On November 13, 1860, the 44th SC General Assembly passed "An Act to Provide for the calling of a Convention of the People of this State," and the elected delegates assembled on December 17th at the Baptist Church in Columbia, SC at noon. This group elected David F. Jamison of Barnwell District as the President of said Convention. After approving their rules for conducting the Convention, they had to adjourn for a few days thanks to a Smallpox scare; they re-assembled in Charleston. On December 20, 1865, the Convention delegates voted to Secede from the Union, and the 44th SC General Assembly was in attendance when Secession was unanimously approved.

Even before the state seceded, South Carolina had already begun making preparations for a war that most of her citizens believed either would never actually unfold or would be a short duration. Militia companies, some of them with lineages dating back to the American Revolution, were joined by new units raised in cities, towns, and communities all over the state to accommodate the flood of enthusiastic volunteers. Within a month, the State Legislature approved ten (10) legislative Acts pertaining to military functions in South Carolina. Per Convention authorization, the local military units seized Castle Pinckney, Fort Moultrie, Fort Johnson, and the U.S. Arsenal in Charleston.

In early 1861, other Southern States seceded from the Union and ratified a Constitution for the Confederate States of America (CSA). Delegates were selected to attend a Provisional Confederate Congress in Montgomery, AL, starting on February 4th. South Carolina updated and issued a new State Constitution on April 8th. On April 12th, the SC Military bombarded Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and the Union troops there surrendered the next day. The American Civil War was now officially started.

When President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, and as the states of the upper South responded by calling their own secession conventions, South Carolinians continued to flock to the colors. More than 60,000 of them saw Confederate service during the Civil War. Reserve and home guard units had little real impact but were nonetheless a presence in their own communities. Several regular Confederate units were commanded by officers with at least some military experience or education, but many more of them were raised and commanded by men better known for their political careers or family connections than anything else.

Many units were first sent to defend Charleston or other points in the lowcountry and remained there for most of the war. Others responded to calls for assistance once it became obvious that Virginia would be the major battlefield, and they began arriving there that spring and summer. Still others organized later in 1861 or early in 1862 and spent a few months in South Carolina before serving for most of the war in other states, primarily in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. Several men born or raised in South Carolina became general officers, among them Stephen Elliott, Jr., and Johnson Hagood, who served for most of the war in their home state; Richard H. Anderson, Matthew C. Butler, Wade Hampton, Micah Jenkins, Joseph B. Kershaw, and James Longstreet, who served in the Army of Northern Virginia; and Ellison Capers, States Rights Gist, and Arthur M. Manigault, who served in the Army of Tennessee.

The Palmetto State was not a major battleground during the war, though it did see a few major campaigns and several minor engagements. The first significant action in the state occurred in the fall of 1861 when the United States Navy, seeking a port that might serve as a base for its blockade of the southern coast, sent an expedition toward Port Royal and Beaufort. On November 7, 1861, Commander Samuel F. DuPont’s fleet shelled the Confederate defenses guarding Port Royal Sound and quickly forced their garrisons to withdraw. Over the next few weeks Union troops occupied Beaufort, Port Royal, Hilton Head, and the neighboring Sea Islands. Planters and other whites in the area fled their homes, leaving behind thousands of blacks whose status was somewhere between enslaved and free.

Hilton Head and Port Royal Sound would serve as a headquarters for Union land and naval forces for the rest of the war, a staging point from which they would launch numerous combined operations against Charleston and the rest of the coast. Officials of the U.S. Department of the Treasury soon began a project known as the “Port Royal Experiment,” by which civil and military authorities took charge of abandoned Sea Island cotton plantations and offered wages for freedmen to work the fields. Northern teachers and missionaries came south to help educate those who were still technically considered “contraband of war.” Union Maj. Gen. David Hunter recruited freedmen on the Sea Islands to organize one of the first black regiments in the United States Army, despite having no real authority to do so before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in the portions of South Carolina under Union occupation on January 1, 1863.

Conscription, in which all men between the ages of eighteen (18) and thirty-five (35), later forty-five (45) were drafted for Confederate service, was unpopular at best and unmanageable at worst. This was mandated by the 1st Confederate Congress on April 16, 1862. State authorities drafted those they could get between the ages of sixteen (16) and sixty-five (65) for the home guard and reserves. By 1863 some men either evaded the draft or deserted once they were enlisted, with individuals and groups hiding out in the mountain districts in the northwestern corner of the state, often called “the Dark Corner.”

