Colonial Unrest, American Revolution, and New Republic (1765-1789)

Following the war, Pinckney devoted his efforts toward rebuilding his law practice and his rice plantations.

Indigo had been considered to be a potentially valuable crop for Carolina since the earliest colonizing, and stands of it were regularly included on many plantations. In the 1740s Eliza was the link in demonstrating that Carolina could produce a superior type.

At the outbreak of war in 1775, Pinckney became a captain in the First South Carolina Continental regiment and was later promoted to major.

Restless by nature, Poellnitz in 1790 exchanged his Minto estate for a 2,991-acre plantation, Wraggtown (later Ragtown), on the Great Pee Dee River in Marlboro County, South Carolina.

In 1819 Poinsett became president of the state Board of Public Works, actively supervising canals and roads built to link Charleston with the undeveloped interior, including a road through the Saluda Gap that brought trade from North Carolina and Tennessee.

The Battle of Port Royal Island was part of a larger campaign designed by the British to cover their operations against Augusta, Georgia.

Prince Frederick’s Parish stretched like an elongated triangle from the Santee River northward “to the utmost bounds of the Province,” encompassing all or part of modern Dillon, Marion, Florence, Horry, Georgetown, and Williamsburg Counties.

Back in Charleston, Pringle turned his energies from trade to public service. Early in his career he had served on the vestry of St. Philip’s Church, and as churchwarden he oversaw the distribution of aid after the disastrous Charleston fire of 1740.

In 1789 Ramsay was among the founders of the Medical Society of South Carolina, and he was elected its president in 1797.

Chosen Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1789, Read repeatedly offered himself for higher office without success. Finally, in 1794, he won election to the U.S. Senate, where he sat from 1795 to 1801. A Federalist with close ties to the mercantile community, Read cast the crucial vote necessary for ratification of the Jay Treaty, for which a Charleston mob opposing the accord hung him in effigy and threatened his home.

Protection of lives and property was the primary impetus behind Regulator activities, but the movement also grew out of tensions between frontier settlers and the colonial administration. South Carolina’s backcountry, which included the entire area beyond the coastal parishes, did not have any organized local government apart from justices of the peace whose judicial authority was minimal.

At the beginning of the 1770s, the Commons House of Assembly was embroiled in the latest in a series of fierce power struggles with royal officials, known as the Wilkes Fund Controversy. Coupled with new imperial initiatives, these clashes convinced the colony’s elite that if it wanted to control the political destiny of South Carolina, then separation was the only answer.

Using flattery and promises of wealth and promotion, they tried to persuade Dorcas to convince her husband to change to the British side. She defiantly refused their advances, however, “and refused to be made instrumental to their purposes.”

Richardson became the first backcountry resident—indeed the first non-Charlestonian—to hold the office, and his election reflected the increasing political and economic solidification of the state based on cotton, slavery, and the plantation system.

In November 1775 Richardson and Colonel William Thomson were given command of 2,500 men and ordered to scatter the large concentration of Loyalists gathering in the South Carolina backcountry.

Throughout royal rule, the council was dominated by a relatively equal number of planters, merchants, and lawyer/placemen who were nominated by the governor and approved by the London-based Board of Trade for their wealth, political connections, and willingness to support English policies.

In 1774 The Story of Aeneas and Dido: Burlesqu’d from the Fourth Book of the Aeneid of Virgil was published in Charleston. This work, which has been called the first classical burlesque written in America, has a lengthy preface satirizing the pretensions of poets in the New World, witty footnotes in Latin, and a wildly comic spirit. Rugeley showed himself to be comfortable with neoclassical forms and a content that mixes the classical with the contemporary.

As a delegate to the South Carolina ratifying convention in 1788, Rutledge was a leader in supporting ratification of the U.S. Constitution. He moved successfully for the endorsement of proposed constitutional amendments to conciliate the opposition.

Rutledge played a prominent role in writing the federal Constitution. He advocated a national government of greatly increased but still limited powers and entrusted to an executive and a Congress designed to consist of gentlemen made relatively independent of public opinion.

Salvador was the first person of the Jewish faith elected to the South Carolina legislature, while the Jewish historian Barnett Elzas claimed that he was “the first Jew in America to represent the masses in a popular assembly.”