Education & Politics

Towne arrived in the Sea Islands in April of 1862. Together with Ellen Murray, she founded what would later become the Penn School in an old plantation house on St. Helena Island. Though they admitted students of all ages, the teachers designed their classes primarily for children, knowing that they would go home at night and teach the lessons they had learned to their entire families.

Unlike most of the Northerners who traveled to Port Royal, Towne stayed for the next forty years, running the Penn School until her death in 1901. Today the school is one of the four sites that form the Reconstruction Era National Historic Park.

A Sea Islands refugee settlement called Mitchelville was one of the earliest examples of African American political and civic participation. Major General Ormsby Mitchel decided in late 1862 to work with freedpeople to build housing and develop civic institutions for those gathered on Hilton Head Island. Under military supervision, freedmen served on the city council and made decisions about local education and policies. At its height, the town reached an area of 200 acres and between 1,500 and 3,000 residents.

In 1865, delegates from across the state traveled to Charleston for a statewide political convention of African Americans. The contingents from Charleston and Beaufort were especially large. Convention participants spoke eloquently about their visions of freedom. They emphasized the need for education, the ability to do business without interference, and the rights to vote and hold office. The convention culminated in an appeal to the state of South Carolina to repeal racist laws that hindered Black people from making progress. They demanded, for one, “the inestimable right of voting for those who rule over in the land of our birth.”

During postwar Reconstruction, Black people gained considerable political power in states where they were a substantial proportion of the population. These included Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where Black people made up about 60% of the population. Enfranchised through federal policy, more than 80,000 Black men in South Carolina registered to vote for delegates to the new state constitutional convention that met in Charleston in 1868. The new biracial governments had many achievements, including establishing the South’s first public school systems, and passing laws to guarantee equal treatment regardless of race in transportation and public accommodations.

Throughout the South, white residents tried to prevent freedpeople from owning weapons to protect themselves and their communities. During Reconstruction, the state authorized the formation of militia units largely composed of Black men. The militia formed by freedmen in Beaufort was one example. The Arsenal in Beaufort had been a prison to enslaved people and a shelter for whites in the event of a slave uprising. During Reconstruction, the local Black militia took over the Arsenal to store their weapons.