The colonies of the Deep South responded to the imperial crisis in different ways. South Carolina's political leaders, the wealthy planters of the lowcountry, embraced Whig principles and took a prominent role in the colonial resistance to British policy. Although they did not speak for all of the province's inhabitants, they were powerful enough to align the colony with their neighbors to the north in the revolutionary movement. Georgians, kept in check by their skillful and popular royal governor, Sir James Wright, and fearful that opposition to Parliament's authority might cause them to forfeit British protection from their powerful Indian neighbors, hesitated to commit themselves fully to the Whig cause. Finally, pressured by South Carolina's Whigs and incited by its own small but vocal rebel party, Georgia became the last of the thirteen colonies to join the American resistance in 1776. In the provinces of East and West Florida, Whigs were few; most inhabitants showed little interest in the disputes of the 1760s and 1770s, and both provinces remained loyal to Britain when hostilities began in 1775.

When Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765, imposing a tax on newspapers, customs documents, and legal papers, South Carolina planters as well as many Charleston artisans believed that the law encroached on their right to be taxed only by their own provincial assembly, and they prepared to resist any attempt to enforce the act. With the law scheduled to take effect on November 1, protests began in October. Opponents of the stamp tax burned an effigy of the stamp distributor, broke several windows at his house, and eventually forced him to resign. They also conducted a mock funeral for “liberty.” Yet, compared to their counterparts in many other colonies, South Carolinians’ resistance to the Stamp Act was relatively restrained; they did not engage in the kind of destruction practiced, for example, in Boston. Tensions ended when Parliament responded to the protests by repealing the act in early 1766.²

Parliament's imposition of the Townshend Revenue Acts in 1767 again strained the province's relationship with Britain. The taxes on imported glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea were seen as another attempt to raise money from the colonists without their consent. Charleston's artisans, who were most affected by the acts, expressed immediate dissatisfaction and soon pressured the planters and merchants, who had initially shown little concern about the new taxes, to join them in opposing the law. Representatives of all three groups agreed to halt the importation of British goods until the acts were repealed.³ The opponents of British policy, who styled themselves “Whigs,” employed harsh methods to enforce the nonimportation agreement. Adopting the motto “Sign or Die,” the Whigs threatened violence to anyone who showed reluctance to subscribe to the pact.⁴ In most cases, however, the coercion was economic: “associators denied nonsubscribers the use of their wharves and refused to purchase their rice, indigo, or other plantation products.”⁵ Yet, many prominent merchants refused to cooperate, so that British exports to South Carolina dropped by no more than 50 percent. Merchants who had agreed to nonimportation, seeing their competitors profiting by ignoring the agreement, sometimes resumed the purchase of British goods. Parliament repealed the Townshend duties in April 1770, except for the tax on tea.⁶

While lowcountry Carolinians denounced British policies they considered oppressive, their counterparts in the province's interior or backcountry raised similar complaints about the treatment they received at the hands of the lowcountry planters who governed them. “The planters of South Carolina…were unwilling to grant representation to the upcountry, and its House of Commons was an exclusively eastern body.”⁷ The Commons House of Assembly ignored the desire of backcountry residents for representation, local courts, and other institutions to establish order and secure their rights. When an outburst of violent crime struck the backcountry in 1767, many of the inhabitants joined together to demand that the provincial government address their grievances. Known as “Regulators,” these people meted out punishment to criminals while pressuring officials to grant them the right to vote, provide courts and jails, and institute other legal reforms. By 1769, when the movement came to an end, the Regulators had achieved many of their demands. Provincial officials created four judicial districts in the backcountry, each with its own sheriff, court, and jail, and established two parishes whose inhabitants could elect representatives to the assembly. Nevertheless, backcountry representation in the assembly remained disproportionately small until the eve of the Revolution, when the provincial congress, in an effort to increase backcountry support for the Whigs, allocated about one-third of its seats to representatives from the region.⁸

