http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Carolina#18th_century
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Colonial
period
Main
article: Colonial
period of South Carolina
The
Carolina Colonies
By
the end of the 16th century, the Spanish and French had left the
area of South
Carolina after several reconnaissance missions, expeditions
and failed colonization
attempts, notably the French outpost of Charlesfort
followed by the Spanish mission of Santa
Elena on modern-day Parris
Island between 1562 and 1587. In 1629, Charles
I, King of England,
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
1719, 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 confluence
of the Ashley
and Cooper
rivers. They 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, the colony's
plantations were relatively small and its wealth came from Indian
trade, mainly in Indian
slaves and deerskins.
The slave trade affected tribes throughout the Southeast, and
historians estimate that Carolinians exported 24,000-51,000 Indian
slaves from 1670–1717, sending them to markets ranging from Boston
to the Barbados.[6]
Planters financed the purchase of African
slaves by their sale of Indians.
18th
century
In
the 1700-1770 era, the colony possessed many advantages -
entrepreneurial planters and businessmen, a major harbor, the
expansion of cost-efficient African slave labor, and an attractive
physical environment, with rich soil and a long growing season,
albeit with endemic malaria.
It became one of the wealthiest of the British colonies. Rich
colonials became avid consumers of services from outside the
colony, such as mercantile services, medical education, and legal
training in England. Almost everyone in 18th-century South
Carolina felt the pressures, constraints, and opportunities
associated with the growing importance of trade.[7]
Yemasee
war
A
pan-Indian alliance rose up against the settlers in the Yamasee
War (1715–1717) and nearly destroyed the colony. But the
Yemasee were defeated and, with exposure to European infectious
diseases, the backcountry's Yemasee population was greatly
reduced.[8]
Slaves
After
the Yamasee war, the planters turned exclusively to importing
African slaves for labor. They used their labor to create rice and
indigo
plantations as commodity crops. Building dams, irrigation ditches
and related infrastructure, enslaved Africans created the
equivalent of huge earthworks
to regulate water for the rice culture.
Most
of the slaves originated in West Africa, and in the lowlands and
on the Sea Islands, where large populations of Africans lived
together, they developed a creolized culture and language known as
Gullah/Geechee (the latter a term used in Georgia). They
interacted with and adopted some elements of the English language
and colonial culture and language. The Gullah adapted to multiple
factors in American society during the slavery years. Since the
nineteenth century, they have marketed or otherwise used their
distinctive lifeways, products, and language to perpetuate their
unique ethnic and racial identity.[9]
Low
Country
The
Low
Country was settled first, dominated by wealthy English men
who became owners of large amounts of land on which they created plantations.[10]
They first transported white indentured
servants as laborers, mostly teenage youth from England who came
to work off their passage in hopes of learning to farm and buying
their own land. Planters also imported African laborers to the
colony. In the early colonial years, social boundaries were fluid
between indentured laborers and slaves, and there was considerable
intermarriage. Gradually the terms of enslavement became more
rigid and slavery became a racial caste. With a decrease in
English settlers as the economy improved in England before the
beginning of the 18th century, the planters began to rely chiefly
on enslaved Africans for labor.
The
market for land functioned efficiently and reflected both rapid
economic development and widespread optimism regarding future
economic growth. The frequency and turnover rate for land sales
were tied to the general business cycle; the overall trend was
upward, with almost half of the sales occurring in the decade
before the American Revolution. Prices also rose over time,
parallel with the rise in the price for rice. Prices dropped
dramatically, however, in the years just before the war, when
fears arose about future prospects outside the system of English
mercantilist trade.[11]
Back
country
In
contrast to the Tidewater, the back country was settled later,
chiefly by Scots-Irish
and North British migrants, who had quickly moved down from Pennsylvania
and Virginia.
The immigrants from Ulster, the Scottish lowlands and the north of
England (the border counties) comprised the largest group from the
British Isles before the Revolution. They came mostly in the 18th
century, later than other colonial immigrants. Such "North
Britons were a large majority in much of the South Carolina
upcountry." The character of this environment was "well
matched to the culture of the British borderlands."[12]
They settled in the backcountry throughout the South and relied on
subsistence farming. Mostly they did not own slaves. Given the
differences in background, class, slaveholding, economics and
culture, there was longstanding competition between the Low
Country and Upcountry that played out in politics.
