Antebellum South Carolina
The expansion of cotton cultivation upstate led to a marked increase in the labor demand, with a concomitant rise in the slave trade.
In 1822, free black craftsman and preacher Denmark Vesey was convicted for having masterminded a plan to overthrow Charlestonian whites.
Calhoun resigned as Vice President, as he planned to become a South Carolina Senator to stop its run toward secession.
In 1786, leaders of the state agreed to ease tensions between Upcountry and Lowcountry citizens by moving the capital from Charleston to a location more convenient to both regions.
It had achieved early economic dominance because of wealth derived from the cultivation of both rice and long-staple cotton, a major crop.
The state's over-reliance on cotton in its economy paved the way for post-Civil War poverty in three ways: planters ruined large swaths of land by over-cultivation, small farmers in the upcountry reduced subsistence farming in favor of cotton, and greater profits in other states led to continued departure of many talented people, both white and black.
[1] In addition, because planters wore out new lands in-state or moved rather than invest in fertilizer or manufacturing, South Carolina did not begin to industrialize until much later.
Afterward, as the North began to create manufacturing centers, Northern lawmakers passed higher taxes on imports to protect the new industries.
In the 1820s, many South Carolinians began to talk of seceding from the union to operate as an independent state with trade laws tailored to its own best interests.
Even South Carolina-born John C. Calhoun, who had begun as a Federalist favoring a strong centralized government, began to change his views.
The debate about the relative importance of states' rights versus federal power became a dividing line between the North and South.
Pro-slavery apologists argued that the Northerners had no place in the debate over the morality of slavery, because they could not own slaves and would therefore not suffer the societal impacts that manumission would mean to the South.
[citation needed] These events inflamed fears and galvanized Southerners into an anti-abolitionist stance that effectively ended reasoned debate on the issue.
In an evolving concept, they came to proclaim slavery a positive good, a civilizing benefit to the enslaved, and a proper response to the "natural" differences between whites and blacks.
[citation needed] So avid had this defense become that by 1856, Governor James Hopkins Adams recommended a resumption of the Foreign Slave Trade.
[citation needed] A powerful minority of slaveholders had begun arguing that every white man should be legally required to own at least one slave, which they claimed would give an interest in the issue and instill responsibility.
They prohibited educating enslaved African-Americans, as they believed slaves' learning to read and write would make them unhappy and less compliant.
South Carolina leaders prohibited slaveholders from freeing their slaves without a special decree from the state legislature.
South Carolina strongly supported the Mexican–American War, as its leaders believed success would allow acquisition of additional lands open to slavery.
The Palmetto Regiment was prepared and trained for the Mexican–American War by cadets and faculty at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina in Charleston.
[citation needed] Chiefly due to disease, however, only 300 men returned alive of the 1,100 South Carolinian volunteers who fought.
[citation needed] As the Mexican–American War drew to a close, the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso in the U.S. Congress raised sectional tensions, this time over the issue of slavery.
Introduced by a northern congressman as a rider on a war appropriations bill, the proviso specified that slavery would not be permitted in any territory ceded by Mexico.
The South had furnished more men for the war (435,248 versus the North's 22,136[citation needed]) and expected this sacrifice to be rewarded with new slave states carved out of the conquered lands.
The preservation of slavery also relied on territorial expansion, which is why most southern states supported the Mexican American War of 1846-1848, and it is the same reason why South Carolinian representatives pushed hard in an attempt to reopen the African slave trade in Congress but were unsuccessful, providing another reason why the state tried to secede from the Union in 1860 following the election of Abraham Lincoln.
"The North is firmly in the grip of a blind and relentless fanaticism and a Lincoln administration would lead inevitably to southern degradation and dishonor.".
