History of South Carolina
The colony of Carolina was settled by English settlers sent by the Lords Proprietors in 1670, followed by French Huguenots. The Carolina upcountry was settled largely by Scotch-Irish migrants from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Carolina became a royal colony in 1712. North Carolina was split off in 1729. The state declared its independence from Great Britain and set up its own government on March 15, 1776. On February 5, 1778 South Carolina became the first state to ratify the first constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation.
During the American Revolution, South Carolina was the site of General Clinton's plan to trap George Washington by moving north from Florida while gaining loyalist followers. The events of the American Revolution triggered the first South Carolina civil war between Americans and Patriots. Before and after the war, South Carolina sent several important delegates that played significant roles in negotiatiations over the Stamp Act, such as Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and John Rutledge.
South Carolina seceded from the United States on December 20, 1860. The rest of the Southern states seceded in the following months; together, they organized themselves as the Confederate States of America. President James Buchanan took little action, preferring to let the newly-elected President Abraham Lincoln decide the matter. On April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries began shelling Fort Sumter, which stands on an island in Charleston harbor, thus precipitating the Civil War. Students from The Citadel were among those firing the first shots of the war, though Edmund Ruffin is usually credited with firing the first shot.
Today, South Carolina attracts numerous businesses due to its low cost environment, and notably industrial types such as BMW. The subject of recent South Carolinan debates is what should be done with the Confederate battle flag that hung over the State House. As a compromise, it was moved to a Confederate monomument on State House grounds. Other issues are legalized gambling and the HOPE scholarship and LIFE scholarship, which some say have been majorly unsuccessful.
Pre-history
Many scientists theorize, based on little currently existing evidence, that South Carolina was originally settled 15,000 years ago near the end of the Ice Age. South Carolina was first settled by numerous native tribes, including the Mustogee, Cherokee, and the Creek. They had hunted fauna such as the mammoth, the mastodon, and the great bison. They were primitive tool makers and crude hunters.
Toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, the Paleo-Indian made its first appearance. These Indians differ from their ancestors in that they had more advanced tools. Their culture is usually defined by the use of Clovis points on spears. Stretching from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, they were the first big-game hunters. In one of their hunting tricks, they would burn the marsh or the woods in order to lure out the mastodons and mammoths that had been hiding within. They also may have used gathering in their vast hunting efforts.
When the Ice Age ended, the early Americans adapted to the new climate and newly abundant game by hunting mammals, particularly the white-tailed deer, fish, and fowl. They spent spring and summer near a large body of water, as evidenced by shell middens and shell rings. Some experts date the earliest pottery and other simple ceramics, found along the Savannah River, between 2,500 B.C. and 1,000 B.C. From 1,000 B.C. to 1,000 A.D., Native Americans began to depend on agriculture, causing them to migrate less.
During the Mississippian Period, practices came into existance such as platform mounds, traditional burial rituals, and a political, social, and religion hierarchical structure organized under village chiefs. During the second half of the 12th century, Mississippian Indians battled eastward and eventually invaded the Woodland Indian areas of South Carolina. The Mississippians had set up defensive structures for their invasions around early sites, and they tended to plant their crops in the fertile soil near rivers whee villages would subsequently spring up.
In 1540, when de Soto was exploring the western South Carolina area on his way to the Mississippi River, he encountered the important town of Cofitachequi on the Wateree River in the area now called Kershaw County and left a detailed description. The town had numerous rectangular thatched-roof houses and store houses, most of which sold clothing and jewelry. Their pearls and knowledge of the Spanish suggests that they traded with coastal Indians.
The number of Native Americans present in South Carolina at the time of first European contact is estimated by ethnologists to be 15,000. This figure was halved in 1715 due to European disease and war. The Native Americans have contributed a significant amount to Carolina culture, most notably place names, ranging from penetentiaries and high schools to rivers and islands.
Colonial Period
Main article: Colonial period of South Carolina
By the end of the 16th century, the Spanish and French had gone from the area of South Carolina after several colonization attempts and reconnaissance missions. In 1629 Charles I granted his attorney general a charter to everything between latitudes 36 and 31. Later, Charles II gave the land to eight nobles, the Lords Proprietors, who ruled over the Carolinas until 1719 when South Carolina was split off from North Carolina and became a British province.
