southcarolina

The first inhabitants of South Carolina, an area of some 31,000 square miles along the South Atlantic coast, probably arrived in the region around 13,000 B.C. There were dozens of Indian nations in the area just prior to European contact, with a total population numbering between 15,000 and 30,000. However, after European contact, native peoples were devastated by disease, and their populations quickly declined.

European Exploration and Early Settlement

The Spanish were the first Europeans to attempt permanent settlement in South Carolina. In 1526 an expedition led by Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón founded San Miguel de Gualdape on the coast, possibly Winyah Bay, but the settlement was abandoned within a few months. The French were next when Jean Ribaut led an expedition of Huguenots to Parris Island in 1562, where they founded Charlesfort. Their settlement collapsed within a year. The Spanish returned in 1566 under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded the garrison town of Santa Elena on Parris Island. The Spanish deserted the site in 1587.

The English attempted to settle the region in the years after the restoration of King Charles II, who in 1663 granted eight prominent noblemen (known as the Lords Proprietors) rights to all the land between Virginia and Spanish Florida, a land they called "Carolina" in honor of their king. The Lords Proprietors sponsored a 1670 expedition, of which only the frigate Carolina survived traveling up the Ashley River to Albemarle Point, where settlers established Charles Town. Ten years later, they abandoned Albemarle Point and moved down the river to Oyster Point, near the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, where the city that came to be known as Charleston developed. The Lords Proprietors offered generous land grants and religious freedom for settlers, and the colony grew at a healthy pace. By 1700 there were about 4,000 white colonists living in South Carolina, almost all in the coastal plain.

The Peoples of the Colony

A majority of the colony's earliest white settlers were "Barbadians," a term used to describe seasoned settlers from Barbados and other English colonies in the West Indies. The Barbadians were immensely influential, and the acquisitive plantation culture they brought with them set the economic, cultural, and social tone of the colony. After 1700, however, English settlers, whether Barbadians or directly from England, made up less than half of the colony's white population. French, Scottish, Irish, German, Welsh, Jewish, Dutch, and Swiss settlers came to South Carolina in substantial numbers, attracted by incentives such as large land grants and subsidized transportation and provisions. Later, during the 1750s, Scots-Irish settlers from the mid-Atlantic colonies began to enter South Carolina's largely uninhabited backcountry via a road that ran from Pennsylvania into the Piedmont region. These Scots-Irish farmers filled the region above the fall line, and on the eve of the American Revolution South Carolina's white population stood at 80,000, about half of them in the upcountry.

The Barbadian culture and economy that became established in South Carolina in the late seventeenth century was based on plantation agriculture and African slavery, and black slaves arrived in South Carolina along with the colony's other original founders. In the early years of colonization, a majority of slaves came from the West Indies. After 1700 most were brought directly from Africa to Charleston, the port through which passed 40 percent of Africans brought in to North America before 1775. South Carolina planters were closely attuned to ethnic differences among Africans, and certain peoples were preferred for their technical expertise and ability to adapt to life in South Carolina. Among the Africans brought to the colony were those from the Congo-Angola region (who made up a plurality), Senegambians (preferred), and those from the Windward and Gold Coasts. As a result of the heavy demand for African slave labor, after 1708 blacks made up the majority of nonnatives in South Carolina. Between 1720 and the American Revolution, there were about two blacks for every one white in the colony. The existence of a black majority had a number of important effects, including the development of a distinctive creole culture that combined African and European elements.

Economic and Political Life in Colonial South Carolina

The Indian trade for deerskins was the first economic success in South Carolina's earliest decades, and by the early eighteenth century other lucrative exports included naval stores, salted meats, and lumber products. Commercial agriculture developed slowly, but by the 1720s rice became the colony's first great staple crop and created fabulous wealth for a few Carolina families. It was grown on plantations in the marshy swamps north and south of Charleston, and rice planters relied on the expertise and labor of large numbers of slaves from the rice-growing regions of coastal West Africa. The success of rice fueled the rapid expansion of plantation slavery. Indigo, which produced a blue dye prized in England, was first successfully cultivated in the 1740s and soon became another source of wealth for the colony's planters and farmers. On the eve of the American Revolution, South Carolina was by far the most prosperous British colony in North America. Of the ten wealthiest North Americans, nine were South Carolinians (all from the low country), including Peter Manigault, the richest American. In the upcountry above the fall line, hardscrabble subsistence farms cultivated by white settlers were the norm.

