South Carolina In The American Revolution
Prior to the American Revolution, the British began taxing American colonies to raise revenue. South Carolina residents were outraged about the 1767 Townshend Acts that taxed tea, paper, wine, glass, and oil. To protest the earlier (1765) Stamp Act, South Carolina sent wealthy rice planter Thomas Lynch, 26-year old lawyer John Rutledge, and Christopher Gadsden to the Stamp Act Congress, held in 1765 New York. Other taxes were removed in 1766, but tea taxes remained. Soon South Carolinians confiscated the tea that arrived at Charleston Harbor and stored it in the Exchange and Customs House. It was later sold to help pay for the Revolution.
Many of the South Carolinian battles fought during the American Revolution were with loyalist Carolinians and the part of the Cherokee tribe that allied with the British. This was to General Henry Clinton's advantage, whose 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 a fleeing army of Patriot soldiers who posed no threat. Enslaved Africans and African Americans chose independence by escaping to British lines where they were promised freedom.
Combined Continental Army and state militia forces under the command of Major General Nathanael Greene regained control of much of South Carolina by capturing the numerous interdependent chain of British held forts throughout the State, one-by-one, until the British and Loyalists were surrounded in Charles Town and completely dependent on food supplies by sea. After preliminary peace terms had been agreed, the British evacuated Charles Town on December 14, 1782, a day now officially designated as "South Carolina Independence Day". Greene was awarded a Congressional Medal and numerous other official awards from the State of South Carolina for his leadership in liberating the state and for restoring an elected government. 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.
Read more about South Carolina In The American Revolution: Prewar Causes, Early Conflicts, Siege of Charleston, General Clinton's Mistakes, Tides Turn For The Americans, The Constitution
Famous quotes containing the words south, carolina, american and/or revolution:
“History in the making is a very uncertain thing. It might be better to wait till the South American republic has got through with its twenty-fifth revolution before reading much about it. When it is over, some one whose business it is, will be sure to give you in a digested form all that it concerns you to know, and save you trouble, confusion, and time. If you will follow this plan, you will be surprised to find how new and fresh your interest in what you read will become.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)
“Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every bit as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.... this is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.”
—Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, African American civil rights organization. SNCC Position Paper (Women in the Movement)
“A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)