South Carolina

• 1. Introduction

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  South Carolina sits at a crossing point that has shaped centuries of American history. On the 12th of April, 1861, Confederate batteries opened fire on Union Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and a war that would define a nation had begun. That single act of aggression came from a state that, just months earlier, had been the first in the union to vote to leave it. How did this relatively small patch of southeastern coastline become such a persistent flashpoint? The answers reach back well before English colonists arrived, through layers of Native American nations, competing European powers, enslaved labor, and a planter class that wielded outsized national influence. South Carolina is the 11th-smallest state in the country, home to a population of just over five million people at the 2020 census. Yet its fingerprints are on some of the most consequential moments in American history: the first European settlement in what is now the contiguous United States, the first state to ratify the Articles of Confederation, the first to secede. The story of how that happened is one worth tracing carefully.

• 2. Before the Colony

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  Evidence of human activity in the area that is now South Carolina dates back roughly 50,000 years. By the time Spanish explorers arrived around 1500, the region was home to dozens of distinct Native American nations. The most powerful polity was Cofitachequi, and the largest individual groups included the Cherokee and the Catawba, whose combined regional population reached as high as 20,000 people around 1600.

  The Cherokee built wattle and daub houses using wood and clay, roofed with wood or thatched grass. They lived well inland. Closer to the coast, a dozen or more small tribes spent their summers harvesting oysters and fish and cultivating corn, peas, and beans along the shore. When winter came, they traveled inland by canoe, hunting deer and gathering nuts. The names of these coastal groups survive today in place names: Edisto Island, Kiawah Island, and the Ashepoo River all carry traces of the people who shaped this land long before European contact.

  The Spanish were the first Europeans to explore the area. Between the 24th of June and the 14th of July, 1521, they mapped the land around Winyah Bay. On the 8th of October, 1526, they founded San Miguel de Gualdape, near present-day Georgetown. Established with five hundred settlers, it became the first European settlement in what is now the contiguous United States. Only one hundred and fifty people survived long enough to abandon it, eight months later. In 1562, French Huguenots established a settlement at what is now the Charlesfort-Santa Elena archaeological site on Parris Island. They, too, eventually departed. Then in 1540, Hernando de Soto had cut through the interior, capturing the queen of the Maskoki and the Chelaque who had welcomed him, leaving behind a pattern of disruption that would define the colonial encounter to come.

• 3. Colony, Trade, and Slavery

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  In 1629, King Charles I of England granted a vast swath of land covering what is now South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee to Sir Robert Heath. The colony was called Carolana. When that arrangement collapsed, King Charles II created the Province of Carolina in 1663, granting the same territory to eight Lords Proprietors as reward for their help restoring him to the throne in 1660.

  Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of those proprietors, drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a governing document drawn from the ideas of the English philosopher John Locke, widely regarded as the Father of Liberalism. The actual shape of the colony that emerged was far from utopian. The Carolina slave trade became the largest among any of the British colonies in North America. Between 1670 and 1715, somewhere between 24,000 and 51,000 captive Native Americans were exported from South Carolina alone. The historian Alan Gallay wrote that the trade in Indian slaves was "the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715."

  English planters from Barbados arrived in the 1670s and settled near what is now Charleston. They built rice plantations in the Lowcountry using the labor of enslaved Africans, who formed the majority of the population by 1720. A second major cash crop, indigo, a plant used as a source of blue dye, was developed by Eliza Lucas. By the second half of the 1700s, South Carolina had become one of the wealthiest of the Thirteen Colonies.

  The Province formally split from North Carolina in 1712. The 1800 census would count nearly 340,000 people in the state, of whom 146,000 were enslaved. At that same moment, Charleston was the country's fifth largest city and home to the largest Jewish population of any city in the sixteen states.

• 4. Revolution and a New Nation

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  On the 26th of March, 1776, South Carolina adopted its own state constitution, electing John Rutledge as its first president, months before the Declaration of Independence. In February 1778, it became the first state to ratify the Articles of Confederation. A decade later, on the 23rd of May, 1788, South Carolina ratified the United States Constitution, becoming the eighth state to enter the union.

  During the Revolutionary War itself, about a third of all combat action in the conflict took place in South Carolina, more than any other state. More than 200 battles and skirmishes were fought within its borders. British forces invaded and occupied parts of the state, while loyalists and partisans waged a brutal civil war in the backcountry. An estimated 25,000 enslaved people, roughly 30 percent of those held in South Carolina at the time, fled, were displaced, or died during the war years.

  The Antebellum period brought expansion and increasing tension. Columbia became the new state capital and its legislature first convened there in 1790. The town grew after being connected to Charleston by the Santee Canal in 1800, one of the first canals in the United States. Wealthy planters maintained firm political control. A man was not eligible to sit in the State House of Representatives unless he possessed an estate of 500 acres and 10 enslaved people, or at least 150 pounds sterling in property.

  In the 1820s, Senator John C. Calhoun emerged as the country's leading voice for nullification, the idea that states could refuse to enforce federal law. In 1832, the state passed the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring federal tariff laws void within its borders. The federal government responded with the Force Bill, authorizing military action to compel compliance.

• 5. Secession and Civil War

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  On the 6th of November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. Three days later, the South Carolina House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring his election a hostile act. Within weeks, South Carolina had become the first state in the union to vote for secession.

