colonies. By 1708, a majority of the non-native inhabitants were African American slaves. Native Americans, ravaged by diseases against which they had no resistance, last significantly threatened the colony's existence in the Yemassee War of 1715. After the colonists revolted against proprietary rule in 1719, the proprietors' interests were bought out and South Carolina became a royal province.By the 1750s, rice and indigo had made the planters and merchants of the South Carolina lowcountry the wealthiest men in what would become the United States. Government encouragement of white Protestant settlement in townships in the interior and migration from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina were to give the upcountry a different character: smaller farms and a larger percentage of German, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh settlers. By 1790, this part of the state temporarily gave the total population a white majority, but the spread of cotton plantations soon again made African American slaves the majority.Charlestonians were strong supporters of their rights as Englishmen in the Stamp Act crisis in 1765, and South Carolina would play a significant role when differences escalated into the American Revolution. The Charleston merchant Henry Laurens served as President of the Continental Congress in 1777 and 1778. The first decisive victory of the war was the repulse of a British fleet by patriot defenders in a palmetto log fort on Sullivans Island *http://www.nps.gov/fomo/* on June 28, 1776. Over two hundred battles and skirmishes occurred in the State, many of them vicious encounters between South Carolinians who opted for independence and those who chose to remain loyal to King George. Battles at Kings Mountain (1780) *http://www.nps.gov/kimo/* and Cowpens (1781) *http://www.nps.gov/cowp*were turning points in the war.South Carolina became the eighth state to ratify the United States Constitution in 1788, and in 1790 moved its seat of governme...
