CAROLINA, the southernmost of the original five Western Provinces admitted to representation by the Second Frame (q.v.) of 1691, its lowcountry given over from the first English settlement to rice and, from the middle of the last century, to cotton besides, its economy built, until 1836, upon a chattel labour force that at the Census of 1830 outnumbered the province's free population by a ratio this contributor's own tables return at very nearly three to two. It was the point of origin of the Act of Severance signed at Charleston in January of 1837, bore the heaviest continental fighting of the War of the Severance (q.v.) that followed, and has been, in the seventy years since the Reconstitution (q.v.) restored it to its seat in the Assembly, the most closely watched of the Commonwealth's provincial franchise returns.
The land itself recovered from the war a good deal faster than the customary accounts allow: cotton acreage under cultivation, which fell by above two-fifths during the fighting years, had regained its 1836 figure by 1855 and stood, at the Census of 1910, at more than double it, the difference being taken up very largely by free tenant and share cultivation rather than by the wage-labour system the Charter (q.v.) had in principle established. The province's rice acreage, by contrast, has never fully recovered the ground lost during the war, the tidal works that made the old rice culture profitable having required a capital investment few of the postwar landholders, of whatever race, found themselves able to renew.
The franchise returns bear a closer statistical examination than this contributor has generally seen given them elsewhere. The provincial registration rolls compiled under the new constitution of 1868 show some ninety-one in the hundred of adult male freedmen in the lowcountry counties enrolled to vote, a proportion this contributor's own arithmetic finds scarcely distinguishable from the corresponding figure for the province's white citizens the same year. The rolls compiled for the general election of 1908, the most recent for which complete provincial returns are available to this contributor, show the freedmen proportion fallen to rather under four in ten of the adult male population the census would reckon eligible, against a white registration figure in the same counties that has moved, across the same four decades, scarcely at all. The intervening statute books record no single Act repealing the franchise this Commonwealth's own Charter declared universal; they record, instead, an accumulating series of property, residency, and registration provisions, adopted piecemeal across five provincial legislatures between 1876 and 1904, none framed in terms that name their object. This contributor, whose office is the returns and not their interpretation, sets the two sets of figures down side by side and leaves their relation to the reader's own arithmetic, which she does not expect to require any great assistance from her in reaching its own conclusion. (M. S. W.)