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“W” is for Walterboro (Colleton County; population 5364). Just after the Revolutionary War, rice planters from the Edisto, Combahee, and Ashepoo Ricers, tired of an annual summer jaunt of fifty miles to Charleston, created an alternate refuge from the malarial swamps closer to home. By the 1790s, among local forests and freshwater springs, they built a village that they called Walterboro. Profits from rice and indigo produced by enslaved black labor brought prosperity. In 1817 the town became the seat of Colleton District. An elegant brick courthouse designed by Robert Mills was complete in 1822. Four years later the town was incorporated. In 1828, Robert Barnwell Rhett launched the nullification movement at the Walterboro Courthouse. Throughout the antebellum period in the years preceding the Civil War, Walterboro was a hotbed of states’ rights sentiment.
Who is John Galt?
âThe American people may oppose the nationâs present course, but by themselves the people cannot change it. They may oppose the taxes and the bureaucrats, but these are merely consequences, which cannot be significantly cut back so long as their source is untouched. The people may curse âbig governmentâ in general â but to no avail if the pressure groups among them, following the logic of a mixed economy, continue to be fruitful and to multiply. The people may âswing to the right,â but it is futile, if the leaders of the right are swinging to their own⦠brand of statism. The country may throw the rascals out, but it means nothing if the next administration is made of neo-rascals from the other partyâ¦â
The Democratic Party began its convention in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, 1860. The incumbent president, James Buchanan, was a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had Southern sympathies but opposed secession. Due to a largely disastrous administration, he had no interest in reelection; still, the Democrats, and Stephen A. Douglas in particular, were favored to win the election. Douglas was a moderate who advocated “popular sovereignty,” or the right of territories and newly admitted states to decide for themselves the question of slavery. His challenge at the convention was to placate the so-called fire-eaters of the party’s Deep South wing who pressed for a strong proslavery platform and threatened secession if they did not get it while avoiding the appearance that these radicals held him hostage, which would have hurt his support among Northerners. Despite fractious debate, Douglas’s supporters had nearly passed their platform by the third day.
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Introduction
The question of the hour is whether the Constitution is pro-slavery or anti-slavery. History has shown us that great leaders and reasonable men and women have changed their viewpoints on this question.
Frederick Douglass, the foremost black abolitionist in the 1840s, called the Constitution a radically and essentially pro-slavery document, but by the 1850s, Douglass changed his mind, concluding, the Constitution, when construed in light of well-established rules of legal interpretation, “is a
glorious liberty document.”
As we war over America’s heart and soul, many are asking what convinced Douglass to change his viewpoint. Some declare it was what the Framers had hoped would preserve a legacy of freedom for generations to come: silence. Douglass asked, “If the Constitution were intended to be by its framers and adopters a slave-holding instrument, then why would neither ‘slavery,’ ‘slave-holding,’ nor ‘slave’ be anywhere found