The colony's political character, like so much else, was shaped first by the Barbadians. They were a thorn in the side of the Lords Proprietors, and the Barbadian political faction (the "Goose Creek Men") consistently challenged proprietary rule, seeking stronger defense for the colony and the freedom to pursue wealth as they saw fit. Bitter political factionalism characterized early colonial politics and came to a head after a disastrous war with the Yemassee Indians (1715–1716), fought south of Charleston. The savage Yemassee War severely weakened South Carolina and in 1719 the colonists over threw the proprietary regime and declared themselves to be under the immediate authority of the king. As a royal colony, South Carolina prospered. Imperial authorities left the wealthy elite to establish a political system that met its needs. The British colonial system operated to the benefit of that elite, providing a ready market for the colony's rice and subsidies for its indigo. Among the most significant challenges to royal government was the Stono Rebellion of September 1739, the largest slave uprising in the American colonies prior to the American Revolution. Originating at plantations along the Stono River just south of Charleston, the revolt left twenty whites and nearly twice that number of blacks dead.

The American Revolution and Internal Sectional Tensions

Seeking to protect their riches and solidify respect for their position in society, the South Carolina planters and merchants who had so profited from the British colonial system became the leaders of revolutionary activity in South Carolina. Sentiment against imperial authority was aroused by arrogant customs officials, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767, and British political claims. Wealthy low-country Carolinians such as Christopher Gadsden, Henry Laurens, Thomas Lynch, and Arthur Middleton led the colony's independence movement, and in March 1776, a provincial congress set up an independent government with Charlestonian John Rutledge as chie fexecutive. A British attempt to take Charleston by force failed on 28 June 1776 at the Battle of Sullivan's Island, but in the spring of 1780 a British siege led to the city's surrender. In spite of the loss of the colonial capital, in the decisive campaign of the American Revolution upcountry militias rallied behind the leadership of Francis Marion, Andrew Pickens, and Thomas Sumter in late 1780 and 1781. In a brutal civil war punctuated by notable victories at King's Mountain (7 October 1780) and Cowpens (17 January 1781), they held the British army and their Tory allies at bay. Meanwhile the Continental Army under the leadership of Nathaniel Greene drove the British into an enclave around Charleston, which they evacuated finally in December 1782.

In the wake of the Revolution, South Carolina was in disarray. Old rivalries between upcountry and low-country resurfaced, resulting in a number of govern-mental reforms that included the removal of the state capital to Columbia in 1786 near the geographic center of the state. Pierce Butler, Henry Laurens, Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and John Rutledge, all members of the lowcountry elite, represented South Carolina at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. They then led the movement to ratify the document in 1788, in spite of significant opposition from the upcountry. A political compromise in 1808 helped to end the state's internal sectional rivalry when it amended the state constitution to provide roughly equal political representation in the General Assembly for upcountry and lowcountry.

The Antebellum Era and Secession, 1808–1860

The Compromise of 1808 was possible because the interests of upcountry and lowcountry were converging. After the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, short-staple cotton cultivation spread rapidly into the upcountry, and slave-based plantation agriculture spread with it. Improved transportation in the form of canals and railroads helped to integrate South Carolina's economy, and the South Carolina College, founded in Columbia in 1801, educated the planter elite from both sections and helped create a unified political culture. However, it was the development of a landed elite in the upcountry whose wealth was based on slave labor that did the most to unite the interests of upcountry and lowcountry. White South Carolinians were united in their support of slavery.

After 1820 it became nearly impossible to free a slave in South Carolina and the state had one of the most stringent slave codes in the country. The threat of slave insurrection, vividly demonstrated by the thwarted rising plotted by Denmark Vesey in Charleston during 1822, put whites on the defensive, as did declining cotton prices, worn-out cotton lands, and rising prices for slaves through much of the antebellum era. Besieged by developments beyond their control, South Carolina politicians first focused on the federal Tariff of 1828, which, they believed, put their slave-based economy at a disadvantage. Opponents of the tariff united behind South Carolinian and Vice President John C. Calhoun, who anonymously authored the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, a pamphlet outlining the doctrine of nullification, which held that a state could nullify any federal law it felt was unconstitutional. Despite bitter disagreement between Unionists and Nullifiers within South Carolina, an 1832 convention declared the Tariff null and void, threatening secession if the federal government tried to enforce the law. After Congress passed a compromise tariff, the convention repealed the Ordinance of Nullification, temporarily quelling disunionist sentiment in South Carolina.