Throughout the Colonial Period, the Carolinas would participate in numerous wars with the Spanish and the Native Americans, particularly the Yamassee and Cherokee tribes. The Carolina upcountry was settled largely by Scotch-Irish migrants from Pennsylvania and Virginia, while the lowcountry mostly consisted of wealthy plantation owners. Toward the end of the Colonial Period, the upcountry was majorly underrepresented and mistreated, which caused them to take a loyalist position when the upcountry complained of new taxes that would later help spark the American Revolution.
Revolutionary War
Main article: South Carolina during the American Revolution
Prior to the American Revolution, the British began taxing American colonies to raise revenue, particularly outraging South Carolinians with the Townsend Acts that taxed tea, paper, wine, glass, and oil. To protest the Stamp Act, South Carolina sent wealthy rice planter Thomas Lynch, 26-year old lawyer John Rutledge, and Christopher Gadsden to the Stamp Act Congress, held in 1765 New York. Other taxes were removed, but tea taxes remained. Soon South Carolinians, in emulation of the Boston Tea Party, began to dump tea into the Charleston Harbor, shortly followed by many boycotts and protests.
Many of the South Carolinian battles fought during the American Revolution were with loyalist Carolinians and the Cherokee tribe which had allied itself with the British. This was to General Henry Clinton's advantage, whose 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 a fleeing army of Patriot soldiers that posed no threat. He also threatened to take away the parole of Patriot prisoners of war unless they took up arms against their fellow Americans.
After its capture, Patriots regained control of Charleston and South Carolina with untrained militiamen by trapping Tarleton's troops by trapping them along a river. In 1787, John Rutledge, Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Pierce Butler went to Philidelphia where the Constitutional Convention was being held and constructed what served as a detailed outline for the U.S. Constitution.
American Civil War
Prewar tensions
Very few South Carolina white saw emancipation as an option. Whites feared that if blacks, the vast majority in most parts of the state, were freed, they would try to "Africanize" their cherished society and culture as they had seen happen after slave revolutions in some areas of the West Indies. Carolinian leaders were divided between devoted Unionists that opposed any sort of secession, and those who believed secession was a state's right. John C. Calhoun proposed that Congress couldn't exclude slavery from territories and that a state should be able to choose which type of economy it wanted, a slave state or a free state. After Calhoun's death in 1850, however, South Carolina was left without a leader great enough in national standing and character to prevent more militant Carolinian factions' desire to secede immediately.
In 1850 and 1851 South Carolina nearly seceded from the Union. Andrew Pickens Butler argued against Charleston publisher Robert Barnwell Rhett, who advocated immediate and, if necessary, independant secession. Butler won the battle, but Rhett outlived him.
When President Abraham Lincoln was elected, a number of conventions organized around the Deep South to discuss the South's options. South Carolina's assembly met first, at Columbia, on December 17, 1860. States with strong pro-secession movements such as Alabama and Mississippi sent delegates to the convention where they advised the Carolinians to "take the lead and secede at once." On December 20, 1860, South Carolinians in Charleston (the convention had moved after an outbreak of smallpox in Columbia) voted to secede from the Union. One delegate from Edisto Island declared that if South Carolina didn't secede, then Edisto Island would secede all by itself. President James Buchanan took little action, preferring to let the newly-elected President Abraham Lincoln decide the matter.
Fort Sumter
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 sea invasion of Charleston, so Carolina could not afford to allow the Federals to remain there indefinitely. Rumors spread that Yankee forces were on their way down to seize the port city, making the locals even more eager to get their own troops behind Sumter's guns.
Mississipi seceded a few weeks after South Carolina, and the rest of the lower South followed. On February 4, a congress of Southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama and approved a new constitution which, among other things, prohibited the African slave trade. Lincoln argued that the United States were "one nation, indivisible," and denied the Southern states' right to secede. Upper Southern states such as Virginia and North Carolina, which hadn't yet seceded, called a peace conference. This came and went without making a dent against the accumulated bitterness on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
On January 9, 1861, the U.S. ship Star of the West approached to resupply the soldiers in the fort. Two Citadel cadets fired what were arguably the first shots in the war between the states in Charleston Harbor, a cannon shot meant to warn the vessel off. For the rest of the month, nothing happened. Then Virginian orator Roger Pryor barreled into Charleston and proclaimed 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.
