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:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Most of the folktales dealing with the Indians are lurid and romantic. The story of the Indian lovers who were refused permission to wed and committed suicide is common to many places. Local residents point out cliffs where Indian maidens leaped to their death until it would seem that the first duty of all Indian girls was to jump off cliffs.”
—For the State of Iowa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“To die is not to play a part in society; it is the act of a single person. Let us live and laugh among our friends; let us die and sulk among strangers.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)