SCSouth Carolina History

Cofitachequi, and a rebellion in 1526

Ninety-four years before the Mayflower, a Spanish expedition under Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon planted a town of about 600 people on this coast, most often placed near Winyah Bay. Fever killed Ayllon within weeks, and the enslaved Africans he had brought set fire to the settlement and escaped to nearby Native towns, the earliest recorded slave rebellion anywhere in what became the United States. Almost everything that would define South Carolina is present in that failed winter.

Hernando de Soto marched inland in 1540 to Cofitachequi, a Mississippian chiefdom on the Wateree River near present Camden, ruled by a woman his chroniclers called its lady. In its graves the Spaniards found European beads left over from Ayllon's disaster. The Catawba held the piedmont, the Cherokee the mountains, and Yamasee, Westo, Edisto and Kiawah communities the rivers and the coast. French Huguenots tried Parris Island in 1562 and quit within a year, and the Spanish held Santa Elena on the same ground as Florida's capital from 1566 to 1587.

Barbados on the Ashley: rice, indigo and Stono

Charles II granted Carolina to eight Lords Proprietors in 1663, and English settlers landed on the Ashley River in 1670, moving in 1680 to the point between the rivers to build Charles Town. A large share came from Barbados, and they brought a fully formed sugar island slave code rather than inventing one. The first export business was in Native captives: traders shipped tens of thousands of enslaved Indians to the Caribbean before 1715, helping provoke the Yamasee War that nearly ended the colony.

Rice made the difference. Grown on tidal flats behind banks and trunk gates, it depended on engineering and agronomy that enslaved West Africans knew and English planters did not, and it made the lowcountry the wealthiest place in British North America. Eliza Lucas Pinckney raised the first viable indigo crop in 1744. From about 1708 the population was majority Black, unique among the mainland colonies. On September 9, 1739 enslaved men gathered near the Stono River, seized weapons and marched toward Spanish Florida, killing about twenty whites before the militia caught them and killed more than forty. The Negro Act of 1740 answered with a ban on assembly, on learning to write and on the drums that had called them together.

More Revolutionary battles than any other state

Something near 200 engagements were fought on South Carolina ground. Charleston surrendered on May 12, 1780 with roughly 5,000 men, the worst American defeat of the war. What broke the British hold afterward was irregular: backcountry militia destroyed a Loyalist force at Kings Mountain in about an hour on October 7, 1780, Daniel Morgan annihilated Tarleton's legion at Cowpens on January 17, 1781, and Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter and Andrew Pickens ran a partisan war out of the swamps that made the countryside ungovernable. After Eutaw Springs in September 1781 the British held little beyond Charleston, which they left on December 14, 1782. The capital moved inland to Columbia in 1786, and the state ratified the Constitution on May 23, 1788, eighth, after pressing hard at Philadelphia to protect the slave trade.

Nullification, secession and Fort Sumter

The politics that led out of the Union were rehearsed for thirty years. In 1822 Charleston authorities executed Denmark Vesey, a carpenter who had bought his own freedom with lottery winnings, along with 34 others accused of plotting a rising. In 1828 John C. Calhoun anonymously argued that a state could void a federal law, and in November 1832 a convention declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null inside the state. Jackson answered with a Force Bill authorizing the army, a compromise tariff defused the crisis in 1833, and Calhoun quit the vice presidency.

On December 20, 1860 a convention at Institute Hall in Charleston dissolved the union between South Carolina and the other states, 169 to nothing, the first state to go. Batteries around the harbor opened on Fort Sumter at half past four in the morning on April 12, 1861, and the war began there.

Port Royal, Columbia, and a Reconstruction taken back

Union forces took Port Royal Sound in November 1861, and the Sea Islands became a laboratory. Planters fled, about ten thousand people they had enslaved stayed, and northern teachers arrived to organize schools, wages and land sales in what was called the Port Royal Experiment. Robert Smalls, an enslaved harbor pilot, took the armed steamer Planter past the Charleston forts before dawn on May 13, 1862 and handed it to the blockading fleet; he later served five terms in Congress. The 54th Massachusetts assaulted Battery Wagner on July 18, 1863. Sherman's army entered Columbia on February 17, 1865 and most of the city burned that night, a fire each side blamed on the other.

What followed was the most thorough Black political mobilization in the South. The constitutional convention of 1868 had a majority of Black delegates, the first anywhere in the country, and wrote free public schooling into state law. That order was dismantled by force: the Hamburg massacre of July 1876, the Red Shirt campaign that installed Wade Hampton, the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, and the constitution of 1895, written under Benjamin Tillman, whose poll tax and understanding clause cut Black registration to almost nothing for sixty years.

Boll weevil, mill villages and the plant at Greer

An earthquake leveled much of Charleston in 1886, and the boll weevil arrived after 1917 to finish what worn-out soil had started, collapsing cotton when it was the only work available. People left. The Black share of the state's population fell from about 55 percent in 1910 to roughly 30 percent by 1970, one of the largest outflows of the Great Migration. Textile capital moved the other way, out of New England into the upstate, where mill villages ran on white labor and kept Black workers off the machines until federal pressure in the 1960s.

The legal end of segregation began in Clarendon County, where parents suing for a school bus filed Briggs v. Elliott in 1950, the first of the five cases decided together as Brown v. Board of Education. Harvey Gantt integrated Clemson in January 1963, and highway patrolmen killed three students at South Carolina State in Orangeburg on February 8, 1968. Hurricane Hugo came ashore near Sullivan's Island as a category 4 storm on September 21, 1989. The mills have largely gone in their turn, succeeded by a German carmaker at Greer from 1994 and an aircraft plant in North Charleston from 2011. After nine people were murdered at Emanuel AME Church on June 17, 2015, the legislature voted to take the Confederate battle flag off the State House grounds, and it came down that July 10.

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