| |
South Carolina is one of the original states of the
United States of
America, and its history has been remarkable for
an extraordinary commitment to political
independence, whether from overseas or federal
control. As a cornerstone of
mercantilism and the
slave trade, as the powder keg of the
American Civil War,
as the home of Jim Crow,
and as the heart of the
Dixiecrat movement, South Carolina's history has
been the epitome of decentralization (Anti-federalism)
in the U.S.
Although
the area that is now the contemporary
U.S. state of South Carolina
has been populated since at least 13,000 BC (when
tool-making nomads began to leave
material remains), the documented history of South Carolina
begins in 1540 with the visit of
Hernando de Soto.
The proprietary colony of
Carolina was first
settled at Charles
Town in 1670, mostly by immigrants from the (one of
many) English colony of Barbados.
There was discontent with the
Lords Proprietors from the earliest years of the colony,
which erupted into a general overthrow after the
Yamasee War of 1715-1717. In 1719
the colony was officially made a
crown colony, although the Lords Proprietors held their
rights until 1729.
Differences
between the northern and southern parts of Carolina were
recognized during proprietary rule and separate governors
established. The de facto separation of the two
colonies was made official when they were admitted as crown
colonies in 1729.
South
Carolina declared independence from
Great Britain and set up its own government on
March 15, 1776.
It joined the United States by signing the
Declaration of Independence. For two years its president
was John Rutledge who became
governor. On February 5,
1778, South Carolina became the first
state to ratify the first constitution of the U.S., the
Articles of
Confederation.
With the
election of Abraham Lincoln
on an anti-slavery platform in 1860, South Carolina
immediately and with considerable unanimity decided to
secede. On December 20,
1860 it became the first state to leave
the Union and in February it joined the
Confederate States
of America. In April the
American Civil War began when Confederate forces
attacked the American fort at Fort
Sumter, in
Charleston, 1861. After the
Confederate
defeat, South Carolina underwent
Reconstruction. Freed slaves benefited from this,
gaining numerous civil rights;
however, the gains were short-lived, and were eventually
taken away by the Jim Crow laws
that were especially severe in South Carolina. Civil rights
for South Carolina's African
Americans would remain diminished until the
Civil Rights struggle of the
mid-20th century.
From 1865
to 1940 the state was poor and educational levels were low.
Most people lived on 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. The
Piedmont area industrialized, with textile factories
that turned the raw cotton into yard and cloth for sale on
the national market.
Politically
the state was part of the Solid South,
with no elected black officials between 1900 and the late
1960s. Segregation was
rigidly enforced in the Jim Crow
era. The Civil Rights laws of the 1960s ended segregation
and allowed the blacks to vote. By 2000 South Carolina was
solidly
Republican at the presidential level, but state and
local government was contested by the two parties. The
cotton regime ended by the 1950s. As factories were built
across the state, the great majority of farmers left
agriculture. 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 only slightly worse than the
national average of 11.7%
Colonial period
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 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 1729 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,
and 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, South Carolina's plantations were relatively small
and the colony's wealth came from Indian trade, mainly in
deerskins and
Indian slaves. In the first
decades of the 18th century, rice plantations began to
flourish along the coast. After the Yamasee War the
backcountry's Indian population was greatly reduced.
The newly
emptied backcountry was then settled largely by
Scots-Irish migrants from
Pennsylvania and
Virginia, while the low country was
dominated by mostly wealthy plantation
owners who brought in white indentured teenage boys and
girls as laborers. The political tensions between the
lowcountry and upcountry became a recurring theme for
generations.
Two
agricultural crops, both
cultivated by slave labor were the
primary reason why South Carolina became one of the
wealthiest colonies prior to the Revolution. Rice culture
was begun along the coast mainly from the
Georgetown and
Charleston areas,
about the beginning of the 18th century and grew rapidly.
The rice varieties and the cultural knowledge were brought
by slaves from West Africa. In time the best rice was
selected and became known as Carolina Gold, which denoted
not only its color but its ability to produce great fortunes
for plantation owners.
Indigo
culture and processing in South Carolina was begun by
Eliza Lucas Pinckney in the
1740s. An "Indigo Bonanza" followed, with South Carolina
production approaching a million pounds in the late 1750s.
This growth was stimulated by a British bounty of six pence
per pound.
In addition
the colonial economy was derived from
sales of pelts (primarily deerskins), and naval stores
and timber. Shipbuilding was begun,
using the prime timbers of the
Live oak.
Interestingly, until about 1830, South Carolina had the
largest Jewish population in the United
States and all of North America, most of them living in
Charleston (see
History of the Jews in Charleston, South Carolina and
the
History of Jews in South Carolina).
Revolutionary War
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,
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 Carolinians, like the
Boston Tea Party, began to
dump tea into the Charleston Harbor, followed by
boycotts and
protests.
South
Carolina declared independence from Great Britain and set up
its state government on March 15, 1776. 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 and nearly annihilating
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.
