Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808

by Rachel N. Klein

This book describes the turbulent transformation of South Carolina from a colony rent by sectional conflict into a state dominated by the South's most unified and politically powerful planter leadership. Rachel Klein unravels the sources of conflict and growing unity, showing how a deep commitment to slavery enabled leaders from both low- and backcountry to define the terms of political and ideological compromise.

The spread of cotton into the backcountry, often invoked as the reason for South Carolina's political unification, actually concluded a complex struggle for power and legitimacy. Beginning with the Regulator Uprising of the 1760s, Klein demonstrates how backcountry leaders both gained authority among yeoman constituents and assumed a powerful role within state government. By defining slavery as the natural extension of familial inequality, backcountry ministers strengthened the planter class. At the same time, evangelical religion, like the backcountry's dominant political language, expressed yet contained the persisting tensions between planters and yeomen.

Klein weaves social, political, and religious history into a formidable account of planter class formation and southern frontier development.

Genres: History, American Revolution

344 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 1990

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 3 out of 5]

By the era of the Civil War, South Carolina’s white population enjoyed a degree of political unity uncommon in the southern United States. Other Confederate states experienced significant internal conflict both before and after the secession crisis; not the Palmetto State, first to secede and first to fight the Union. In the 1980s historians like Lacy Ford began to study the origins of white Carolinians’ solidarity. Rachel Klein found it well back in South Carolina’s past, in the Revolutionary era and the ideological and economic changes accompanying it. The story she tells in UNIFICATION is a conventional one, grounded in traditional sources (like tax and court records) and focused on traditional elites, but no less compelling for that. It was in the Carolina lowcountry and uplands that herrenvolk democracy, an ostensibly democratic political order grounded on the subordination of a racial underclass, first assumed its classic American form.

Prior to the American Revolution, the Carolina backcountry was a borderland dominated by subsistence farmers and outlaws. Lowcountry elites like Charles Woodmason characterized the inhabitants as "ignorant, mean, worthless, beggarly Irish Presbyterians, the Scum of the Earth, and Refuse of Mankind." The region did harbor a small, market-oriented elite of tobacco planters and fur traders, who during the South Carolina Regulation (1767-69) used vigilante violence to terrorize insubordinate commoners: bandits, runaway slaves, squatters. The lowcountry-controlled Assembly chastised the Regulators but also pardoned them, recognizing they shared a common commitment to order. The two regional elites tightened their bond in the 1770s and ‘80s, when Britain’s invasion and its recruitment of runaway slaves and Cherokees drove white colonists into an alliance of necessity. The lowcountry elite remembered this important alliance when in the 1780s it gave political concessions to the backcountry: new courts, debtor relief, a pledge to move the state capital to Columbia.

Ideological divisions remained. The upland elite made hay out of opposing the “opulent decadence” of lowcountry planters, and showing off their own (artificial) republican simplicity of dress and speech. Both regions split over ratification of the U.S. Constitution, with the lowcountry minority only carrying the issue by packing the ratifying convention. The tidewater planters worried about social disorder and foreign revolution, while backcountry leaders supported the French Revolution and its democratic tendencies.

Economics and religion provided the bond that bridged these political divisions. The cotton boom of the 1790s gave upcountry and lowcountry a common interest in promoting exports of cotton and imports of slaves, and furnished investors from both regions with a common enterprise – land speculation – and even a common grift (selling previously-sold land to foreigners). The evangelical religious awakening that began around 1800 provided a justification for slavery to both the elite and the backcountry white yeomanry: Baptists and Methodists in the South emphasized not religious liberty but family, hierarchy, and the organic structure of society. This devotion to religious order may also have reconciled the lowcountry elite to the growth of an democratic political culture among the state’s white population, whose Republican majority gained control of the legislature after 1800. As long as white men had united behind the subordination of blacks (and women), democratic government could not get too far out of hand.