South Carolina

THE FIRST EUROPEAN settlers in South Carolina came from Barbados and other islands in the 1670s, followed by the arrival of French Huguenots. Pioneers from Pennsylvania and Virginia opened up inland South Carolina, and South Carolina was proclaimed a royal colony in 1729. It took a leading role in the American War of Independence, and was the first state to ratify the first U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and became the 8th state of the Union on May 23, 1788. Initially elections in South Carolina, as stipulated in the state's 1776 constitution, were conducted to elect the General Assembly of the state, which, in turn, elected the president (the office was renamed governor in 1778). This meant that the General Assembly, which consisted of a senate and a house of representatives, remained all-powerful. Prior to the 1964 Supreme Court ruling in Reynolds v. Sims, a senator represented each county in the state, and each county elected at least one member of the House of Representatives based on the population of the county.

The presidents elected under the Constitution of 1776 were John Rutledge and Rawlins Lowndes, the former a brother to a signatory to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and himself a signatory to the U.S. Constitution, and the latter, born in the West Indian island of St. Kitts, was a lawyer who was a prisoner of the British during the part of the American War of Independence. Under the Constitution of 1778, John Rutledge was elected for a second term, followed by two lawyers, two soldiers, and Charles Pinckney, a soldier who was the son of a lawyer, and also another signatory to the U.S. Constitution. Although the Constitution was revised in 1790, the election of the governor was still through the General Assembly, which also decided on the allocation of the electors for the Electoral College in U.S. presidential elections. That the state representatives and the senators could not only chose the executive officials of the state, but also decided on whom the state would support in presidential elections, made South Carolina unique.

Although African Americans were not able to vote in South Carolina until after the U.S. Civil War (prior to the war the vast majority of them were slaves) South Carolina was the first state to adopt the system of allowing white male suffrage in elections. It was a move introduced early in the career of John Caldwell Calhoun, [Page 755]the politician most identified with the state from the 1820s until the 1840s. He believed passionately in states rights, and also in the rights of minorities, such as slave-owners. Calhoun was the U.S. secretary of war 1817–25, and 1825–32 he was the seventh vice president of the United States, serving under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun first entered politics as a member of the South Carolina General Assembly, before moving to Washington, D.C., as a member of the House of Representatives 1811–17, and then in the cabinet and as vice president for the next 15 years, the U.S. Senate for the next 18 years, excepting just under a year when he was U.S. secretary of state. Calhoun's major contribution to U.S. politics was his concept of Nullification, by which any state legislature could nullify any laws that it did not like.

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