South Carolina was among the wealthiest of the thirteen colonies and the only one where enslaved Black people made up a majority of the population, producing an extraordinarily stratified society dominated by Low Country rice planters. The planter class itself was divided between Patriots and Loyalists. South Carolinians moved early. In December 1773, shortly before the Boston Tea Party, Christopher Gadsden led a seizure of British tea in Charleston. By 1775 the colony had built a powerful shadow government: the Provincial Congress in January and the Council of Safety in June, with Henry Laurens as its first president and effective governor. A sharp divide between the wealthy Low Country and the poorer, less-represented backcountry drove much of the colony’s politics. Roughly 25 percent of white South Carolinians actively opposed the Revolution. Henry Laurens summed up the era’s anxieties as the “triple threat” of a simultaneous British invasion, a large-scale slave rebellion, and a coordinated Native American attack on the frontier.
Interviewees
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Elizabeth Chew
- CEO, South Carolina Historical Society
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Annette Guild
- Metadata Specialist, South Carolina Historical Society