State and local governments made necessary adjustments as well, implementing policies intended to support the war effort. Milledge L. Bonham succeeded Francis W. Pickens as governor on December 17, 1862, serving until December 20, 1864. As the war progressed, some politicians expressed opposition not only to Confederate measures such as conscription and impressments, or to the course of the war, but also to Jefferson Davis as the Confederate President. Newspaper editors such as Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., of the Charleston Mercury heaped scorn on President Davis and his administration at every turn. Andrew G. Magrath succeeded Milledge L. Bonham as governor on December 20, 1864, serving only a few months before the war’s end.

South Carolina units played significant roles defending the low-country for two and a half (2-1/2) years after the Battle of Secessionville (June 16, 1862), most notably near Charleston, where they repulsed an attack by a Union ironclad squadron in April 7, 1863. On July 10, 1863, Union Maj. Gen. Quincy A. Gillmore opened a campaign against Charleston by landing forces on Morris Island in an attempt to gain a foothold from which to operate against Charleston. On July 18, 1863 the Union troops launched an attack on Battery Wagner, the major Confederate earthwork on Morris Island. The assault, notable as one of the first in which the United States Army employed black troops, was a complete failure and resulted in heavy casualties. Though unsuccessful in capturing Charleston, Maj. Gen. Gillmore’s activities initiated a siege that lasted until February of 1865. During this period the Union forces carried out two (2) major bombardments from batteries on Morris Island against Fort Sumter and began firing shells into Charleston, which accomplished little other than the destruction of property and the intimidation of civilians. A third and final major bombardment of Fort Sumter occurred the next summer, and a Union movement from Port Royal against the railroad junction at Gopher Hill (Ridgeland) in conjunction with Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s march from Atlanta in late November 1864 resulted in an inconclusive engagement at Honey Hill on November 30, 1864.

On February 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine, C.S.S. Hunley, attacked and sank the 1,240-ton U.S.S. Housatonic, which had been on Union blockade-duty in Charleston's outer harbor. The C.S.S. Hunley did not survive the attack and also sank, taking with her all eight (8) members of her crew, and was lost.

In September of 1864, a military prison was established at Florence. As many as twelve thousand (12,000) Union prisoners, most of them transferred from the prison at Andersonville, GA, were held there during the war’s final winter. Almost three thousand (3,000) of them died before Union Maj. Gen. Sherman’s advance through the state closed the prison in February of 1865.

In January of 1865, Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman began shifting his army’s right wing through Beaufort to Pocotaligo. Then on February 1st, the soldiers at Pocotaligo moved inland while Maj. Gen. Sherman’s left wing crossed the Savannah River and marched through Robertsville and Lawtonville in southwestern South Carolina. The only engagement of any consequence before he approached Columbia occurred on February 3rd at Rivers Bridge on the Salkehatchie River. Some eight thousand (8,000) Union forces attempting to cross there were delayed briefly by nine hundred (900) Confederates, who were quickly outflanked and forced to withdraw, clearing the way for Maj. Gen. Sherman’s advance through the state. Though Maj. Gen. Sherman feinted as if he were headed for Charleston, his troops reached the outskirts of Columbia by February 16th. Charleston began quietly evacuating the next day, at the same time that the major Confederate force defending the two (2) Carolinas withdrew from Columbia.

In the capital city, Union soldiers ransacked both the existing State House and the new unfinished one, and many of them roamed the streets drinking, frightening citizens, and looting at will. High winds throughout the night of February 17th helped spread multiple fires, and about a third of the city burned, although numerous Union officers and men tried to re-establish order and help Columbians save their homes and churches. Maj. Gen. Sherman continued toward North Carolina, occasionally skirmishing along the way and burning or ransacking portions of Winnsboro, Camden, Chester, and Cheraw during the next two weeks. A limited Federal raid by troops under Union Brig. Gen. Edward E. Potter in April made its way through Georgetown, Manning, Sumter, and Camden and was the last significant military operation in the state during the war.

One of the more painful costs of Confederate defeat was that 18,000 to 21,000 men, or one of every fourteen (1 of 14) white South Carolinians, had been killed or mortally wounded or had died from disease. The most significant consequence of Union victory was the emancipation of 400,000 slaves and their subsequent attempt to adjust to their new place in South Carolina society. Whether bitter amid defeat, devastation, and memories of the past or optimistic amid victory, freedom, and expectations for the future, South Carolinians would struggle with the results–and the legacy–of the war for generations to come.

The 1865 "Convention of the People" repealed the Ordinance for Secession, and produced a new SC Constitution. In November of 1865, the "Colored People's Convention" convened for five (5) days.