South Carolina

C

3

Slavery

During the nullification battle, South Carolinians became increasingly alarmed over attacks on slavery by abolitionists, who wanted slavery ended totally and immediately. The slavery issue loomed larger as Congress debated the question of the extension of slavery into the newly acquired territories in the West. Many Congress members from the Northern states pressed to end slavery, both because it was considered immoral and because white labor could not compete with unpaid black labor. Members from the Deep South (North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida) believed that slavery was essential to their cotton-centered agricultural system and that the North was trying to dominate the national economy. Southern plantation owners feared that, if the new territories all became antislavery states, they would join with the North in Congress and force an end to slavery in the South.

South Carolina was one of only three states with a black majority, and thus the entire white population was especially apprehensive about what would happen to their society if the slaves became free. They had memories of the Stono Uprising of 1739, starting near Charles Town, in which 25 whites were killed; and the aborted rebellion of Denmark Vesey in 1822, which involved 2,000 to 3,000 slaves. Vesey’s plan was well organized and, had he not been betrayed, might have accomplished its goal of seizing the arsenals in Charleston and burning the city.

The so-called fire-eaters, politicians who wanted secession, tried but failed to push South Carolina into seceding in 1850. Henry Clay came up with another compromise, embodied in the Compromise Measures of 1850, that postponed the showdown for another decade. However, the agitation for secession increased.

C

4

Secession and Civil War

In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected president as the candidate of the Republican Party, which opposed the spread of slavery. South Carolina had threatened to secede if the Republicans won, and on December 20, 1860, it became the first state to leave the Union. Ten other Southern states followed. In March 1861 the breakaway states organized as the Confederate States of America and got ready for war.

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The American Civil War began April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery, under orders from Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, bombarded federal forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. After 34 hours, the fort surrendered. Aside from this event, little major fighting took place in the state. Charleston harbor was blockaded almost for the duration of the war, and the city was finally occupied by Union forces in February 1865 after a 19-month siege. Among the Union troops marching into Charleston was the black 54th Massachusetts Infantry, singing “John Brown’s Body.” A few weeks later, 4,000 of the city’s black population staged a massive parade to celebrate their liberation. Black schoolchildren marched with a banner that read “We Know No Master But Ourselves.”

Also in February, Union troops under General William T. Sherman burned Columbia in the course of their devastating march northward from Savannah through the Carolinas. All along the way, planters’ homes, smokehouses, and storerooms were plundered.

In all, about 63,000 South Carolinians served in the Confederate forces; more than one-fifth of them lost their lives.

C

5

Reconstruction

After the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson’s plan for restoring the Union, or Reconstruction, was to reestablish the state governments and then readmit the states’ delegates to Congress. A government dominated by ex-Confederates was set up in South Carolina, which repealed the 1861 ordinance of secession and recognized the abolition of slavery. This government was short-lived, however, because it maintained white supremacy. It failed to give blacks the right to vote and, in common with most other rebel states, enacted a Black Code that severely restricted the liberties of all blacks, both the newly freed and those who had not been slaves. For example, blacks were required to pay a yearly tax of $10 to $100 if they wished to follow any occupation other than farmer or servant.

Partly because of these acts by the Southern states, the Radical wing of the Republican Party in Congress wrested control of Reconstruction from President Johnson and imposed the harsher regime called Radical Reconstruction. In March 1867, Congress put ten of the ex-Confederate states under military rule. Readmission to the Union was made conditional on their adoption of new constitutions acceptable to Congress. They were required to extend the vote and basic civil rights to all men, regardless of race. The next year a convention, composed mainly of former slaves, free blacks, whites who had moved from the North (called carpetbaggers by their enemies), and Southern whites sympathetic to the North (called scalawags) drew up a new state constitution. This constitution allowed all adult men to vote and did not impose property or educational requirements; it also provided for a system of public schools. The most powerful ex-Confederates were disfranchised (denied the right to vote). On June 25, 1868, South Carolina was readmitted to the Union.

