Session laws of the Province/Colony/State of South Carolina: various titles, 1731–, various state printers, 1731–. (In 1663 Charles I of England
granted a Charter for the Province of Carolina to a group of eight “Lords Proprietors”; a group of nobles who had helped restore him to the throne in
1660. Initially the territory nominally comprised the area occupied by the modern U. S. states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and
South Carolina. In 1665 the charter was expanded to nominally include Spanish territory to the south as far as St. Augustine in modern Florida. However
the first settlement in the whole vast area, Charles Town {now Charleston, S.C.} was not founded until 1670, and for many decades the area was sparsely
populated. The Lords Proprietors administered the small population for roughly the next 50 years through a body called the Grand Council. In
acknowledgment of the difficulty of governing the vast territory, in 1691 the Colonial proprietors appointed a governor resident in Charleston for the whole of
Carolina, but regularly appointed either another governor or a deputy to administer the northern portion of the colony. In 1712, North and South
Carolina were officially divided into separate colonies, with South Carolina continuing to nominally administer the dependencies further south. In 1719,
in response to the settlers’ dissatisfaction with proprietary rule, South Carolina was effectively made into a crown colony administered by a royal
governor and his council. This was made official in 1729 when the Lords Proprietors sold their charter back to the Crown. In that same year the
territories roughly comprising modern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were severed off and given a separate Royal Charter as the Colony of Georgia, so that
South Carolina assumed its modern borders. South Carolina became a U.S. state through its ratification of the United States Constitution on 23 May
1788. Pimsleur’s Checklists of Basic American Legal Publications, in its listings of identified published session laws for South Carolina, begins with
year 1731, the year of the S.C. Ninth General Assembly. However, various legislative assemblies were functioning at least as far back as 1671; i.e., The
Grand Council, 1670-1719, and His Majesty’s Council 1720-1775. The history of the Senate of South Carolina dates back to the beginning of local rule
by the Proprietors through the Grand Council in 1671. The House of Representatives dates back to the establishment in 1691 of an advisory body to the
Grand Council consisting of 20 elected members termed the Commons House of Assembly. It is noteworthy that the enumeration of the earlier General
Assemblies ends with the 33rd General Assembly, Feb. 23-Aug. 39, 1775. A new series of enumeration was begun with the 1st General Assembly in 1776.) At
the time of microfilming the Early State Records Collection, the Library of Congress was unable to locate a document for the following sessions:
September 1739; August 1733; May 1755; September 1755; The Tax Act in 1761; October-December 1762; January-July 1766; January 1773-September 1775; December
1776; and, January-February 1777 (printed as separate acts). Moreover, no laws were passed during the following sessions: January-September 1763;
October-?, 1765; November 1766-May 1767; November 1768; June-September 1770; September-December 1771; April 1772; October-November 1772; November 3, 1856
(called session); November 1, 1861 (called session); and, October 1865 (called session). (Titles in the Early State Records collection were digitized
from a microfilm copy of title originally held by the Library of Congress and the Public Record Office in London, England).
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