SC Public Interest Foundation Chairman, Mr. Vince Graham, reminds us of the importance of our state’s struggle to stop tyranny in sharing the following comment and historical writing.
“The spirit of constitutional seriousness and long-term responsibility lies at the heart of the SC Public Interest Foundation’s work”
In early March 1776, acting through the revolutionary government of South Carolina’s Provincial Congress and Council of Safety, orders were issued directing Colonel William Moultrie to proceed immediately to Sullivan’s Island and begin construction of Fort Sullivan. Later that month, upon adoption of the Constitution on March 26, 1776, John Rutledge was elected President of a newly founded republic. South Carolina’s Constitution was among the earliest written in the modern world. It established a functioning government exactly 100 days before July 4th.
Speed was paramount; permanence was secondary. With the British navy – then the most powerful in the world – bearing down upon them, South Carolinians did not await authorization from the Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia, nor for professional military engineers from elsewhere. It governed itself, resourcefully using what was at hand: palmetto logs, sand, local labor, and a sense of urgency. Usually described as military history, South Carolina’s defense can also be understood as constitutional history.
In the spring of 1776, George Washington dispatched Charles Lee (no relation to the Virginia Lees) to assess southern defenses. He arrived in Charleston in early June, bringing with him military experience and a lack of local knowledge. After inspecting the partially completed Fort Sullivan, he declared it a “slaughter pen” and ordered its evacuation.
Lee’s judgment reflected established orthodoxy. Unimpressed, Rutledge’s response reflected an instinct that local civil authority must remain supreme. A man of few words, Rutledge wrote to Moultrie:
“Sir: General Lee still wishes you to evacuate the fort. You will not, without order from me. I would sooner cut off my hand than write one.”
This was not petulance, but an assertion of jurisdiction. Rutledge understood that if civilian authority yielded to distant command, self-government itself would be compromised. A stand would be made at the imperfect fort because right or wrong, South Carolina’s leadership determined it must.
Outmanned and outgunned, the Americans turned back the British on June 28, 1776 – thereafter known as “Carolina Day.” With the threat of renewed attack still real, Rutledge ordered that an additional 500 pounds of gunpowder be sent to Fort Sullivan. His accompanying note to Moultrie concluded with a simple instruction: “cool and do mischief.” The phrase captures discipline joined with resolve.
The American victory validated not only a resourceful position, but a constitutional judgment: that local knowledge, properly exercised, could outperform centralized direction. President Rutledge later presented his personal sword to Sergeant William Jasper, a hero of the battle, and the structure renamed Fort Moultrie, after its commanding officer.
That same constitutional temperament carried forward to 1787, when Rutledge served as Chairman of the Constitutional Convention’s Committee of Detail, which produced the initial draft of the United States Constitution. During an August 23 debate, South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney proposed a narrowed version of a federal veto over state laws, scaled back from a similar congressional power unsuccessfully advanced earlier in the Convention. The debate revealed a shared understanding of possible consequences. Roger Sherman argued the Supremacy Clause rendered such a veto unnecessary. Oliver Ellsworth warned it would require federal control over state legislative machinery. George Mason asked whether every road or bridge would require national approval. Rutledge responded that “if nothing else, this alone would damn and ought to damn the Constitution,” reducing the states to “mere corporations.” The motion failed.
74 years later, South Carolina’s Christopher Memminger chaired the committee that drafted the Confederate Constitution, which sought to reassert founding principles and clarify the allocation of power between central and state governments. For example, its revisions to Article I, Section 8 prohibited corporate welfare and expressly rejected federal infrastructure funding except for limited navigation aids paid for by user fees.
Whatever one’s view of the Confederate cause, the method is unmistakable: confront the scope of power in the text, constrain it structurally, and align benefits with costs.
In an 1866 correspondence, British champion of liberty, Lord John Acton, wrote to Robert E. Lee of “those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy.” In response, Lee expressed gratitude for the constitutional amendment ending slavery, while expressing hope that “the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people” would be preserved. For otherwise, Lee prophesied, “the consolidation of the states into one vast republic [was] sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home.” Was he correct?
Across these episodes runs a consistent thread: South Carolina treated constitutions not as symbols, but as operating instruments, to be designed, tested, upheld and, when necessary, revised.
That raises a question for today: Do our current institutions reflect clarity? Do they align authority with responsibility? Do they make costs visible and decisions accountable? Or have we drifted into arrangements where power is unaccountable, incentives are misaligned, and outcomes are disconnected from responsibility?
If the latter, the answer is not nostalgia. It is the same one South Carolinians reached in 1776—and again in later generations: return to first principles.
A constitution is not a relic. It is a framework for action. And if it no longer serves that purpose, the situation demands a call for that moral imperative of duty Jefferson set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
Because constitutions shape incentives and outcomes, we must be willing, calmly and deliberately, to ask whether South Carolina’s present arrangement still reflects those principles that animated its founding: self-reliance, subsidiarity, clarity of authority, and accountability of power.
In that spirit, it is time to consider a new South Carolina constitution – one that reclaims appropriate authority from the federal government, restores local authority and responsibility closer to the people of our State’s counties and municipalities, relies more on user-based funding where appropriate, limits diffuse and unaccountable spending, and states plainly what state government may and may not do.
South Carolina has done this before – carefully, deliberately, and with a clear-eyed understanding of both the risks and the necessity. It is time to do so again.