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In this article Rebecca Starr examines how a broad political consensus was maintained in the politics of South Carolina during the difficult transitional period that followed the gaining of independence. The colony's legislature had been firmly controlled by an oligarchy of planter and merchant families from the coastal plain, and centred in Charleston. Even before the revolution there had been tensions emerging between the oligarchy and the inhabitants of the developing up-country settlements, who had reason to feel that they were being neglected and excluded from representation. The article explains how the oligarchy succeeded in sustaining consensus, while preserving its own ultimate hegemony over the politics of the new state. This was done mainly by a skilful use of committee and petitioning procedures to neutralize and conciliate the potentially divisive political challenges from the up-country. These tactics enabled the oligarchy to maintain its grip on power until the economic development of the decades after independence generated a renewed planter oligarchy which transcended the old geographical divisions and provided a solid foundation for a new consensus in South Carolina politics that held good until the Civil War.