From 1868 to 1876 the Republican Party governed the state. This “rule of the robbers,” as the ex-Confederates called it, evoked violent white opposition. The Ku Klux Klan, a secret society organized in Tennessee, extended its activities to the state to subvert Republican rule by terrorist means. In 1871 so many lynchings and beatings took place that nine counties in the Piedmont were placed under martial law by the federal government. Hundreds of people were arrested, and the Klan ceased to exist in the state.

In 1876 the Red Shirts, a militant white political organization, supported Wade Hampton, a former Confederate general and the Democratic Party candidate for governor, against the Republican incumbent, Daniel H. Chamberlain of Massachusetts. Bribes and intimidation occurred on both sides. The Red Shirts engineered an apparent victory for Hampton, but the election results were contested, with both sides crying fraud. As it happened, the presidential election that year was also in doubt because of contested electoral votes in four states, three of which—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—were in the South. The Republican presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, needed those votes to barely defeat his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden. He got them. Whether a deal was struck, or whether the Republicans merely gave assurances to cease interfering in the South, Tilden did not challenge the national result, and the Republicans did not challenge Hampton’s claim to the governorship. Hayes withdrew the remaining federal troops from the state when he took office in March 1877.

The Democrats had returned to power in South Carolina, and it was to be essentially a one-party state for almost a hundred years thereafter. In subsequent decades the Democrats strengthened their control of state politics by disfranchising the state’s black population.

C

6

Hard Times and the Growth of the Textile Industry

The end of the Civil War left South Carolina in deep poverty, from which the state did not completely emerge for a century. Cotton cultivation was resumed on a large scale after the war, and in time cotton acreage grew beyond its prewar levels. The vastly increased production resulted in low prices in most years. The times were hardest for blacks who owned little land. Times were also hard for the small white farmers, many of whom lost their land through debt. Most of the blacks and many whites became sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

Sharecropping and tenant farming were substitutes for paid farm labor where little cash was available to pay wages. A sharecropper raised part of the landlord’s crop and was paid a share of the profits after deductions for living expenses and the cost of tools and supplies. A tenant farmer sold what he raised and paid the landlord a share of the profits as rent. The landlord either owned the crop (in sharecropping) or had a lien on it (in tenant farming); so, even if the profit was low, he got his share first. The cropper or tenant took what was left or, if none was left, got an advance to keep going until the next harvest. Once in that system, tenants and croppers were forced to remain because they could seldom earn enough to pay off their yearly advances. The increasing erosion of the soil contributed to the deepening poverty. Not until World War II (1939-1945), when widespread mechanization of agriculture made sharecropping unprofitable, did the system begin to disappear.

Some white farmers left the land to work in the textile mills that were being built, mainly in the upcountry, in the 1880s. By 1892 there were 51 textile mills in South Carolina, about three times the number operating before the Civil War. By 1910 there were 167 mills. The growth of the textile industry was spurred by such purely economic factors as the proximity of raw cotton and the availability of waterpower and of cheap labor. In addition, the construction of mills took on the nature of a crusade, aimed at raising the economic level of impoverished white farmers. By 1910 about 50,000 workers, virtually all of them white, had jobs in textile mills.

C

7

Tillman and the Agrarians

By the 1880s many white farmers were dissatisfied with the traditional leadership of the Democratic Party. That leadership rested with the Redeemer, or Bourbon, faction, consisting of the wealthier planters and business leaders. In 1890 an upcountry farmer, Benjamin R. Tillman, sought the Democratic nomination for governor. Inveighing against the wealthy classes on one hand and the blacks on the other, Tillman rallied white farmers to his support and won the Democratic nomination and the governorship from the Bourbons. Tillman’s proudest achievement was the new state constitution passed in 1895. It replaced the Reconstruction constitution of 1868 and made it difficult for most blacks to vote, using techniques that were not explicitly racial and thus avoided the protection of black voting rights afforded by the 15th Amendment to the Constitution.

Another means of disfranchisement was the so-called white primary—the statewide primary election of the Democratic Party, first held in 1896, in which only white voters could participate. Because this was a party vote only, not a state election, it circumvented the 15th Amendment. However, it effectively denied any voice to the few black voters because under one-party rule the Democrat who won the primary always won the general election.

About this time, state laws began to impose racial segregation, or separation of white and black citizens, in every area of life.

D

The 20th Century

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