The People

About 80 percent of the settlers of colonial South Carolina were of English origin. Many of them came by way of Barbados and other colonies rather than directly from England. A group of Dutch settlers from New York came to South Carolina in 1671. Another smaller group was of French origin, mostly descendants of Huguenots, who came to the area beginning in 1680. More numerous were the Scottish dissenters, who were brought in beginning in 1682, and the Germans, who arrived during the eighteenth century. Blacks constituted a majority of the population from early colonial times until 1930. Indian wars drove most of the native Americans from the state, but there are still a few Catawba Indians in York County.

Settlement Patterns

The earliest settlements were on the coastal plain low country of South Carolina. Pushed by a desire to escape the Revolutionary War and pulled by a desire for land, settlers eventually poured into the Piedmont up country. They were of Ulster Scots, German, and Welsh descent. In 1770 the population of South Carolina was less than 50,000; by 1790 it had reached 140,000.

Almost immediately after statehood, South Carolina began to lose population to the westward movement. In the early 1800s, slaveholders moved to new, more fertile plantations in Alabama and Mississippi. In the 1820s, antislavery Quakers moved to the Old Northwest, especially Indiana.

South Carolina did not attract many overseas immigrants during the nineteenth century. State-sponsored recruiting efforts brought in a few hundred Germans between 1866 and 1868 and about 2,500 northern Europeans in the early 1900s.

The Records

The major port of entry to South Carolina was Charleston. The Family History Library and the National Archives have fragmentary passenger lists for Charleston for 1820 to 1828 (FHL film 830232) and for Port Royal for 1865 (FHL film 830245). A few arrivals at Charleston are included in an index to passenger lists of vessels arriving at miscellaneous southern ports from 1890 to 1924 (FHL films 1324938-63).

Customs records for the ports of Charleston, Georgetown, and Beaufort are at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Several published records of pre-1900 immigrants are indexed in P. William Filby, Passenger and Immigration Lists Index (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981, 1985, 1986; FHL book 973 W32p). Supplements are issued annually. There are cumulative indexes.

More detailed information on immigration sources is in the United States Research Outline (30972). Records of blacks are listed in the Family History Library Catalog Locality Search under the heading SOUTH CAROLINA - SLAVERY AND BONDAGE and under the heading SOUTH CAROLINA - MINORITIES. Records of other major ethnic groups, including French Huguenots, Ulster Scots, Jews, Quakers, and Catawba Indians, are listed under SOUTH CAROLINA - MINORITIES.

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