History
The Republican Party of the United States was founded during the 1850s in response to the political tensions that revolved around slavery and came to define that era. The Republican Party's goal was to abolish slavery and preserve the hierarchy of the national government over that of the states. The ensuing years were marked by an increasing divide between northern and southern states that eventually boiled over when the state of South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860. Other southern states followed and the Civil War of the United States began between the Union and the newly minted Confederacy. In 1865, the conflict had finally ended with the Union as the victor. Following this, the southern and formerly Confederate states were gradually reintroduced back into the Union of the United States with a process that came to be called the Reconstruction Era of the United States. Northern Republicans and freed slaves came to control the politics of South Carolina during this era, leaving the formerly powerful white officials without the money and political sway that they previously had enjoyed. The Republican Party of South Carolina was established during this time and controlled the politics of South Carolina throughout this period. When Reconstruction finally ended in 1877, however, white Democrats led by Wade Hampton took back control of the South Carolina government and dominated the political landscape for decades after. Thus, the formerly Confederate states had evolved into Republican states during Reconstruction only to form the Solid South dominated by the Democratic party once the Reconstruction Era of the United States ended. The control possessed by the Democratic party left the South Carolina Republican Party with very little influence within the state for generations after. This control would last until the second half of the twentieth century.
A milestone for the South Carolina Republican Party was September 16, 1964, when Senator Strom Thurmond announced to a statewide television audience that he had switched parties from the Democrats to the Republicans, saying the Democratic "party of our fathers is dead" and had "forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses, and businessmen looking for government contracts and favors". This statement sparked a shift from the solidly Democratic southern United States towards an equally solid Republican party support base within the region. Ten years later, James B. Edwards was elected as the first Republican governor of South Carolina since Reconstruction and the majority of the elected government officials in the years since have also been part of the Republican party.
South Carolina's January 21, 2012 Republican Presidential Preference Primary was the party's largest ever, drawing over 600,000 participants despite terrible weather. Newt Gingrich won the race with 40.4% of the vote. The highly contested election set multiple state records for a presidential primary cycle, including five presidential debates and $13.2 million in television ads.
Read more about this topic: South Carolina Republican Party
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)