David Atkins: Hullabaloo, What are South Carolina's Values

Consider South Carolina, which has opposed or defied almost every beneficent social and political change in American history. To appease South Carolinian slaveholders, Thomas Jefferson removed language condemning slavery from the Declaration of Independence. Four years later, back-country loyalists in South Carolina helped the British Army recapture the state in 1780 from the patriots. By 1828, Palmetto State native and vice president John C. Calhoun was agitating for state "nullification" of federal powers, generating secessionist calls a full generation before the outbreak of the Civil War. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede. Four months later Confederate forces in Charleston fired the opening shots of the Civil War on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, and South Carolina even threatened to secede from the Confederacy, because the other southern states would not agree to reopening the slave trade. Soon after the state's chapter of the Ku Klux Klan formed "red shirt" Democratic rifle clubs using physical intimidation and ballot manipulation to alter results of the 1876 election. In the 1890s, Governor Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman, who earned his nickname by threatening to stab Grover Cleveland in the ribs with said implement, served two terms as governor before embarking on a twenty-three-year Senate career during which he defended segregation as vigilantly as his fellow Edgefield County native, Strom Thurmond, later did for most of his career. Well into the twentieth century, South Carolina's black citizens observed the Fourth of July mostly alone , because the vast majority of whites refused to, preferring instead to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, May 10.