As the question of the expansion of slavery in the territories seized the attention of the nation in the 1840s, secessionists in South Carolina (the so-called fire-eaters) argued that if the new territories became antislavery states, they would join with the North and force an end to slavery in South Carolina. The fire-eaters tried to push the state to secede in 1850. Unsuccessful in that year, the election of the antislavery Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860 gave the fire-eaters the political momentum they sought, and a special state convention ratified the Ordinance of Secession on 20 December 1860. South Carolina was the first state to secede, setting the stage for the Civil War.

Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861–1877

The war began on 12 April 1861, when Confederate artillery bombarded the federal installation at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The war that followed devastated South Carolina. A federal blockade virtually shut down the port of Charleston, and federal troops under General William T. Sherman brought modern warfare to the state in early 1865, plundering and destroying homes, farms, and railroads in a wide swath in their march from Savannah northward. On 17 February 1865, Sherman entered Columbia, and that night a fire destroyed one-third of the city. Between 31 and 35 percent of South Carolina's young white male population died during the war.

With defeat came emancipation for nearly 60 percent of South Carolinians, and white and black Carolinians were forced to work out a new relationship. In late 1865, white Carolinians took advantage of lenient federal policies to create a new state government filled with former Confederates, who imposed restrictive black codes that circumscribed black civil rights and later rejected the Fourteenth Amendment. In response, Congress ordered military rule and a new state government. In 1868, a constitutional convention that welcomed freedmen created a new government recognizing black voting rights, removing property qualifications for office holding, and creating a free public school system. Until 1876, the Republican Party controlled state government, and African Americans held office at every level but governor, achieving a greater degree of political power in South Carolina than in any other state. But South Carolina's whites reacted violently to this turn of events. A reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan during 1870 and 1871 resulted in so many lynchings and beatings of Republicans that the writ of habeas corpus was suspended in nine upstate counties. However, in the aftermath the federal government failed to make more than a token show of force and terror organizations continued to function in South Carolina. In the disputed election of 1876, the Red Shirts, a white paramilitary organization, managed to engineer an apparent Democratic victory through violence and fraud. The Compromise of 1877 ended federal support for Republican Party government in South Carolina, and the white minority, represented by the Democratic Party and led by former Confederate General Wade Hampton III, regained control of state government.

The Rise of Jim Crow and the Persistence of Poverty, 1877–1941

As Hampton and the old elite (the so-called "Bourbons") returned to power, they tried to recreate the world of antebellum South Carolina. However, their inattention to the state's agricultural problems and mildly tolerant racial policies soon led to political revolt. Benjamin R. Tillman rode the disaffection of the state's white farmers to the governor's office, where he and his allies attacked the symbols of Bourbon power, if not the substance. Tillman focused his "reform" impulse on removing the state's black majority from public life. His triumph was the state's Constitution of 1895, which disfranchised the black majority and laid the groundwork for white supremacy and one-party Democratic rule in the twentieth century. In the last years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, South Carolina's white government also enacted a host of laws designed to segregate public life, and black Carolinians became virtually powerless. Relations between the races not governed by law were controlled by rigid customs that ensured blacks inferior status. As a result, black Carolinians left the state in droves, most bound for northern cities. After about 1922, South Carolina no longer had a black majority.

Persistent poverty plagued the state in the decades after the Civil War and was another factor in the out migration. The economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural and the system of sharecropping and farm tenancy led to heavy dependence on cotton, whose prices were in decline because of overproduction. As a result, farmers in the state's northeastern Pee Dee region turned increasingly to tobacco cultivation, which soon witnessed its own cycle of overproduction and declining prices. In the last years of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century, South Carolinians began to diversify their economy, primarily into extractive industries such as cotton textiles. Textile mills were organized across the Piedmont region, taking advantage of waterpower and a surplus of white labor, but creating new class tensions in the process. These mills were most often built in up-country towns that boomed with the widespread expansion of railroads after the Civil War. Towns such as Spartanburg, Greenville, Anderson, Rock Hill, and Greenwood became important marketing centers and drew economic activity away from Charleston, which entered a period of decline. In spite of the efforts of an indigenous Progressive movement, which sought to alleviate the effects of poverty, the economic stagnation that plagued South Carolina through the first decades of the twentieth century proved nearly impervious to change.