On
October 7, 1780,
at Kings Mountain,
Pickens led a body of North and South Carolinians and
attacked British Major Patrick
Ferguson and his body of American loyalists on a
hilltop. This was a major victory for the patriots,
especially because it was won by
militiamen and not trained Continentals. Kings Mountain
is considered to be the turning point in the southern
campaigns since it forced General
Cornwallis to split his troops, making his plan for a
major push north impossible. Patriots regained 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, and
the new state constitution was ratified in 1790 without the
support of the Upcountry.
Antebellum South Carolina
Due to the
invention of the cotton gin in
1786, the economies of Upcountry and Lowcountry became
fairly equal in wealth. The Lowcountry could grow long
staple cotton, but the Upcountry's soil could only grow
short staple cotton. Lowcountry cotton had been easier to
separate by hand until Eli Whitney's
cotton gin made it as easy to separate Upcountry cotton as
it was to separate Lowcountry cotton. The invention caused
farmers to require a larger number of workers. Upcountry
planters began to import slaves.
To avoid
the dangers of corruption in Charleston, the capital was
moved to Columbia.
Before the War of 1812, the
state's Congressmen voted to prevent Northern industry from
exporting any goods, leading to inter-sectional tensions.
After the war, however, John C.
Calhoun proclaimed the need for more industry, and
proposed higher protective tariffs. He later reversed
course.
In 1828,
John C. Calhoun decided that constitutionally, the state
government of each state within that state had more power
than the federal government. Consequently, if a state deemed
it necessary, it had the right to "nullify" any federal law
within its boundaries. When in 1832, South Carolina's houses
quickly "nullified" the hated federally mandated tariffs,
President Andrew Jackson declared this an act of open
rebellion and ordered U.S. ships to South Carolina to
enforce the law.
Calhoun
resigned as vice president, planning on becoming a senator
in South Carolina to stop its run toward secession while
solving the problems inflaming his fellow Carolinians.
Before federal forces arrived at Charleston, Calhoun and
Henry Clay agreed upon a
compromise tariff that would lower rates over 10 years.
Tensions
over the institution of slavery were a key feature of South
Carolina life during the antebellum period. In 1822, free
black craftsman and preacher
Denmark Vesey was convicted for having masterminded a
plan to overthrow Charlestonian whites by slaves and free
blacks. Whites established curfews
and forbade assembly of large numbers of African Americans
and the education of slaves. Since the mere presence of free
blacks was seen as dangerous, South Carolina leaders also
made it illegal for slaveholders to free
their slaves without a special degree from the state
legislature. This intensified already existing hostility
between the abolitionist Northern States and the
slave-advocating Southern States.
American Civil War
Prewar tensions
Very few
South Carolina whites 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 noted that
the dry and barren West could not support a plantation
system and would remain slaveless. Thus, 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 more militant Carolinian factions'
desire to secede immediately.
Andrew Pickens Butler argued against Charleston
publisher Robert Barnwell Rhett,
who advocated immediate and, if necessary, independence.
Butler won the battle, but Rhett outlived him.
When it was
seen that President Abraham
Lincoln would be elected, a number of conventions
organized around the Deep South to
discuss the options. 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 voted to secede from the Union. President
James Buchanan declared the
secession illegal but did not act to stop it.
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 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.
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
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 occurred within the state's
borders until 1865, when
Sherman's Army, having already completed its march to
the Sea in Savannah, marched 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. Poverty would
mark the state for generations to come. 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.
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 1865-1877
Interracial animosity
African-Americans had long comprised the majority of the
state's
population and began to play a prominent role in the
South Carolina government for the first time during
Reconstruction. Despite the
anti-Northern fury of their prewar and wartime politics,
most South Carolinians, including the state's leading
opinion-maker, Wade Hampton III,
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:
-
"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 comprised of a coalition of Freedmen,
Carpetbaggers and
Scalawags. The federally mandated
new Constitution of 1868 brought democratic reforms.
Scalawags supported it, but 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 South 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. When the Union Army rolled in and slaves deserted
by the thousands (though many did not), slaveholders were
stunned. 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 gubernatorial 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 this could indeed be the year they regain
control. Before the election, Republican Governor
Chamberlain asked
Washington for assistance
and President Ulysses S. Grant
sent 1,100 federal troops to keep order and ensure a "fair"
election.
Using as a
model the ", which had redeemed that state in 1874, South
Carolina Redeemers employed intimidation, 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, and each selecting a black man to watch, privately
threatened to shoot him if he raised a disturbance; they
organized hundreds of rifle clubs, then obeying
proclamations to disband, 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, turning
them out of employment and avoiding all contacts with them.
They beat down the opposition — but always just within the
law. Only a few
confrontations drew blood. Wade Hampton made more than
forty speeches across the state. Thousands of Black
Republicans joined his cause; donning the Red Shirts, they
paraded with the whites. Most Scalawags "crossed Jordan," as
switching to the Democracy was called. On election day,
there was trickery and 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, 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 convoluted presidential "victory" over
Samuel Tilden, withdrew federal
troops from Columbia. At this point, the Republican
government dissolved and Chamberlain headed back north, as
Wade Hampton and his Redeemers took control.
