Antebellum South Carolina is typically defined by historians as the period of time between the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. Due to the invention of the cotton gin in 1786, the economies of the Upcountry and the Lowcountry became fairly equal in wealth. The expansion of cotton cultivation in the Upcountry led to a great increase in labor demand, with a concomitant rise in the slave trade. In 1822, free black craftsman and preacher Denmark Vesey was convicted for having masterminded a plan to overthrow Charlestonian whites. In reaction, whites established curfews for blacks, and forbade assembly of large numbers of blacks and the education of slaves.
In 1828, John C. Calhoun decided that constitutionally, each state government 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. Calhoun resigned as vice president, as he planned to become a senator in South Carolina to stop its run toward secession. He also wanted to resolve problems inflaming his fellow Carolinians. Before federal forces arrived at Charleston in response to challenges on tariffs, Calhoun and Henry Clay agreed upon a compromise tariff to lower rates over 10 years.
Read more about Antebellum South Carolina: The Cotton Gin's Effect On South Carolina, The Nullification Crisis, The Vesey Plot and The Indian Removal Act, The Mexican-American War
Famous quotes containing the words antebellum, south and/or carolina:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“...I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.”
—Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)