Correspondence, account books, tax receipts, land papers, wills and estate inventories, and other items document life in South Carolina during colonial, antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras and into the 20th century. Topics represented include plantation management; African-American slaves and management of slave labor, including records re hiring-out, feeding, and clothing of slaves; nullification and presidency of Andrew Jackson; local, state, and national politics and political leaders; Civil War developments; Reconstruction; race relations; education for males and females in Columbia, Charleston, and elsewhere; Columbia Canal; and the South Carolina Penitentiary. Also including correspondence, chiefly ca. early 19th century, re family news from relatives remaining in Scotland; and scrapbook, ca. 1900s, of Emma Eugenia Anderson McMaster, wife of George McMaster, re Fairfield County history, and accomplishments of members of Anderson and Kincaid families, and related families (microfilm, R115). Materials re African-American history include bills of sale, 1821-1859, for slaves identified by name; correspondence re slave trade including letters re Cuba's continuation of trans-Atlantic slave trade, ca. 1836; wills and inventories identifying various slaves by name or gender; and volume, 1799-1863, identifying Kincaid family slaves by name, including yearly hire records, expenditures for clothing and medicine, and records of births and deaths.
