In the years following the Civil War, when Southern Blacks had been freed of their chains and began to enter the political and social sphere, South Carolina incrementally sought ways to disenfranchise and halt the mobility of its African American population. At his state’s constitutional convention in 1895, South Carolina Congressman Thomas Miller—an adopted son of freed slaves—urged his colleagues to reject the retreat back toward bigotry, and to honor the real gains made during Reconstruction: “We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.”
Miller’s appeal was rebuffed, and South Carolina, along with much of the South, entered into a new campaign of fear, disenfranchisement, and domestic terrorism.