Rice
Planters
earned wealth from two major crops: rice and indigo,
both of which relied on cultivation by slave labor.[13]
Historians no longer believe that the blacks brought the art of
rice cultivation from Africa.[10]
Exports of these crops led South Carolina to become one of the
wealthiest colonies prior to the Revolution. Near the beginning of
the 18th century, planters began rice culture along the coast,
mainly in the Georgetown and Charleston areas. The rice became
known as Carolina Gold, both for its color and its ability to
produce great fortunes for plantation owners.[14]
Indigo
In
the 1740s, Eliza
Lucas Pinckney began indigo culture and processing in coastal
South Carolina. Indigo was in heavy demand in Europe for making
dyes for clothing. An "Indigo Bonanza" followed, with
South Carolina production approaching a million pounds (400 plus
Tonnes) in the late 1750s. This growth was stimulated by a British
bounty of six pence per pound.[15]
South Carolina did not have a monopoly of the British market, but
the demand was strong and many planters switched to the new crop
when the price of rice fell. Carolina indigo had a mediocre
reputation because Carolina planters failed to achieve consistent
high quality production standards. Carolina indigo nevertheless
succeeded in displacing French and Spanish indigo in the British
and in some continental markets, reflecting the demand for cheap
dyestuffs from manufacturers of low-cost textiles, the
fastest-growing sectors of the European textile industries at the
onset of industrialization.[16]
In
addition, the colonial economy depended on sales
of pelts (primarily deerskins), and naval stores and timber.
Coastal towns began shipbuilding to support their trade, using the
prime timbers of the live
oak.
Revolutionary
War
John
Rutledge had many roles in South Carolina's history throughout the
American Revolution.
Main
article: South
Carolina during the American Revolution
Prior
to the American
Revolution, the British
began taxing American colonies to raise revenue.
Residents of South Carolina were outraged by the Townsend Acts
that taxed tea, paper, wine, glass, and oil. To protest the Stamp
Act, South Carolina sent the 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 residents of South Carolina,
like those of the Boston
Tea Party, began to dump tea into the Charleston Harbor,
followed by boycotts
and protests.
South
Carolina set up its state government and constitution on March 26,
1776. Because of the colony's longstanding trade ties with Great
Britain, the Low Country cities had numerous Loyalists. Many of
the Patriot battles fought in South Carolina during the American
Revolution were against loyalist
Carolinians and the Cherokee
Nation, which was allied with the British. This was to British
General Henry
Clinton's advantage, as his 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 who posed no threat.
White
colonists were not the only ones with a desire for freedom.
Estimates are that about 25,000 slaves escaped, migrated or died
during the disruption of the war, 30 percent of the state's slave
population. About 13,000 joined the British, who had promised them
freedom if they left rebel masters and fought with them. From 1770
to 1790, the proportion of the state's population made up of
blacks (almost all of whom were enslaved), dropped from 60.5
percent to 43.8 percent.[18]
On
October 7, 1780, at Kings
Mountain, John Sevier and William Campbell, assaulted the
'high heel' of the wooded mountain, the smallest area but highest
point, while the other seven groups, led by Colonels Shelby,
Williams, Lacey, Cleveland, Hambright, Winston and McDowell
attacked the main Loyalist position by surrounding the 'ball' base
beside the 'heel' crest of the mountain. North and South
Carolinians attacked the British Major Patrick
Ferguson and his body of Loyalists on a hilltop. This was a
major victory for the Patriots, especially because it was won by militiamen
and not trained Continentals. Thomas Jefferson called it,
"The turn of the tide of success."[19]
It was the first Patriot victory since the British had taken
Charleston.
While
tensions mounted between the Crown and the Carolinas, some key
southern Pastors became a target of King George: "...this
church (Bullock Creek) was noted as one of the "Four
Bees" in King George's bonnet due to its pastor, Rev. Joseph
Alexander, preaching open rebellion to the British Crown in June
1780. Bullock Creek Presbyterian Church was a place noted for
being a Whig party stronghold. Under a ground swell of such Calvin
protestant leadership, South Carolina moved from a back seat to
the front in the war against tyranny. Patriots went on to regain
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. The new state constitution was ratified in 1790
without the support of the Upcountry.
Scots
Irish
During
the American
Revolution, the Scots Irish in the back country in most states
were noted as strong patriots. One exception was the Waxhaw
settlement on the lower Catawba
River along the North Carolina-South Carolina boundary, where Loyalism
was strong. The area had two main settlement periods of Scotch
Irish. During the 1750s-1760s, second- and third-generation Scotch
Irish Americans moved from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North
Carolina. This particular group had large families, and as a group
they produced goods for themselves and for others. They generally
were patriots.
Just
prior to the Revolution, a second stream of immigrants came
directly from northern Ireland via Charleston. Mostly poor, this
group settled in an underdeveloped area because they could not
afford expensive land. Most of this group remained loyal to the
Crown or neutral when the war began. Prior to Charles
Cornwallis's march into the backcountry in 1780, two-thirds of
the men among the Waxhaw settlement had declined to serve in the
army. British victory at the Battle of the Waxhaws resulted in
anti-British sentiment in a bitterly divided region. While many
individuals chose to take up arms against the British, the British
forced the people to choose sides, as they were trying to recruit
Loyalists for a militia.[20]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Carolina#18th_century
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