S.C. vows to relate truth on U.S.’ birth

CAMDEN, S.C. — South Carolina sees the coming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution as a chance to remind people that the state played a huge part in winning the nation’s independence, even if it did secede from the United States during the Civil War.

The state has opened a new Revolutionary War center and released an app for mobile devices that explores some 200 sites of battles and other key events, including remote swamps where patriots and loyalists skirmished in the War of Independence.

Organizers promise that this anniversary won’t all involve hero worship of the Founding Fathers and won’t turn a blind eye to the slavery that steered South Carolina’s history for 400 years.

“The 250th commission is dedicated to telling the story of the American Revolution as it exists — the beauty and the warts and the terror of it all,” said Charles Baxley, chairman of the South Carolina American Revolution Sestercentennial Commission. “And they are dedicated to the idea — which is a radical and new idea — of telling it from all points of view.”

As South Carolina’s preeminent historian Walter Edgar said, “It’s important to tell everyone’s story. It’s not just the people in the fancy knee britches and the powdered wigs.”

Anniversary organizers in South Carolina, which is often remembered more for leading the Confederacy into secession, say the state can be proud of its role in turning a stalemated war into victory against the British, but it’s a story that can’t fully be told without including its treatment of enslaved people.

Slaves were often used as spies and messengers, and South Carolina militias fighting for independence from Britain allowed up to one-third of their units to be slaves, but only in support roles like engineers or sailors and not as front-line armed troops, according to Edgar’s book, “South Carolina: A History.”

For most Black people, the founders’ soaring proclamation in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” did little to change their reality of servitude in the new United States.

A quarter- century later, more than 100,000 people remained enslaved in South Carolina, even after 25,000 slaves were freed by the British. Some 5,000 more just disappeared.

The plight of slaves, along with Native Americans, is acknowledged at the Revolutionary War Visitor Center on both sides of the conflict.

Other displays show major players like the “Swamp Fox” Francis Marion, who thwarted plans by British Gen. Banastre Tarleton to decisively end the war. Marion’s men exhausted “Bloody” Tarleton’s troops, leading them on fruitless swampland chases, before French allies arrived and together they drove the British to surrender.

“It’s a case of trying to touch lightly on everything and then send people if they are really interested in the Revolutionary War to other sites that are going to go into more detail,” said Rickie Good, the center’s director.

There are thousands of stories to tell. Good said the center’s goal is to open the door to as many of them as possible — by combining battlefield heroics with stories of common men and women who had to decide whether to join the revolution.

Along with blood and battles, the state’s anniversary commission wants to commemorate the liberty and equality ushered into the world by the Founding Fathers, even though many of them were plantation owners and it would take nearly two more centuries for these ideals to fully spread across the nation.

“There is a bright light in all of this,” Baxley said. “The enlightened language of the founding documents and ideas that made the United States possible — it really was not guns, bullets and knives, it was those powerful ideas — are the same ideas that resonate today in people’s minds and rhetoric as they press the case for equality and justice.”