The Vesey Plot and The Indian Removal Act
Since colonial times, South Carolina had always been home to a sizable population of free blacks. Many were descended from enslaved mulattoes freed by their white fathers/owners. Others had been freed for faithful service. Some African Americans purchased their freedom with portions of earnings they were allowed to keep when being "hired out". As long as there had been free blacks, free blacks made the white population nervous.
In 1822, free black craftsman and preacher Denmark Vesey was convicted of having masterminded a plan for enslaved and free African Americans to overthrow Charlestonian whites. Afterward whites established curfews and forbade assembly of large numbers of African Americans. They prohibited educating enslaved African Americans, as they believed slaves' learning to read and write would make them unhappy and less compliant. Free African Americans posed a challenge to slavery by their very presence. South Carolina leaders prohibited slaveholders to free their slaves without a special decree from the state legislature. This was the same path that Virginia had taken when its slaveholders became uneasy about freedpeople.
Like Denmark Vesey, most of South Carolina's free blacks lived in Charleston, where there were opportunities for work and companionship. A free African-American subculture developed there. Charlestonian blacks performed more than 55 different occupations, including a variety of artisan and crafts jobs. Some African Americans, such as Sumter cotton gin-maker William Ellison, amassed great fortunes. He did so in the same fashion that most wealthy whites had - by using the labor of black slaves.
As settlers pressed against western lands controlled by Native Americans, violence repeatedly erupted between them. Andrew Jackson came to the office of President determined to pave the way for American settlers. In 1830 he signed the Indian Removal Act, by which he offered Native Americans land in unsettled areas west of the Mississippi River, in exchange for their lands in existing states. While some tribes accepted this solution, others resisted. By this time, the Cherokee Nation had been mostly pushed west and south out of South Carolina into Georgia.
Read more about this topic: Antebellum South Carolina
Famous quotes containing the words plot, indian, removal and/or act:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Sabra Cravat: I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself. Mooning around with an Indian hired girl.
Cim Cravat: Ruby isn’t an Indian hired girl. She’s the daughter of an Osage chief.
Sabra Cravat: Osage, fiddlesticks.
Cim Cravat: She’s just as important in the Osage nation as, well, as Alice Roosevelt is in Washington.”
—Howard Estabrook (1884–1978)
“Anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also.”
—Baruch (Benedict)
“We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will, therefore, always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in pursuit of it. No, we are complicated machines; and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometime stop that motion.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)