ABSTRACT
South Carolina has always been pointed to as the typical Reconstruction state. Slavery was the driving force of the state's industrial and social life; it was the institution which made South Carolina different from the states of the North; it was the principal reason why the white manhood of the state had fought so desperately. Both Sumner and Stevens had encouraged the Negroes of South Carolina to seek sympathetic Southern whites as their leaders, but neither they nor others suggested any plans of union with white labor. White Carolina labor was dumb with absolutely no intelligent leadership except the planters and carpetbaggers. Singularly enough, it is conveniently forgotten that a good proportion of the white officials of South Carolina during Reconstruction were not Northerners, but Southerners, and several of them had served in the Confederate army. There was, then, without doubt, theft and incompetence in the government of South Carolina during Reconstruction times.