As bad as the years before 1930 had seemed, the Great Depression brought economic life in South Carolina nearly to a standstill. With Carolinians literally starving, both white and black Carolinians overwhelmingly supported Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempts to break the Great Depression, and U.S. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina was a key to the passage of New Deal legislation. But the New Deal did little to change things in the Palmetto State. In spite of federal aid, debt-ridden farmers abandoned the land in large numbers, seeking work in cities. The textile industry was a shambles because of over production, and the General Textile Strike of 1934 left six dead in the Piedmont mill town of Honea Path.

Modern South Carolina from 1941

With the coming of World War II, a revival began in South Carolina. Military installations boosted the economy in communities all over the state, and defense related industries helped spur a wartime boom. After the war, agriculture began a long-term decline and by 1980 the state's traditional dependence on farming had given way to a diverse economy. Mechanization eliminated tens of thousands of farm jobs, while crop diversification reduced the importance of cotton, which was replaced by tobacco and soy beans as the state's leading cash crops. For three decades after the war, textiles remained the state's most important industry, and during the 1950s manufacturing employment exceeded agricultural employment for the first time. State government made concerted efforts to attract northern and foreign-owned industry by promoting special tax incentives, tax-free government bonds, technical education, and a revived Port of Charleston. By the 1990s, firms such as Michelin, DuPont, BASF, Fuji, BMW, and Hoffman-LaRoche were a major presence in South Carolina, primarily in the Piedmont, but few had located their headquarters in the state. By the end of the twentieth century, textile employment had declined in importance and, in the long term, appeared doomed in the region. Tourism capitalized on the state's climate and environment and emerged as the state's most lucrative industry, concentrated at coastal destinations such as Myrtle Beach, Charleston, and Hilton Head Island. While the state's standard of living rose considerably after World War II, at century's end South Carolina's 4,012,012 inhabitants still ranked near the bottom nationally in per capita income.

South Carolina's postwar revival included a revolution in race relations. At the end of World War II, the state was a part of the solid Democratic South, its politics was controlled by a rural elite, and Jim Crow ruled race relations. But after the war, the civil rights movement achieved a victory with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Briggs v. Elliott (a case arising in Clarendon County) as part of its 1954 decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Though the state's white leaders at first resisted the demands of black Carolinians for civil rights, by the early 1960s they had begun to heed them. A series of strong, moderately progressive governors, including Ernest F. Hollings (1959–1963), Robert E. McNair (1965– 1971), and John C. West (1971–1975), urged white South Carolinians to peacefully accept federal civil rights laws and rulings. With the notable exception of the deaths of three students at Orangeburg's South Carolina State College in 1968, South Carolina avoided the violence and unrest that plagued other Deep South states during the civil rights era. By 1970, black Carolinians had begun to take their rightful place in the state's public life. At century's end, racial issues continued to play a prominent role in politics, as black Carolinians supplied the core of Democratic Party voters, while the Republican Party attracted few blacks. But for the first time in its history, the state had a genuine, competitive two-party system. South Carolina was a far different place than it had been even fifty years before.

Bibliography

Carlton, David L. Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Edgar, Walter B. South Carolina: A History. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Ford, Lacy K. Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry 1800–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Hayes, J. I. South Carolina and the New Deal. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Jones, Lewis P. South Carolina: A Synoptic History for Laymen. Rev. ed. Lexington, S.C: Sandlapper, 1978.

Joyner, Charles. Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Klein, Rachael N. Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Kovacik, Charles F., and John J. Winberry. South Carolina: A Geography. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987. Reprinted as Kovacik, Charles F., and John J. Winberry. South Carolina: The Making of a Landscape. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.

Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Newby, I. A. Black Carolinians: A History of Blacks in South Carolina from 1895 to 1968. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973.

Simkins, Francis Butler. Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944.

Tindall, George Brown. South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952.

Weir, Robert M. Colonial South Carolina: A History. Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1983.

Williamson, Joel. After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861–1877. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Zuczek, Richard. State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

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