On April 10, the Mercury reprinted stories from New York papers that told of a naval expedition that had been sent southward toward Charleston. The Carolinians could no longer wait if they hoped to take the fort without fighting the U.S. Navy at the same time. 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. Students from The Citadel were among those firing the first shots of the war, though Edmund Ruffin is usually credited with 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.
The war ends
South Carolina's instigation persuaded other states to join the Confederacy. The rest of the Southern states seceded in the following months. Together, they organized themselves as the Confederate States of America. Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, now certain that Lincoln meant to use force to keep their fellow Southern states under federal rule, seceded one by one. The South was at a disadvantage in number, weaponry, and Navy. Federal ships sailed south and blocked off one port after another. As early as November, Union troops occupied the Sea Islands in the Beaufort area, establishing an important base for the men and ships who would obstruct the ports at Charleston and Savannah. When the plantation owners, many of which had already gone off with the Confederate Army elsewhere, fled the area, the Sea Island slaves became the first "freedmen" of the war, and the Sea Islands became the laboratory for Northern plans to educate the African Americans for their eventual role as full American citizens.
Despite South Carolina's important role in the start of the war, and a long unsuccessful attempt to take Charleston from 1863 onward, few military engagements occured within the state's borders until 1865, when Sherman's Army, having already completed its infamous march to the Sea in Savannah, marched to Columbia and leveled most of the town, as well as a number of towns along the way and afterward. South Carolina lost 12,922 men to the war, 23% of its male white population of fighting age, and the highest percentage of any state in the nation. Sherman's 1865 march through the Carolinas resulted in the burning of Columbia and numerous other towns. Poverty would mark the state for generations to come.
On February 21, 1865, with the Confederate forces finally evacuated from Charleston, the black 55th Massachusetts Regiment 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.
Reconstruction
Interracial animosity
Though they had long occupied the majority of the state's population, African Americans first played a prominent role in South Carolina government for the first time when federal troops first occopied the state from 1866 to 1877. Despite the anti-Northern fury of their prewar and wartime politics, most Carolinians, including South Carolina's opinion-maker, Wade Hampton III, believed that white Carolinians would do well to accept President Johnson's terms for reentry to full participation in the Union. However, when powerful "radical" anti-Southern Congress seized control of the Reconstruction process, things got harder for white Carolinians. These Republicans' idea was to establish a solidly Republican South by convincing blacks to vote Republican and then keeping former Confederates from voting as long as possible.
The federally mandated new Constitution of 1868 brought democratic reforms, but by now most whites viewed the Republican government as representative of black interests only and were largely unsupportive. Laws forbidding former Confederates, virtually the entire native-white male population, from bearing arms only exacerbated the tensions, especially as rifle-bearing black militia units began drilling in the streets of Carolina towns. Adding to the interracial animosity was many whites' sense that their former slaves had betrayed them. Before the war, most slaveholders had convinced themselves that that they were treating their slaves well and had thus earned their slaves' loyalty. Understandably, most slaves had been happy to give their masters the impression that they were, indeed, devoted to the household. Hence, when the Union Army rolled in and slaves deserted by the thousands (though many did not), slaveholders took it as a personal affront. The black population scrambled to enjoy and 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 1876 governor election
The Ku Klux Klan raids began shortly thereafter, terrifying blacks and black sympathizers in an attempt to reestablish white supremacy. Most of the state's "better element" showed little tolerance for such violence, especially when undertaken anonymously, and largely squelched the movement locally after a few years. In 1876, Piedmont towns were the site of numerous demonstrations by the Red Shirts, white Democrats determined to win the upcoming elections by any means possible. Named for their trademark red shirts (worn to mock the historic "waving of the bloody shirt" of the radical Republicans), the Red Shirts turned the tide in South Carolina, convincing whites that, after 11 years of military rule, this could indeed be the year they regain control. Before the election, Republican Governor Chamberlain asked Washington for assistance and they sent 1,100 federal troops by President Ulysses S. Grant to keep order and ensure a "fair" election.
The bitter and hard-fought campaign of 1876 ended in a deadlock, as Hampton won the official vote, but Chamberlain and his followers claimed, accurately, as the records seem to show, that the Democrats' "victory" was the result of massive voter fraud and coercion by Red Shirts. In Edgefield and Laurens Counties, for instance, Hampton and other Democratic candidates received more votes than the total number of registered voters in both parties.
