S.C. Encyclopedia | The [South Carolina] constitutional convention in 1868 was composed of 76 black and 38 white delegates. Population alone became the basis for representation and the vote was provided for all males, regardless of race. The General Assembly struggled with issues such as funding a system of public education, rebuilding infrastructure, revitalizing the economy, and countering white opposition to Reconstruction. Spurred by the retreat of federal authority in the mid-1870s, white Democrats regained control of the General Assembly in 1876 and a one-party political system gradually emerged as a way to reestablish and ensure white supremacy.
By 1890 South Carolina looked a lot like it would look in 1950. Agriculture had turned into an established sharecropping system dependent on cotton; the building of railroads had created a new “small town” elite; textile mills had begun to migrate south; and Republicans—the hated party of Lincoln—had virtually disappeared from the state’s political landscape. Under these conditions, political conservatives—the elites and former Confederate leaders—came to prominence, but did little to relieve the discontent of white farmers who fumed over low prices, high interest and freight rates, and suspicion that the Conservatives were using black voters to stifle legislative responses to their needs.
One leader, Benjamin R. Tillman, was able to articulate the farmers’ problems and set events in motion that produced yet another constitutional convention in 1895. The apparatus of government was not changed very much, but the politics were. One purpose was to get around the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave blacks the right to vote. To counter this, white delegates inserted a clause in the new state constitution that limited the right to vote to adult males who had paid a poll tax six months before the election and who were not guilty of certain crimes. The assumption was that most poor persons, especially blacks, could not pay the tax that early and, even if they did, would not subsequently be able to save a receipt to prove it. Even after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 extended the vote to women, the electorate in South Carolina remained restricted to “acceptable” whites and blacks.
The continuation of counties as election districts gave rise to a “one county-one senator” system of representation in the General Assembly. The county, not population, was the basis for legislative representation. Each county was also apportioned at least one House member. In 1895 there were thirty-five counties. The number grew to forty-six by 1919. State senators dominated the politics and programs of their county through passage of annual “supply bills,” by which they controlled their county’s budget and most aspects of local government. Since no senator could oppose another’s supply bill without risking opposition to his own, legislative approval for a county’s schools, roads, courts, law enforcement, or other county purposes really rested in the hands of the senator. House members were dependent on what the senator wanted.
As “emperors of a county-based empire,” state senators were extraordinarily powerful political figures well into the twentieth century and the linchpins of the one-party system. Senator Edgar Brown of Barnwell County is perhaps the most potent example of a dominant senator. Speaker of the House Solomon Blatt, also of Barnwell County, advanced rural power in the S.C. House by appointing only one member from each county to a committee, thereby assuring that small counties would outnumber urban counties in most instances. Blatt and Brown were referred to by their critics as the “Barnwell Ring,” but more realistically the reference was to a statewide, rural “ring” that excluded growing urban areas from meaningful political power.
The power of rural delegations faced significant changes as national civil rights policies emerged. First the national Voting Rights Act of 1965 extended full voting rights to every individual regardless of race. An expanded electorate gradually demonstrated political success in gaining minority representation in the General Assembly. John Felder, Herbert Fielding, and I. S. Leevy Johnson, elected to the S.C. House in 1970, and I. DeQuincey Newman, elected to the S.C. Senate in 1983, became the first African Americans elected to the General Assembly in the twentieth century.
Next the county delegation system was fundamentally altered by U.S. Supreme Court decisions that mandated population as the basis for representation and prohibited gerrymandering, the arrangement of political district boundaries for the advantage of a particular interest. New districts with equal population per legislator would now have to be drawn after each national census. In 1971 the House first reapportioned in a plan that retained one representative per county. The tactic did not pass federal courts and the House subsequently reapportioned into single member districts on the “one person, one vote” principle. The Senate in 1968 tried a plan of twenty multimember districts through which each senator represented approximately the same number of people. After the 1970 census, forty-six senators were elected from sixteen districts. After 1980, however, the Senate moved to single member districts.
Election districts are adjusted every ten years to reflect changes in population. The redistricting decisions are in the hands of incumbent state legislators, although their decisions are subject to approval by the U.S. Department of Justice and have typically been challenged in federal courts. Since 2001, Republicans have had a majority in both houses and have allocated important committee assignments by party affiliation rather than by years of service. Legislative party caucuses have become more influential in raising campaign money. In addition to the Republicans and Democrats, African American legislators are organized into a separate caucus. The low number of women elected to the General Assembly continues as a topic of political comment by legislative observers. In 2003 only sixteen members of the General Assembly were women, the smallest percentage of female state legislators in the nation.
Contemporary legislators are aided in their work by increased staff support, computer assisted bill management, and the use of individual offices. Annual sessions begin in January and continue until May or June. Many study committees continue throughout the interim. A new General Assembly is convened every two years after November elections in even numbered years. House members are elected for two-year terms and senators are elected for four years. Each must reside in the district from which elected. House members must be a qualified elector at least twenty-one years of age and senators must be twenty-five years old.
— Excerpted from an entry by Cole Blease Graham, Jr.. This entry hasn’t been updated since 2006. To read more about this or 2,000 other entries about South Carolina, check out The South Carolina Encyclopedia, published in 2006 by USC Press. (Information used by permission.)
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