South Carolina African Americans – Reconstruction & Restoration Index

South Carolina SC African Americans SC Reconstruction, Restoration

Economic Gains, Then Losses

• Economic effects of the Civil War - on freedmen, white yeomen farmers, and planters
  
• The rise of wage labor - also called labor contract system - includes 1868 labor agreement for freedmen on Kiawah Island in Charleston County
  
• Wage labor gives way to tenancy - sharecropping and renting
  

Political Gains, Then Losses

• Major events - Constitutions of 1865 and 1868, Election of 1876, Bargain of 1877, and Constitution of 1895
  
• Did Hampton Win? - November 3, 1876 - learn about the most fraudulent election in SC history
  
• Keeping blacks from voting - literacy tests, democratic clubs, poll taxes, and poll terrorism
  
• Black Codes - keeping blacks down and separate from whites - also called "Jim Crow" laws
  
• Union League of America - political organization which Northern whites used to influence the votes of Southern blacks
  

Beating and Killing Blacks

• Lynching's rise and fall - scroll to "The Heritage of Lynching" - explains connections between lynching and the economy
  
• Lynchings in South Carolina from 1882-1968 - statistics for lynching in the US and South Carolina
  
• Freedmen's Bureau Reports of Murders and Outrages - Abbeville, Anderson, Columbia, Darlington, Georgetown, and Greenville - October 1865-November 1868 - includes both white-on-black and black-on-white crimes
  
• Lake City Lynchings - 1898 murder of Postmaster Frazier Baker and His Infant Daughter Julia in Florence County
  
• Murder at Cokesbury - Abbeville District, 1866 - describes murder of unknown black man
  
• Murder at Hamburgh - Abbeville District, 1866 - describes murder of Elbert MacAdams
  

Everyday Life

• A freedman testifies - 1863 - Harry McMillan speaks about black people's lives in bondage and their aspirations in freedom - emphasizes the desire for land of their own
  
• Marriage laws for newly freed men and women - 1866 - includes special rules for the reunion of husbands and wives who were seperated by slavery
  
• Life in Moncks Corner - 1866 - Freedmen's Bureau officer explains living conditions in Berekely County, including widespread hunger, poor sanitation, the spread of small pox, and the hatred of planters for both freedmen and "Yankees"
  
• Life on McLeod Plantation - Charleston County - traces the history of a group of James Island slaves and freedmen from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth
  
• "Murder and Starvation, Desolation and Death" - 1865 - Chester, Lancaster, Orangeburg, and York districts - Freedmen's Bureau reports on the abuse of blacks by planters and US Army officers
  
• Freedmen's Bureau Records for South Carolina - index
  

Education

• The State of Education in South Carolina
  
• Public Schools in Charleston - focuses on overcrowding in classrooms, as well as the lack of training available to black teachers and their low pay
  
• Penn Normal, Industrial and Agricultural School - St Helena Island, Beaufort County - part of the Port Royal Experiment
  
• Schofield Normal and Industrial School - Aiken
  
• Impact of the Jeanes Program in South Carolina - Aiken
  

Notable Black South Carolinians

• Dave Drake - also called "Dave the Potter"
  
• Kelly Miller - newspaper columnist and teacher
  – More info
• Joseph Hayne Rainey - US Congressman
  
• Your Servant, Quash: Letters of a South Carolina Freedman - Kiawah Island overseer

Related Resources

• Documenting the American South - UNC
  
• South Carolina During Reconstruction - maps, sites of violence, and population data
  
• South Carolina Reconstruction Period Maps
• Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices from the Special Collections Library - Duke University