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The Reconstruction era was a period in American history following the American Civil War (1861–1865) and lasting until approximately the Compromise of 1877. During Reconstruction, attempts were made to rebuild the country after the bloody Civil War, bring the former Confederate states back into the United States, and to redress the political, social, and economic legacies of slavery.
Charleston is the largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston–North 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 150,277 at the 2020 census. The 2020 population of the Charleston metropolitan area, comprising Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties, was 799,636 residents, the third-largest in the state and the 74th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States.
In the United States the period 1849 and 1865 was dominated by the Origins of the American Civil War between North and South, and the bloody fighting in 1861-1865 that produced Northern victory in the war and ended slavery. At the same time industrialization and the transportation revolution changed the economics of the Northern United States and the Western United States. Heavy immigration from Western Europe shifted the center of population further to the North.
James Guthrie was an American lawyer, plantation owner, railroad president and Democratic Party politician in Kentucky. He served as the 21st United States Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, and then became president of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. After serving, part-time, in both houses of the Kentucky legislature as well as Louisville's City Council before the American Civil War, Guthrie became one of Kentucky's United States Senators in 1865. Guthrie strongly opposed proposals for Kentucky to secede from the United States and attended the Peace Conference of 1861. Although he sided with the Union during the Civil War, he declined President Abraham Lincoln's offer to become the Secretary of War. As one of Kentucky's Senators after the war, Guthrie supported President Andrew Johnson and opposed Congressional Reconstruction.
South Carolina was one of the thirteen colonies that first formed the United States. European exploration of the area began in April 1540 with the Hernando de Soto expedition, which unwittingly introduced diseases that decimated the local Native American population. In 1663, the English Crown granted land to eight proprietors of what became the colony. The first settlers came to the Province of Carolina at the port of Charleston in 1670. They were mostly wealthy planters and their slaves coming from the English Caribbean colony of Barbados. They started to develop their commodity crops of sugar and cotton. The Province of Carolina was split into North and South Carolina in 1712. Pushing back the Native Americans in the Yamasee War (1715–17), colonists next overthrew the proprietors' rule in the Revolution of 1719, seeking more direct representation. In 1719, South Carolina became a crown colony.
Archibald Henry Grimké was an American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for rights for blacks, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. branch.
Robert Smalls was an American politician, publisher, businessman, and maritime pilot. Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, he freed himself, his crew, and their families during the American Civil War by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor, on May 13, 1862, and sailing it from Confederate-controlled waters of the harbor to the U.S. blockade that surrounded it. He then piloted the ship to the Union-controlled enclave in Beaufort–Port Royal–Hilton Head area, where it became a Union warship. His example and persuasion helped convince President Abraham Lincoln to accept African-American soldiers into the Union Army.
George Alfred Trenholm was a South Carolina businessman, financier, politician, and slaveholding planter who owned several plantations and strongly supported the Confederate States of America. He was appointed as its Secretary of the Treasury during the final year of the American Civil War.
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 the symbol of victory.
The Reverse Underground Railroad is the name given, sardonically, to the pre-American Civil War practice of kidnapping in free states not only fugitive slaves but free blacks as well, transporting them to slave states, and selling them as slaves, or occasionally getting a reward for return of a fugitive. Those who used the term were pro-slavery and angered at an "underground railroad" helping slaves escape. Also, the so-called "reverse underground railroad" had incidents but not a network, and its activities did not always take place in secret. Rescues of blacks being kidnapped were unusual.
The Detroit race riot of 1863 occurred on March 6, 1863, in the city of Detroit, Michigan, during the American Civil War. At the time, the Detroit Free Press reported these events as "the bloodiest day that ever dawned upon Detroit." It began due to unrest among the working class related to racism and the military draft, which was heightened after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln. Based in a free state, some recent immigrants and other workers resented being drafted for a war that they thought was waged for the benefit of slaves in the Southern United States, and they feared competition from Black people.
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 Caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate chamber, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts. The attack was in retaliation for a speech given by Sumner two days earlier in which he fiercely criticized slaveholders, including pro-slavery South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler, a relative of Brooks. The beating nearly killed Sumner and contributed significantly to the country's polarization over the issue of slavery. It has been considered symbolic of the "breakdown of reasoned discourse" and the use of violence that eventually led to the Civil War.
Black South Carolinians are residents of the state of South Carolina who are of African 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.
Charles D. Hayne (1844–1913) was an American politician, tailor, and railroad investor from South Carolina. He served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1868 to 1872 and in the South Carolina Senate from 1872 to 1876. He also served as a warden in Aiken County, South Carolina and as a lieutenant colonel in the state militia. His brothers Henry E. Hayne and James N. Hayne also held political offices.
Whitefield J. McKinlay was a teacher, state legislator, and real estate businessman who lived in Charleston, South Carolina and then Washington D.C. The Library of Congress has a glass plate negative portrait of him. In other photographs he is among leaders of Charleston's African American community. He was a Republican. Many of his letters remain.
Richard Edward Dereef (1798–1876) was a former black slave who would eventually gain freedom and become owner of forty black slaves, American lumber trader, and politician. A member of a wealthy mulatto family, Dereef was a prominent member of South Carolinian society but was subject to discrimination due to his race. He was considered one of the wealthiest black men in Charleston, South Carolina and served as a city alderman during the Reconstruction era.
Elizabeth Wragg Manigault was an American socialite who was prominent figure in colonial South Carolinian society. She was the wife of Peter Manigault, who served as Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives and was one of the wealthiest people in British North America.
John Carraway was a tailor, seaman, civil rights activist, and politician in the United States. In Alabama during the Reconstruction era, he served as a delegate to the 1867 Alabama Constitutional Convention. He also served on Mobile, Alabama's city council, and in the Alabama House of Representatives.
Bruce H. Williams was a state legislator in South Carolina.
References
- 1 2 Johnson, Michael; Roark, James L. (February 1, 2001). No Chariot Let Down: Charleston's Free People on the Eve of the Civil War. UNC Press Books. ISBN 9780807849439 – via Google Books.
- 1 2 Representatives, USA House of (June 9, 1868). "House Documents". U.S. Government Printing Office – via Google Books.
- 1 2 Bellows, Barbara L. (21 February 2018). Two Charlestonians at War: The Civil War Odysseys of a Lowcountry Aristocrat and a Black Abolitionist. ISBN 9780807169117 . Retrieved July 18, 2020.
- ↑ "Property File - 139 South Market Street (McKinlay Building)".
- ↑ "Enterprise Railroad".
- ↑ "African American Council Members City of Charleston, South Carolina" (PDF). www.charleston-sc.gov. Retrieved 2021-01-06.
- ↑ Koger, Larry (November 18, 2011). Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860. McFarland. ISBN 9780786469314 – via Google Books.
- 1 2 McKinlay family legal papers, 1885-1889. WorldCat. OCLC 847981093 . Retrieved January 6, 2021.