Conservative rule 1877-1890
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 repair the damage done to the state by 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.
Furthermore they launched investigations into the corruption
and frauds committed by eminent Republicans during
Reconstruction, but all charges were dropped when the
federal government similarly dropped its charges against the
white participants of the
violence during the 1876 election campaign.
With their
position secure, the Democrats next tackled the state debt.
Massive corruption and the squandering of the resources of
the state by the Republicans during Reconstruction caused
the state debt to spiral out of control to $25 million by
1873. Many Democrats from the upcountry, led by
Martin Gary, pushed
for the entire state debt to be canceled, but he was
bitterly opposed by those from Charleston who were the chief
holders of the bonds. A compromise moderated by Wade Hampton
was achieved and by October of 1882, the state debt was
reduced to $6.5 million.
Other
legislative accomplishments by the Conservatives went to its
primary benefactors, the planting and business class. Taxes
across the board were reduced and funding was cut for
programs that generally assisted the blacks. Oral contracts
were made to be legally binding, breach of contract was
enforced as a criminal offense, and those who were 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 and generously supported by the state
government.
By the late
1880's, the agrarian movement
swept through the state and raised the awareness of the
farming class to assert their political rights. They
pressured the legislature to establish an agriculture
college, which the legislature complied with great
reluctance by adding an agriculture college to the
University of South Carolina in 1887. However,
Ben Tillman engaged in
demagogy to provoke the farmers into
demanding a separate agriculture college completely isolated
from the politics in Columbia and the Conservatives finally
relented in 1889.
Tillman era 1890-1914
In 1890,
Ben Tillman set his sights on the
gubernatorial contest of that year. The farmers of the
state rallied behind his candidacy and Tillman easily
defeated the Conservative nominee,
A.C. Haskell. The
Conservatives failed to grasp the strength of the farmer's
movement in the state and they no longer engendered respect
for having fought so gallantly for the state 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" and devised a new constitution as a means to
deprive
blacks of voting rights without violating the
Fifteenth Amendment. After the promulgation of the
Constitution of 1895, the usual black vote dropped from
approximately 15,000 to under 5,000 and blacks were also
excluded from the Democratic primary. 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
and 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 ascension to the U.S. Senate in 1895. The
Conservatives recaptured the legislature in 1902 and
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. The sharecroppers and mill
workers coalesced behind the candidacy of Tillmanite
Cole Blease in the
gubernatorial election of 1910 because they felt like he
was making them an important part of the political force of
the state. However, once in office Blease never initiated
any policies that were beneficial to the mill workers or
poor farmers. Instead his four years in office were highly
erratic in behavior and it helped pave the way for a
progressive, Richard
I. Manning, to win the
governorship in 1914.
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 based on the Northern economic 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.
The idea was not entirely new to South Carolinians; in 1854,
De Bow's Commercial Review of the South & West,
founded by Charleston-born
James Dunwoody
Brownson De Bow, had boasted to
investors of South Carolina's potential for
manufacturing, citing its three
lines of rail roads, inexpensive
raw materials, nonfreezing rivers, and labor pool.
These
enticements remained constant after the
Civil War, 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, things were looking up. In 1902, the
Lowcountry hosted the
Charleston
Expedition, drawing visitors from around the
world, with the hope of impressing 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 Irvine Manning
III in 1914. The expansion of brightleaf
tobacco around 1900 from North
Carolina brought an agricultural boom, which was broken by
the depression, but recovered and lasted until near the end
of the 20th century. In 1919, the invasion of the
boll weevil destroyed the state's
cotton crop 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. The
expansion of military bases,
followed by domestic and foreign investment in
manufacturing, have helped 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 discontent with the
Democrats' post–World War II
continuation of the New Deal's
federalization of power. The process 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.
When the
time came for Clemson to
allow Harvey Gantt into its
classes in 1962, after the state and the college's board of
trustees had exhausted all legal recourse to prevent it,
word went out from influential whites that no violence or
otherwise unseemly behavior would be tolerated. Gantt's
entrance into the school occurred 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". Twenty years later, Gantt
would 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 Republican Party, most notably
Senator 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 Carolina's
golf courses and
beaches. 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 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.
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 a 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
went into the 1998 elections with such an edge in
popularity that the top two
Democratic candidates did not even bother to run.
Remarkably, Beasley was brought down by the Democrats' third
stringer, Lancaster State Assemblyman
Jim Hodges. Hodges, a former opponent of legalized
gambling, 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 had not said
anything up until that moment, he agreed with 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 admired Hodges'
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 had fingers pointing in Hodges' way. The lack of
hurricanes in the 2000 and 2001
seasons did not 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 number 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 sophomore years.
Hodges campaigned for reelection in 2002 against Republican
moderate Mark Sanford, former
U.S. congressman from Sullivan's
Island, and lost.
State
Index |
Information
|
Fast Facts
|
Geography
|
Government
|
Economy |
History
|
|