Shortly after Regulator unrest had subsided, the assembly voted in December 1769 to send a contribution of fifteen hundred pounds sterling (nearly two hundred thousand dollars in 2002 value) to the Society of the Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights, an organization devoted to assisting British political radical John Wilkes in his opposition to the government. Wilkes was popular among South Carolina Whigs; Charleston's artisans had earlier formed a “John Wilkes Club.”⁹ Lt. Gov. William Bull and the council were aghast, not only because they opposed the payment but also because it had been made without their consent. The council therefore refused to permit the assembly to recover the funds from the 1770 tax receipts. To force the council's hand, the assembly refused to pass a tax bill that did not cover the expense of the donation to Wilkes. Bull and the council found this unacceptable, and a deadlock ensued. When Gov. Lord Charles Montagu arrived in September 1771, he too resisted the assembly's efforts to include the Wilkes funds in a tax bill and eventually dissolved the house. Both sides remained intransigent, as the dispute evolved into a debate over the relative powers of the assembly and the council. “No annual tax bill was passed in South Carolina after 1769 and no legislation at all after February 1771. For all practical purposes royal government in South Carolina broke down.”¹⁰

The breakdown of legal government enabled the Whig committees to take effective control of affairs in Charleston. They were therefore ideally situated to take advantage of the next crisis in the imperial relationship—the passage of the Tea Act in 1773. Parliament's intention had been to assist the financially troubled East India Company by allowing it to sell tea directly to the colonists at a lower cost; the act actually reduced the tax on tea. To the Whigs, however, the act appeared to be a ploy by the British government to deceive them into abandoning their opposition to British taxation by purchasing taxed tea, something they had avoided since the repeal of the Townshend Acts. When a shipment of tea arrived in Charleston on December 1, a crowd gathered to protest. The merchants to whom it was consigned, fearing the wrath of the mob, refused to accept it. Before a confrontation could develop, Lieutenant Governor Bull confiscated the tea for nonpayment of the tax and stored it in town. This action defused the protests in Charleston.¹¹

In Boston opponents of the Tea Act had dumped a large quantity of tea into the harbor in mid-December. Parliament responded to the news by passing the Coercive Acts, which closed the port of Boston and placed Massachusetts under military government. South Carolina's Whigs believed that the Coercive Acts foreshadowed a British attack on the people's liberty throughout the colonies, and they joined their eleven northern neighbors in sending representatives to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.¹²

When the delegates returned, the Whigs called for the election of a provincial congress, as the assembly was still moribund as a result of the Wilkes fund dispute. The congress adopted a nonimportation agreement, chose delegates to attend the Second Continental Congress, and began preparations to resist the British with force. In the spring of 1775 reports of fighting between British troops and Americans at Lexington and Concord and rumors that British officials planned to incite slave revolts and unleash Indian attacks on South Carolina radicalized the Whigs. They used coercion to enforce nonimportation and make people sign the Continental Association declaring their opposition to British policy. The recently arrived royal governor, Lord William Campbell, found the Whigs in control of the militia and himself powerless to assert any authority. Fearing for his safety, he took refuge aboard a British warship in Charleston harbor on September 15, 1775. Royal authority no longer existed in the province.¹³

Because lowcountry planters dominated the assembly and nearly all of them were Whigs, the transition from royal government to Whig control was relatively smooth. This made it virtually impossible for Loyalists to retain a voice in provincial affairs.¹⁴ One of the few who expressed an opinion displeasing to the Whigs quickly felt their wrath. On August 12, 1774, the Reverend Mr. John Bullman, assistant rector at St. Michael's Church, preached a sermon in which he urged the people to keep their proper station, do their duty, and not usurp the authority of others. His advice “afforded the Demagogues a handle to work up such resentment in the minds of the People” that Bullman was immediately labeled an enemy of liberty. The vestry of St. Michael's forbade him to officiate at future services. Although seventy-four church members later signed a petition requesting that Bullman be reinstated, the vestry refused. The humiliated minister returned to England in the spring of 1775.¹⁵ His fate was a harbinger of what awaited South Carolina's Loyalists when they dared to challenge the Whigs.

