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The Popular Education Question In Antebellum South Carolina, 1800-1860, Brian A. Robinson

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation reviews the struggle for popular education in Antebellum South Carolina. It contends that the failure of popular education in South Carolina was not a foregone conclusion nor was it mistake by school administration or state leaders, but instead, the failure to provide education for the white majority was the result of an intended goal. This project concludes that South Carolina remained without a system of public schools for the majority of citizens because those who opposed general education firmly believed popular education held the seeds of revolution while ignorance the better tool to perpetuate the status quo.

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Proslavery Thinking In Antebellum South Carolina: Higher Education, Transatlantic Encounters, And The Life Of The Mind, Jamie Diane Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

Eminent antebellum intellectuals Thomas Cooper, James Henley Thornwell, William Campbell Preston, and Francis Lieber, not only shaped their sociocultural milieu as published authors, compelling speakers, and powerful politicians, but also created a greenhouse environment of proslavery instruction at South Carolina College (SCC), today the University of South Carolina. As professors and presidents of the state’s landmark institution of learning, they produced some of the South’s most radical proslavery thinkers during the forty crucial years preceding the Civil War. SCC alumni, fresh from the four professors’ hothouse, became seminal figures in fomenting secession, fighting the Civil War, and firing Southerners’ frenzy …