Tim Scott and the Palmetto State Legacy

The best words about South Carolina p0litics weren’t written by an academic or some traveling journalist, but by a native of Pickens County who explained the disagreement between those who lived in the upstate and their counterparts in the low country. “From the beginning,” Ben Robertson wrote in 1942, “the difference in our views was fundamental, and the time was bound to come when there would not be room enough in Carolina for two such conceptions of a state.”

Decades have come and gone since the dissimilarity of opinion was so boldly described, and today the national specialists divide the state into four regions, not two: the upstate (10 counties), midlands (12 counties), the Pee Dee (12 counties) and the low country (12 counties).  That separation didn’t end Robertson’s original account, and in Red Hills and Cotton, it persists to this day. “From 1750 to 1860 we lost to Charleston, since that time Charleston has lost to us.  One of us had to whip the other to a farewell and a frazzle.”  

It is an unwritten rule that any upstate politician needs to be “shown around” the low country by a trusted local elected official, and when a Charlestonian comes to the upstate seeking votes, he or she is examined in a similar way.  Among Republicans, even that kind introduction doesn’t always take away the doubts.  Upstate people didn’t like former governor Mark Sanford, and some think present congresswoman Nancy Mace is a spoiled product of privilege.    

It remains a fact that in spite of the same television shows, matching internet connections, statewide commercial marketing and interstate highway connections, the upstate and low country rivalry lingers.  Rhett Butler said in Gone With the Wind that he was “…going back to dignity and grace. I’m going back to Charleston.”  A writer like Pat Conroy set his stories in low country locations, and once described a walk in Charleston as being through “gauze or inhaling damaged silk.”  

Residents in the upstate had their own opinions about their neighbors who lived close to the coast, and it didn’t include silk or dignity in any way.  We “are land people,” wrote Robertson, and “we believed the coastal city to the South [is] “a worldly place longing for Europe.”  It had sophisticated Anglican-like churches, while upstate inhabitants preferred plain, but sturdy, Baptist assemblies.  That meant that the white lap sidings of wood churches surrounded people of conviction more than appearance.  One woman who lived in Charleston for thirty years died in the upstate.  She had her tombstone: “Born 1810 – Died 1890, Lived Fifty Years.”  

Why revive this forgotten history?  There is one reason: the presidential campaign of Tim Scott is gaining national momentum.  Other South Carolinians have run for the nation’s highest office, but this African-American from impoverished circumstances is a US Senator who previously served 14 years on the Charleston County Council.  

He has defied conventions and achieved political success his whole life.  Today, Scott may be this state’s most popular politician; and at the same time when prognosticators say he is unlikely to win the White House, he likes his odds.  By law, an appointed person to a federal office like the US Senate must run in subsequent elections after accepting his position.  This meant that in 2014, Tim Scott, and Senior Senator Lindsey Graham, both appeared on the same ballot at the same time.  Scott ran slightly ahead of Graham in virtually every county, including the senior senator’s home ones of Pickens and Oconee.  In fact, Scott may have buried the past upstate vs low country rivalry when he won every upstate county.   

In 2022, Scott won his second election – in his self-declared term-limited last Senate race – with nearly two-thirds (63%) of the popular vote.  He carried 38 of 46 counties, but more impressively, he won the major population trophies.  In South Carolina, half of the state population live in just seven counties, and Tim Scott won every one of them. 

Are these in-state accomplishments enough to be the first person from South Carolina to win the White House?  We don’t know, but after his national appearance on television last night, there is one caveat that should be remembered: “Don’t count him out.” Tim Scott has a tendency to defy the odds.