Ladies Benevolent Society (LBS) was a charitable organization for women, active in the city of Charleston, South Carolina between 1813 and 1861.
The LBS was founded in 1813. It was founded by white, elite women of Charleston. The initial purpose was to provide help to the needing after the War of 1812, but in contrast to its predecessors, it was to become the first permanent charitable organisation by women in Charleston.
LBS conducted charity among the poor in Charleston, founded upon the ideal of Christian charity. The foremost focus of the LBS was poor white women, although they are known to have occasionally helped free coloured women as well. LBS aimed to offer care for "anyone who did not fall within the purview of the almshouse, dispensary, or slave hospital.” The ladies cared for Blacks if they were freed and did not ask for information about how that freedom was obtained in the name of "southern tradition". The ladies would visit the ill and provide them with sugar, coffee, blankets, soaps, among other comforts. [1] It played an important role in the life of the pre-war city. In Antebellum Charleston, there were few occupations available for uneducated poor women who needed to support themselves. Normally in the 19th century, this category of women would be working as domestic servants, but in the Antebellum South, the planter aristocracy owned enslaved people and did not employ free domestic maids, and consequently, poor uneducated white women were, to a large degree, dependent upon charity.
The LBS played a pioneering role as one of the first public organisations in Antebellum South Carolina which was managed by women. In Antebellum South, where women's public participation in society was controversial, LBS was an important organisation founded and managed by women which played an active part in society and managed its own independent finances. It was the local version of a number of local organisations of the same kind, also called "Ladies Benevolent Society", which was founded around the United States at that time. It was the first of the three leading women's organisations in Antebellum Charleston, the other being Ladies Fuel Society (LFS) from 1830 and Female Charitable Association (FCA) from 1824.
The Ladies Benevolent Society provided an estimated 10% of charity proceeds in Charleston at the time. With the rise of other charitable groups such as the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy and the Methodist Benevolent Society during the mid-19th century, the Ladies Benevolent Society’s workload diminished. [1]
LBS was disbanded after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
Charleston is the most populous city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston metropolitan area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint of South Carolina's coastline on Charleston Harbor, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the confluence of the Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers. Charleston had a population of 150,227 at the 2020 census. The population of the Charleston metropolitan area, comprising Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties, was estimated to be 849,417 in 2023. It ranks as the third-most populous metropolitan statistical area in the state, and the 71st-most populous in the United States.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
Geographically, the U.S. states known as the Old South are those in the Southern United States that were among the original Thirteen Colonies. The region term is differentiated from the Deep South and Upper South.
In the British colonies in North America and in the United States before the abolition of slavery in 1865, free Negro or free Black described the legal status of African Americans who were not enslaved. The term was applied both to formerly enslaved people (freedmen) and to those who had been born free, whether of African or mixed descent.
Antebellum South Carolina is typically defined by historians as South Carolina during the period between the War of 1812, which ended in 1815, and the American Civil War, which began in 1861.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Frances Jacobs was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, to Jewish Bavarian immigrants and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. She married Abraham Jacobs, the partner of her brother Jacob, and came west with him to Colorado where Wisebart and Jacobs had established businesses in Denver and Central City. In Denver, Frances Jacobs became a driving force for the city's charitable organizations and activities, with national exposure. Among the philanthropical organizations she founded, she is best remembered as a founder of the United Way and the Denver's Jewish Hospital Association.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860, and was one of the founding member states of the Confederacy in February 1861. The bombardment of the beleaguered U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, is generally recognized as the first military engagement of the war. The retaking of Charleston in February 1865, and raising the flag again at Fort Sumter, was used for the Union symbol of victory.
The Benevolent Society, founded by Edward Smith Hall in 1813, is Australia's first and oldest charity. The society is an independent, not-for-profit organization whose main goals include helping families, older Australians and people with disabilities.
The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial history of the United States until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the Civil War.
The Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Mercy is a Roman Catholic religious institute founded by Bishop John England of the Diocese of Charleston in South Carolina, in 1829 as the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. In 1949 the word "Charity" was added to the congregation's name, in order to identify it more explicitly with others that follow the Rule of Life of St. Vincent de Paul. They came to serve throughout the Eastern United States. The members of the congregation use the postnominal initials of O.L.M.
The history of Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the longest and most diverse of any community in the United States, spanning hundreds of years of physical settlement beginning in 1670. Charleston was one of leading cities in the South from the colonial era to the Civil War in the 1860s. The city grew wealthy through the export of rice and, later, sea island cotton and it was the base for many wealthy merchants and landowners. Charleston was the capital of American slavery.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
Poor White is a sociocultural classification used to describe economically disadvantaged Whites in the English-speaking world, especially White Americans with low incomes.
Black South Carolinians are residents of the state of South Carolina who are of African American ancestry. This article examines South Carolina's history with an emphasis on the lives, status, and contributions of African Americans. Enslaved Africans first arrived in the region in 1526, and the institution of slavery remained until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Until slavery's abolition, the free black population of South Carolina never exceeded 2%. Beginning during the Reconstruction Era, African Americans were elected to political offices in large numbers, leading to South Carolina's first majority-black government. Toward the end of the 1870s however, the Democratic Party regained power and passed laws aimed at disenfranchising African Americans, including the denial of the right to vote. Between the 1870s and 1960s, African Americans and whites lived segregated lives; people of color and whites were not allowed to attend the same schools or share public facilities. African Americans were treated as second-class citizens leading to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In modern America, African Americans constitute 22% of the state's legislature, and in 2014, the state's first African American U.S. Senator since Reconstruction, Tim Scott, was elected. In 2015, the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina Statehouse after the Charleston church shooting.
The Brown Fellowship Society (1790-1945), which became the Century Fellowship Society, was an African-American self-help organization in South Carolina. It eventually became the Century Fellowship Society.
Eliza Seymour Lee (1800–1874), was an American pastry chef and restaurateur.
Slavery as a positive good in the United States was the prevailing view of Southern politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to seeing it as a crime against humanity or a necessary evil. They defended the legal enslavement of people for their labor as a benevolent, paternalistic institution with social and economic benefits, an important bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution similar or superior to the free labor in the North.
Elias Marks founded the South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute at Barhamville, South Carolina. The girls' school flourished for over 30 years in the antebellum period, pioneering in higher education for young women. Marks was born in Charleston and earned an M.D. at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. He soon switched from medicine to a career in female education. Marks published writings on medical and educational themes as well as a book of poems. He "was esteemed by all as a scholar and a gentleman."