Short answers, pulled from the story.
South Carolina voted to secede in 1860 because its planter class believed Abraham Lincoln's election signaled the long-term end of the slavery-based agrarian economy and social system they depended on. Three days after Lincoln was elected on the 6th of November 1860, the state House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring his election a hostile act, and secession followed within weeks.
The Civil War began in South Carolina on the 12th of April 1861, when Confederate batteries shelled Union Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. More than 60,000 soldiers from South Carolina served in the Confederate Army, and the state lost an estimated 18,000 troops. In early 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman's army marched through the state, devastating most of the capital city of Columbia.
The Port Royal Experiment was a partnership between Northern charities and the federal government, begun in 1861 after Union forces occupied Beaufort County and the Sea Islands. White plantation owners fled, leaving behind roughly 10,000 enslaved people. Those people were then assisted in running the cotton farms themselves and paid by the pound harvested, making them among the first people freed by Union forces to earn wages.
The Charleston earthquake of 1886 was the largest earthquake ever to strike the eastern United States. It measured between 7.0 and 7.3 in magnitude, killed 60 people, and destroyed much of the city of Charleston, South Carolina.
San Miguel de Gualdape, founded by the Spanish on the 8th of October 1526, near present-day Georgetown, South Carolina, was the first European settlement in what is now the contiguous United States. It was established with five hundred settlers but was abandoned eight months later, with only one hundred and fifty survivors.
The 1895 constitution introduced poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests that dramatically reduced the voter rolls. By 1896, only 5,500 Black voters remained registered, even though African Americans comprised the majority of the state's population. The 1900 census counted 782,509 African American citizens, more than 58 percent of the population, with essentially no political representation.