148 years ago today, 169 delegates sat in Charleston's Institute Hall deciding whether or not South Carolina could and should leave the United States of America. Representing Beaufort District were Langdon Cheves, Jr.; George Rhodes; Richard James Davant; Ephraim Mikell Seabrook; John Edward Frampton; William Ferguson Hutson; Joseph Daniel Pope; and, Robert Woodward Barnwell. All these men -- indeed all the delegates present at the Secession Convention -- voted in favor of secession and signed the state's Ordinance of Secession.
The issue of secession still inflames the hearts and minds of many people. Was the action of the Secession Convention "legal?" The American Battlefield Trust has created lesson plans for elementary through high school students to help them draw conclusions about what the answer to that question is.
We recommend the following titles and lists of materials as good starting points for exploring the political opinions of the Secessionists and Unionists from South Carolina:
BDC's WordPress blog posts:
Robert Barnwell Rhett
Robert Woodward Barnwell
William John Grayson
Materials available from the SCLENDS Consortium:
Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles B. Dew (2002)
Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater by William C. Davis (2001)
Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War by Paul Starobin (2017)
The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina by Manisha Sinha (2000)
Beaufort Tricentennial Lecture Series : Part 2, February 13, 2009 : Sea Island Cotton Kingdom [with Dr. Larry Rowland] ; The Idea of a Southern Nation [with Dr. John McCardell, Jr.] [DVD]
James Louis Petigru: Southern Conservative, Southern Dissenter by William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease (2002)
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