Republic of South Carolina - Background

Background

South Carolina had long before the War of Secession/American Civil War been a region that had to some extent supported individual states' rights, especially to maintain the rights of slaverholders as the state saw fit, which South Carolina and many other states saw as in jeopardy from increasing Abolitionist sentiment in the North. As much as historical revisionism painted the state as a bulwark for states' Rights, South Carolina had actually been an ardent supporter of the federal government, especially in the federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. As northern states failed to fulfill their obligations under the act, the state began to see Washington as increasingly ineffective in protecting its economy. Therefore, political leaders such as John C. Calhoun and Preston Brooks had inflamed regional (and national) passions, and voices cried for secession. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, and saw the first shots of the Civil War when Citadel cadets fired on a civilian merchant ship Star of the West bringing supplies to the beleaguered Federal garrison at Fort Sumter on January 9, 1861.

Very few South Carolina whites saw emancipation as an option. Whites feared that if blacks– the vast majority in most parts of the state– were freed, they would try to "Africanize" their cherished society and culture as they had seen happen after slave revolutions in some areas of the West Indies. Many white Southerners also believed that slavery, as practiced in the South, was "the mildest and most humane of all institutions to which the name of 'slavery' has ever been applied," and that this "benign institution" had transformed "unprofitable savages" into "efficient Christian laborers." Carolinian leaders were divided between devoted Unionists that opposed any sort of secession, and those who believed secession was a state's right. John C. Calhoun noted that the dry and barren West could not support a plantation system and would remain slaveless. Thus, Calhoun proposed that Congress should not exclude slavery from territories but let each state choose for itself whether it would allow slaves within its borders. After Calhoun's death in 1850, however, South Carolina was left without a leader great enough in national standing and character to prevent more militant Carolinian factions' desire to secede immediately. Andrew Pickens Butler argued against Charleston publisher Robert Barnwell Rhett, who advocated immediate secession and, if necessary, independence. Butler won the battle, but Rhett outlived him.