
- WPA. South Carolina: A Guide to the Palmetto State (1941) online famous guide to all the town and cities
- Wright, Louis B. South Carolina: A Bicentennial History (1976) online, popular survey
Scholarly secondary studies: to 1865
- Burton, Orville Vernon. In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. (1985) online edition
- Clarke, Erskine. Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690-1990 (1996)
- Channing, Steven. Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (1970)
- Coit, Margaret L. John C. Calhoun: American Portrait (1950)
- Coclanis, Peter A., “Global Perspectives on the Early Economic History of South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 106 (April–July 2005), 130–46.
- Crane, Verner W. The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (1956)
- Ford Jr., Lacy K. Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (1991)
- Johnson Jr., George Lloyd. The Frontier in the Colonial South: South Carolina Backcountry, 1736-1800 (1997)
- Rogers, George C. Evolution of a Federalist: William Loughton Smith of Charleston (1758-1812) (1962)
- Roper, L. H. Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 1-4039-6479-3.
- Schultz, Harold S. Nationalism and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1852-1860 (1950)
- Sinha, Manisha. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000)
- Smith, Warren B. White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina (1961)
- Tuten, James H. Lowcountry Time and Tide: The Fall of the South Carolina Rice Kingdom (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) 178 pp. isbn 978-1-57003-926-3
- Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (1996)
Scholarly secondary studies: since 1865
- Bass, Jack and Marilyn W. Thompson. Ol' Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond,. (2003)
- Brown, D. Clayton. King Cotton: A Cultural, Political, and Economic History since 1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 2011) 440 pp. isbn 978-1-60473-798-1* Carlton, David L. Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (1982
- Clarke, Erskine. Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1690-1990 (1996) online
- Cooper Jr., William J. The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877-1890 (1968).
- Ford, Lacy K. "Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-1900", Journal of American History, LXXI (September 1984), 294-318; in JSTOR
- Kantrowitz, Stephen. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2002)
- Kantrowitz, Stephen. "Ben Tillman and Hendrix McLane, Agrarian Rebels: White Manhood, 'The Farmers,' and the Limits of Southern Populism." Journal of Southern History. Volume: 66. Issue: 3. (2000) pp. 497+. online edition
- Keyserling, Harriet. Against the Tide: One Woman's Political Struggle. University of South Carolina Press, 1998.
- Minchin, Timothy J., “An Uphill Fight: Ernest F. Hollings and the Struggle to Protect the South Carolina Textile Industry, 1959–2005,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 109 (July 2008), 187–211.
- Peirce, Neal R. The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven Deep South States; (1974)online; solid reporting on politics and economics 1960-72
- Simon, Bryant. A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948 (1998) online
- Simkins, Francis Butler. The Tillman Movement in South Carolina (1926) online
- Simkins, Francis Butler. Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian (1944)
- Simkins, Francis Butler, and Robert Hilliard Woody. South Carolina during Reconstruction (1932).
- Slap, Andrew; "The Spirit of '76: The Reconstruction of History in the Redemption of South Carolina" in The Historian. Volume: 63. Issue: 4. 2001. pp 769+ on 1876
- Tullos, Allen Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont (1989) online
- Williamson Joel R. After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (1965)
- Zucek, Richard. State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (U of South Carolina Press, 1996)
Local studies
- Bass, Jack and Jack Nelson.The Orangeburg Massacre,. Mercer University Press, 1992.
- Burton, Orville Vernon. In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985), new social history
- Carlton, David L. Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (1982)
- Doyle, Don H. New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910 (1990)
- Huff, Jr., Archie Vernon. Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont (1995)
- Moore, John Hammond. Columbia and Richland County: A South Carolina Community, 1740-1990 (1993)
- Pease, William H. and Jane H. Pease. The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843 (1985),
- Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964)
Primary documents
- Pike, James Shepherd, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government(New York, 1874). hostile report on Reconstruction full text online at Making of America, University of Michigan
- Salley, Alexander S. ed. Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650-1708 (1911)
- Woodmason Charles. The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution Edited by Richard J. Hooker. (1953), a missionary reports