Both parties claimed victory, and 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, where they continued to pass resolutions and held forth with 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, after months of this, and a couple of near shoot-outs in April 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in return for the South's support of his own convuluted presidential "victory" over Samuel Tilden, withdrew federal troops from Columbia. At this point the Republican government dissolved and Chamberlain headed back north.
The Bourbons
The whites were back in charge of South Carolina, in the person of General Wade Hampton III. Hampton's election marked the establishment of a 99-year hold on the State House by the Democrats. The next Republican governor of South Carolina was James Burrows Edwards in 1975. The normal American two-party system was thrown off-balance because the Democratic Party, in those years, was the "white" party in South Carolina, and whites successfully kept blacks away from the ballot boxes through various Jim Crow laws. Hampton and other wealthy Confederate officers, known as the "Bourbons," ruled the state, but the farmers of the Upcountry were in no mood to return to the aristocratic leadership that had led them down the path to destruction.
At the 1890 election of the great populist and advocate of agriculture, Edgefield's Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman, the Upcountry finally made its long-awaited ascent to state leadership. Tillman realized that a divided white electorate made it possible that a united black electorate could gain recontrol of the state, and therefore in 1892, after his reelection as governor, Tillman led the charge to hold a new state constitutional convention to draw up a new constitution that would deprive the voting rights of blacks. He succeeded.
Economic booms and busts
In 1886, Atlanta newspaper publisher Henry W. Grady, speaking before a New York audience, proclaimed his vision of a "New South," a South that is based on the Northern economic model. By now, the idea had already struck some enterprising South Carolinians that all cotton they were sending North could be processed just as well down in South Carolina. This idea wasn't entirely new to South Carolinans; in 1854, De Bow's Commercial Review of the South & West, founded by Charleston-born James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, had boasted to potential investors of South Carolina's potential for manufacturing, citing its three lines of rail roads, cheaper raw materials, non-icing rivers, as well as its labor pool.
These enticements remained constant after the war between the States, and by the end of the 19th century, the textile industry was exploding across South Carolina, particularly upstate because of its turbine-turning rivers, bringing relief from the depressed sharecropper economy. For whites, anyway, things were looking up. In 1902, the Lowcountry hosted the Charleston Expedition, drawing visitors from around the world, hoping to impress them on the idea that the state was on the rebound. On April 9, President Theodore Roosevelt, whose mother had attended school in Columbia, made an appearance, smoothing over the still simmering animosities between the North and the South.
In South Carolina, things continued to improve even after the Tillman era ended with the election of progressive Governor Richard I. Manning in 1914. In 1919 the invasion of the boll weevil destroyed the state's cotton, which, despite it having not paid well since before the Civil War, was still the state's primary crop. Blacks and low-income whites left the state in droves for better jobs up north. Only the expansion of military bases during World War I, as well as domestic and foreign investment in manufacturing in more recent decades, have revitalized the state.
Desegregation
Compared to hot spots such as Mississippi and Alabama, desegregation went rather smoothly during the 1950s and 1960s in South Carolina. And yet, as early as 1948, when Strom Thurmond ran for president on the States Rights ticket, South Carolina whites were showing their discontentment with the Democrats' post-World War II continuation of the New Deal's federalization of power. Though South Carolinians no doubt felt outside pressures, by and large, they settled their racial differences without "outside meddling." The process began, in large part, up in Rock Hill in 1961, when nine black Friendship College students took seat at the whites-only lunch counter at McCory's (now Vantell Variety, on Main Street) 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" chose the latter, becoming the first protesters of the Civil rights movement to suffer imprisonment.
When the time came for Clemson to allow Harvey Gantt into its classes in 1962, making it the first public college in the state to intergrate, after the state and the college's board of trustees had exhausted all legal recourse, word went out from influential whites that no violence or otherwise unseemly behavior would be tolerated. Gantt's entrance into the school there went without incident, and 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." Gantt would 20 years later go on to serve as mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater's platform galvanized South Carolina's conservative Democrats and led to major defections into the Grand Old Party, most notably Senator Strom Thurmond. Unfortunately, the tragic shooting at Orangeburg in 1968 made one great exception to the state's peaceful desegregation. Three students were killed and more than 30 others wounded by police overreacting to the violence of students protesting a segregated bowling alley.
