Reconstruction in South Carolina
[2] A couple influential scalawags from South Carolina during reconstruction were Franklin J. Moses Jr. and Thomas J Coghlan.
[3][4] Initial experiments with African-American land ownership began during the Civil War with the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.
The United States Department of the Treasury decided to allow the slaves of the Sea Islands to farm and cultivate the land in an experiment of citizenship and landownership.
However, in January 1865, Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No.
15 provided all the Sea Islands, encompassing 485,000,[clarification needed] to 40,000 African Americans in South Carolina.
[6] At the end of the Civil War, these new freedmen held only possessory titles to the land granted to them by General Sherman.
President Andrew Johnson cancelled the possessory titles and granted the land back to southerners who paid the Direct Tax Commission and took an oath of allegiance.
[6] The conversation regarding opportunity and land ownership for newly freed African-Americans became a central issue of the 1868 Constitutional Convention of South Carolina.
Cain specifically petitioned for one million dollars, and that the land purchased for African Americans would be loaned and eventually be paid back.
Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts advised that Congress would not accept the South Carolina petition.
[9] The 1865 South Carolina constitution created after the Civil War did not provide newly freed African-Americans suffrage.
Black delegate Robert B. Elliott, fought for the removal of a literacy test that he believed would discourage African Americans from voting.
[13] Another proposal brought before the convention was to make public schools in South Carolina open to all races.
There was concern from the white delegates, specifically B. O. Duncan, who worried that this would lead to racial integration of all schools.
These freedwomen wanted to turn their efforts and labor from the fields to a more domestic setting and work in the home.
The term black, used to describe skin color, was used very loosely, since the census did not give a completely accurate definition of who that included.
[17] Scalawags was a derogatory term applied to white southerners who were involved in, and contributed to, Reconstruction laws.
Many white southern politicians became Republican scalawags due to the high influx of African-American voters after the Civil War.
[18] At the same convention, white southerner Thomas J. Coghlan fought to establish a hate-speech law which would have prohibited racial slurs against African Americans.
[4] South Carolina Klan members were ordered to report to their leadership of any meetings or gatherings of republicans or African Americans.
[4] Northern republican journalist James Shepherd Pike, regarding his observations of South Carolina, believed that involvement of the Klan would be helpful against the "ignorant" leadership of African Americans.
