Wars with the Spanish in 1686, 1702-04, 1740, with the Spanish and French in 1706, with pirates in 1718, with the Yemassee Indians in 1715 and the Cherokees in 176o-61, with aid only in 1760-61 from British troops, and a slave rising in 1739 had accustomed the people to arms. The State suffered severely dur ing the Revolution both from British troops and from the pres ence of numerous loyalists. A British fleet attempting to capture Charleston was repulsed by Ft. Moultrie, June 28, 1776. Calm prevailed until Clinton returned in 178o with an overwhelming force and Gen. Benjamin Lincoln surrendered the city, May 12. Completely overrun, there followed two years of fighting involving more battles, though most of them small, than occurred in any other State. A Continental army under Gen. Greene assisted by State troops under Sumter, Marion and Pickens slowly drove the British hack into Charleston and wrecked the plan of British troops from the South to join those from the North to crush Washington. The chief battles fought in the State were Ft. Moultrie (June 28, 1776), the siege of Charleston (March 12–May 12, 178o), Camden (Aug. 16, 178o), King's Mountain (Oct. 7, 1780), Cowpens (Jan. 17, 1781), Hobkirk's Hill (April 25, 1781) and Eutaw Springs (Sept. 8, 1781).
The generation following the Revolution witnessed an ambitious programme of transportation development. The Santee canal, connecting Charleston with the whole Santee-Wateree-Broad Saluda river system, was opened in i800. Highway building fol lowed. The latter was dropped and the canal was ruined from railroad development. The South Carolina railroad, 133 m. from Charleston to Hamburg opposite Augusta, when completed in 1833 was the longest railroad in the world.
Strife Between Sections.—The early State period was char acterized by a bitter struggle between the older low country and the newer up country, the latter settled largely by Scotch Irish coming down the Piedmont belt from Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina. In 1786 it was necessary, to allay discontent, to consent to the removal of the capital to a newly located site to be called Columbia. Although removal took place in 179o, State officers until 1865 kept offices both in Columbia and Charleston and the supreme court met in each city to hear appeals from the two sections respectively. The up country (then comprising a larger area than now thus designated), containing four-fifths of the white population and one-fifth of the wealth, in 18o8, with the help of a liberal low country minority led by Joseph Alston, secured a constitutional amendment apportioning one senator to each county and representatives to each county in proportion equally to white population and wealth. This left the control of the upper house to the low country and that of the lower house to the up country. Manhood suffrage followed in 1810. The low country's fear for its slave interests was allayed as slavery, fostered by cotton culture, spread up the State.
The South Carolina college was chartered in 18oi largely to allay sectional enmity. Only the necessity of standing unitedly against anti-slavery and reconstruction agitation from the North prevented the more numerous element from forcing its demo cratic changes until late in the 19th century.
Nullification and Secession.—Northern anti-slavery agita tion and the adoption of a tariff harmful to Southern agriculture united both factions in the passage of the Ordinance of Nullifica tion, Nov. 24, 1832, forbidding the execution of the tariff in South Carolina. The readiness of a powerful minority to assist President Jackson, combined with a reduction of the tariff, operated to deter the majority from forcing the issue to armed conflict, but left a bitterness within the State that disappeared only after 185o in the face of graver danger from outside.
Following the slave conspiracy of 1822 and the Northern abolitionism the slave code was severely revised (1840-44), even to forbidding the sending of a slave to freedom anywhere in the world. The years 1850-52 saw most of the people deterred from secession only from lack of the co-operation of other States. After 1828 Virginia's Southern leadership was superseded by the more uncompromising leadership of South Carolina under John C. Calhoun. South Carolina was the first State to secede, her ordinance of Dec. 20, 1860, being almost unanimously approved by her citizens. With a white population of 291,30o, the State put into the field 62,838 effectives, with a total enrolment, in cluding reserves, of 71,083, of whom 22% were killed or died in prison. Gen. W. T. Sherman's march across the State, February to March 1865, was accompanied by enormous de struction, including the burning of Columbia.
Reconstruction.—The misfortunes of war were more easily borne than the humiliation of reconstruction. Under President Johnson's guidance, the white population elected officers, who were soon ejected under the Congressional plan of reconstruction, disfranchising most whites and transferring power to the negroes, Northern adventurers ("carpetbaggers") and disreputable native whites ("scallawags"). In the spring of 1868 the State was "re admitted" to the Union under the control of these elements, and entered upon a period of eight years of crime and corruption, ac companied by arrogance on the part of the blacks that the whites found unendurable. Legislation was by bribery. Stealing ex tended from large blocks of State property to the price of a poli tician's whiskey. Two hundred trial justices were said to be unable to read. Daniel H. Chamberlain, able carpetbagger and would-be reformer of his own party (governor 1874-76) declared in 1901 that if he had been re-elected in 1876, his party, even with white assistance, could not have given government "fit to be endured." The most urgent pleas on a non-partisan basis failing to draw the least sympathy in Washington, the whites in 1876, by combined fraud, intimidation and persuasion of negroes elected Gen. Wade Hampton (1818-1902) governor by a narrow major ity. President Hayes's withdrawal of troops in March 1877 marked the collapse of "radical" rule.