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 Caronlina's golf courses and beaches, and the state, particularly the coastal areas, but increasingly inland as well, has become more popular as the nation's collective memories of race riots and lynchings in the South continue to dim. Even descendants of black Carolinians who moved out of the South during the Jim Crow years have moved back. Even still, the number of native-born Carolinians in the state hovers around 69%.
Recent events
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. Republican David Beasley, a former Democrat who claimed to have undergone a spiritual rebirth that caused him to reconsider his views, ran for governor as Republican and won. As governor, Beasley surprised everyone and risked the wrath of Southern traditionalists by announcing, in 1996, that as a Christian he could not justify keeping the Confederate flag flying over the State House, knowing that it offended black South Carolinians. Traditionalists were further shocked when Bob Jones III, of Bob Jones University, announced that he held the very same view.
Beasley edged into the 1998 elections with such an edge in popularity that the top two Democratic candidates didn't even bother to run. Remarkably, Beasley was brought down by the Democrats' third-stringer, Lancaster State Assemblyman Jim Hodges, a former opponent of legalized gambling who now attacked Beasley's opposition to the creation of a state lottery and to the continued growth of video gaming in the state, which Hodges painted as salvation tax base for public education.
Despite Hodge's unwillingness to join Beasley in his opposition to the flying of the Confederate battle flag, the NAACP, though at the same time demanding a boycott of the state over that very same issue, announced its support for Hodges. In 1998, 90% of African-American Carolinians voted for Hodges, causing the election to swing his way. By USA Today's reckoning, the Collins Company, maker of video gambling machines, had given at least $3.5 million in donations to Hodge's campaign. Others claim the numbers went over twice that high.
After the election, however, with public opinions steadfastly against video gambling, Hodges asked for a statewide referendum on the issue, claiming that he would personally join the expected majority in saying "no" on legalized gambling, but vowing not to campaign against it. Critics in both parties suggested that Hodge's debts to Collins and other members of the state's multibillion-dollar gambling industry were keeping him from campaigning against legalized gambling. The idea for a referendum would have worked except that holding one would have violated the state constitution, which makes no provision for them except for ratification of amendments to the constitution itself. However, state legislators shut down the state's video casinos soon after Hodges took office, aided by the public outcry after a Georgia woman killed her 10-day-old baby by leaving her in a sweltering car while she gambled in a Ridgeland casino.
Upon his election, Hodges announced that, while he hadn't said anything up until that moment,he, too held Beasley's increasingly popular compromise on the Confederate flag issue, supporting the flag's transfer to a Confederate monument on the State House's grounds. Though many Carolinians agreed with this position as the only solution, and while many admired Hodge's solution to nuclear waste shipments to the state, Hodges alienated many moderate voters in a variety of ways, enough so that most of the state's major newspapers supported Mark Sanford to replaces Hodges in 2002. The state's mishandling of the Hurricane Floyd evacuation in 1999 drew fingers Hodge's way, and the lack of hurricanes in 2000 and 2001 seasons didn't give Carolinians a chance to see if Hodge's post-Floyd revisions to the plan would work.
In 2002, South Carolinians were surprised to learn that most of the funds from his "South Carolina Education Lottery" were going to pay for college scholarships, rather than trying to improve the rural and inner-city elementary, middle, and high schools that Hodges had gotten elected by maligning. Critics, including leaders at Hodge's church, the United Methodist, denounced the lottery as taxing the poor to pay for services for the middle class. On top of this, Hodges insisted that a full $3 million be sent to Allen University, Benedict College, Morris College, Claflin University, and Vorhees College, all private schools with a significant amount of non-South Carolinian students.
In the lottery's first year, Hodges and his supporters awarded $40 million for "LIFE Scholarships," granted to any South Carolinian with a B average, graduation in the top 30% of the student's high school class, and a 1,100 SAT score. He and his supporters also awarded $5.8 million for "HOPE Scholarships" which had even lower standards. In 2002, Hodges and legislators were chagrined to learn that only about 40% of the LIFE scholars were able to maintain the necessary 3.0 GPA needed to renew their scholarship for sophmore years. Hodges campaigned for reelection in 2002 against Republican moderate Mark Sanford, former U.S. congressman from Sullivan's Island, and lost.
References
- Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, , USC Press, 1998.
- Siglas, Mike, South Carolina, Moon Handbooks, 2003.
External links
- South Carolina History from the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia on Infoplease.
- A Brief History of South Carolina from the state's official site.
- Yamassee War of 1715 from Our Georgia History.