  The opening shots of the Civil War followed on the 12th of April, 1861, when Confederate batteries shelled Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Later that same year, Union forces attacked Port Royal Sound and occupied Beaufort County and the neighboring Sea Islands. White plantation owners fled, leaving behind approximately ten thousand enslaved people. Under what became known as the Port Royal Experiment, Northern charities partnered with the federal government to help these people operate the cotton farms themselves. Workers were paid by the pound harvested, making them among the first people freed by Union forces to earn wages.

  More than 60,000 soldiers from South Carolina served in the Confederate Army. The state lost an estimated 18,000 troops. In early 1865, the army of General William Tecumseh Sherman marched across the state, devastating plantations and most of the capital city of Columbia. South Carolina was readmitted to the Union on the 9th of July, 1868.

  During Reconstruction, the state maintained a majority-black government. That changed around 1876, when Democrats and former Confederates used voter fraud to reclaim power. On the 19th of October, 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant had suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties under the Ku Klux Klan Act, and his Attorney General Amos T. Akerman led a campaign that arrested hundreds of Klansmen while 2,000 more fled the state. But the gains of Reconstruction proved fragile. By the mid-to-late 1870s, white Democrats were using paramilitary groups, including the Red Shirts, to terrorize black voters back into submission.

• 6. Disenfranchisement and the Long Jim Crow Era

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  By 1896, only 5,500 black voters remained on South Carolina's registration rolls, despite African Americans constituting the majority of the state's population. The 1895 state constitution had methodically stripped them of political power through poll taxes, residency requirements, and literacy tests. The 1900 census made the scale of the exclusion plain: 782,509 African American citizens, comprising more than 58 percent of the population, held essentially no political representation.

  Governor "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, a Populist who controlled Democratic state politics from the 1890s to 1910, drove this agenda. At the 1895 constitutional convention, a debate arose over proposals for a one-drop rule that would have prohibited intermarriage between white citizens and anyone with any known African ancestry. George Dionysius Tillman, speaking in opposition, warned that the law would devastate "respectable families in Aiken, Barnwell, Colleton, and Orangeburg" and declared: "It is a scientific fact that there is not one full-blooded Caucasian on the floor of this convention." South Carolina delayed enacting such a law. Virginia adopted one in 1924.

  From 1910 to 1970, roughly 6.5 million Black Americans left the South in what became known as the Great Migration. By 1930, for the first time since 1708, South Carolina had a white majority population. The state had initially rejected the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote, and its legislature did not ratify it until the 1st of July, 1969. County home rule, basic local self-governance, did not arrive until 1975.

  South Carolina's transition out of the Jim Crow era was, by accounts in the source, less violent than in some other Deep South states. The source attributes this partly to a willingness among both white and black leaders to accept slow change. Senator Strom Thurmond, however, was identified as one of the nation's most persistent and effective opponents of integration.

• 7. Land, Water, and Earthquake Country

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  South Carolina covers a total area of just over 32,020 square miles. From east to west, three distinct natural zones define the state: the Atlantic coastal plain, the Piedmont, and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the northwestern corner. The coastal plain alone makes up two-thirds of the state's land area, its eastern edge lined with the Sea Islands, a chain of tidal and barrier islands stretching along the Atlantic.

  The coastal plain contains an unusual geological feature: a large number of oval-shaped, low-relief depressions called Carolina bays. These formations line up in a northwest-to-southeast orientation and are understood to be wind-blown sand sheets and dunes mobilized episodically from approximately 75,000 to 6,000 years ago, most intensely during the last glaciation. Further inland, the Piedmont's fall line, where rivers drop to the coastal plain, provided the early water power that encouraged the growth of several cities, including the capital, Columbia.

  The Blue Ridge contains Sassafras Mountain, South Carolina's highest point at 3,560 feet. The Chattooga River, on the border with Georgia, is a popular whitewater rafting destination. All of South Carolina's major lakes are human-made. The largest, Lake Marion, covers 110,000 acres.

• 8. Economy and the 21st Century

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  Boeing opened an aircraft manufacturing facility at Charleston International Airport in 2011, making South Carolina the final assembly site for the 787 Dreamliner. BMW has maintained a production facility in Spartanburg County near Greer since 1994. These are two visible signs of how thoroughly the state's economy transformed across the 20th century, from cotton and textile mills toward aerospace, automotive manufacturing, agribusiness, and tourism.

  In 2025, South Carolina's gross state product was $378.830 billion and its per capita personal income was $63,179. The service sector accounts for 83.7 percent of the economy. As of 2025-99.4 percent of South Carolina's businesses were small businesses, employing 42.9 percent of the state's workforce. There are 1,950 foreign-owned firms operating in the state, employing almost 135,000 people.

  South Carolina attracts business partly through a tax environment that includes no state property tax, no local income tax, no inventory tax, no sales tax on manufacturing equipment, and a 5 percent corporate income tax rate. Domtar in Rock Hill, Sonoco Products, and ScanSource are the three Fortune 1000 companies headquartered in the state.

  The College of Charleston, founded in 1770, is the oldest institution of higher learning in South Carolina and the 13th oldest in the United States. Claflin University, founded in 1869 by the American Missionary Association, is the oldest historically black college in the state. On the 20th of November, 2014, South Carolina became the 35th state to legalize same-sex marriages after a federal court ordered the change. In 2022, only 17.6 percent of state legislators were women, one of the lowest percentages in the country, against a national average of 30.7 percent. The Charleston Battery soccer team, founded in 1993, holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating professional soccer team in the United States, predating Major League Soccer itself.