The rebels had other concerns besides an occasional critic. They worried about the political attitude of their neighbors in Georgia, who in their opinion did not exhibit sufficient zeal for the revolutionary cause. The Georgians showed little desire to cooperate in nonimportation, leading angry South Carolinians to declare that the province should “be amputated from the rest of their brethren, as a rotten part that might spread a dangerous infection.”¹⁶

Loyalist clerics and wavering Georgians were minor problems compared to other dangers the Whigs faced. From the beginning of the dispute with Britain, South Carolina's large slave population had complicated the political situation. In 1775 slaves outnumbered the province's white population by 104,000 to 70,000. With nearly two-thirds of whites living in the backcountry and more than 90 percent of slaves in the lowcountry, the fear of slave insurrection was pervasive among lowcountry whites.¹⁷ To keep their laborers subservient, the planters established a system of rigid control that constituted “the most rigorous deprivation of freedom to exist in institutionalized form anywhere in the English continental colonies.”¹⁸ Thus, much of the restraint that the Whigs demonstrated during the Stamp Act protests was the result of whites’ concern that any tumults might provoke unrest among the slaves. The fear was well founded, as some “disorderly negroes,” emulating white opponents of the stamp tax, marched through Charleston in January 1766 shouting “Liberty.” The march threw Charleston residents into an uproar; provincial officials called out the militia and sent emissaries across the colony looking for signs of slave rebellion.¹⁹

As relations with Britain worsened, the actions of a black Methodist preacher named David Margate made clear to whites that the threat from their slaves might be magnified by the conflict. Margate had been trained in England and sent to America by the countess of Huntingdon to convert slaves to Christianity. In late 1774 or early 1775 he preached a sermon in Charleston on the delivery of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, declaring that “God will deliver his own People from Slavery.” Whites recognized the incendiary nature of this message, and some of Margate's white supporters had to rush him out of town before he was lynched.²⁰ Taken to Georgia, he was promptly sent back to England by other sympathetic whites.²¹

Fear of slave rebellion was also widespread among backcountry settlers. Many backcountry residents hoped to one day become slave owners themselves; while they were hostile toward the lowcountry aristocracy, they “were not hostile to slavery.”²² One of the Regulators’ complaints had been that whenever they managed to “save a little Money…Wherewith to purchase Slaves,” robbers learned of it and stole the funds.²³ The number of slaves in the backcountry grew steadily in the years before the Revolution, reaching about six thousand by 1770.²⁴

Rev. Charles Woodmason, an Anglican missionary, recognized the fear of slave revolt in the backcountry as he traveled through the region in the 1760s, and he used it to strengthen his argument for religious tolerance. Woodmason pointed out the threat that arose from “an Internal Enemy,” the province's numerous slaves. “Over these We ought to keep a very watchful Eye,” he advised, “lest they surprize us in an Hour when We are not aware, and begin our Friendships towards each other in one Common Death.”²⁵ In promoting the establishment of schools in the backcountry, Woodmason tried to tap into this fear to dampen the inhabitants’ desire for slaves. He expressed the hope that education “may prove a Means of lessening the Number of Negroes that are now employ'd as family Servants and therefrom by Degrees freeing this Land from an Internal Enemy that may one day be the total Ruin of it.”²⁶

Woodmason also found backcountry inhabitants to be extremely hostile to the Indians and likewise appealed to this sentiment to advance his agenda. “There is an External Enemy near at Hand, which tho’ not formidable either to our Religion or Liberties, still is to be guarded against,” he told a Presbyterian audience in urging them not to discriminate against people of other denominations. “These are our Indian Neighbours. Common Prudence, and our Common Security, requires that We should live like Brethren in Unity, be it only to guard against any Dangers to our Lives and Properties as may arise from that Quarter.”²⁷ He also demonstrated the value of education by contrasting white society with that of the Indians, asserting that among the latter, “for want of due Instruction, the most Savage Dispositions and detestable Practises contrary to the Principles of Humanity as well as of Religion, are transmitted down from one Wretched Generation of Creatures to another.”²⁸ Woodmason may not have actually held such opinions, but he was clearly aware that appeals of this nature would be effective in winning support from the backcountry settlers. The Whigs would employ the same tactic a few years later in an attempt to convince these same people to support the rebellion.