South Carolina

South Carolina has always been one of those states that appears in lists, but doesn’t really exist in my mind. I memorized it in high school as one of the thirteen signers of the Declaration of Independence, but it was only Massachusetts and Virginia that were described in the textbooks.

The thing that’s remarkable is how often the same strain of intransigence appears when people from the state do become famous: John Calhoun provided the theory for states rights, Ben Tillman led efforts to negate reconstruction with segregation, Strom Thurmond lead the Dixicrats out of the Democratic party convention in 1948.

Race has been another recurring feature, but it has mutated with conditions: for Calhoun it was the right to own slaves, for Tillman the right to control freedmen. Recently, Mark Sanford used the refusal to provide federal benefits to the poor, implicitly Blacks, as a way to bring attention to his political aspirations.

The two ideas are tightly interwoven, but they are separate, if for no other reason than intransigence existed before abolitionists and persists after civil rights. That is also the idea that’s more dangerous to the well-being of our constitutional democracy. We’ve survived, for better or worse, depending on our skin color, the vicissitudes of racism, but we’ve already had thousands die to establish the priority of federal law over local, and still see people willing to impose their dissident views with guns.

So far, my attempts to understand South Carolina are superficial, the conclusions of anyone just starting to read about something. At best, all I have are a few facts and a number of suppositions, that need a great deal more research to become history. But, as the King of Hearts told Alice, you must begin at the beginning, and so begins a series of musings on that state’s past.