From Revolution to Reunion by Rebecca Brannon

Author:Rebecca Brannon [Brannon, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9781611176698
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2016-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Thomas Stothard, “O Fly, Cries Peace.” Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-45560.

While they worked to rebuild personal, business, and state finances, they also tried to put their society on a more solid footing through targeted philanthropy. While Thomas Jefferson’s Elementary Education Act for Virginia called for the creation of a system of universal education “to avail the commonwealth of those talents and virtues which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as rich, and which are lost to their country by the want of means for their cultivation,” South Carolinians in both the lowcountry and the backcountry worked to spread educational opportunities to the poor and orphaned. South Carolinians were in step with the rest of the country. For instance backcountry and lowcountry residents joined together in creating the Camden Orphan Society on Independence Day in 1786 as a more organized way to provide support and education for war orphans as well as children orphaned in the normal, if tragic, run of late eighteenth-century life. Camden, near present-day Columbia, had been struck hard by the civil war of the Revolution, and that damage lingered after the war. A visitor to the town in 1784 remarked that the war damage was so extensive that it offered “evident Proofs of … wanton Barbarity & Desolation” because British and Loyalist troops had “burnt the Court House, Gaol, & the greatest Part of the best Houses. They cut down all the Fruit Trees; & destroyed all the Furniture, which they could not carry away.” And yet in joining other Americans in a vigorous pursuit of philanthropy in the years after the war, they healed their own infrastructure, land, society, and people—all by working to build a more prosperous nation. South Carolinians were in step with the rest of the country even as they were more generous toward former Loyalists.22

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