This early threat to the Union was deflected with a tariff reduction in 1833, but the nullification doctrine had laid the ideological groundwork on which 11 southern states were to base their secession over the issue of slavery 28 years later. Slavery was an economic mainstay of agriculture throughout the South, but particularly so in South Carolina, where slaves had been imported from Barbados with the very earliest settlers at Charles Town and where a plantation system based on involuntary servitude had existed since the late seventeenth century. By the early 1700s African slaves already made up three-quarters of the South Carolina population, and on the eve of the Civil War, South Carolina remained the largest slaveholding state in the Union. Colleton District, where Middleton Place was located, was nearly 80% black. This enormous disparity meant that white slaveholders lived in constant fear of slave insurrection. They were equally fearful of emancipation, which, as abolitionist sentiment grew in the North, many planters came to view as an inevitable outcome of northern political dominance. There were slaveholders who staunchly opposed disunion, but South Carolina, as it had been during the nullification dispute, was a hotbed of secessionism. With the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, a Charleston convention passed an ordinance making South Carolina the first state to withdraw from the Union. Henry Middleton had died in 1846 before the slavery controversy reached its height, but among the signers of the Ordinance of Secession were his sons John Izard Middleton of Georgetown, and Williams Middleton of Middleton Place. The war that followed caused more devastation to the plantation economy than emancipation, for in defeat the planters lost most of their financial assets and their voice in local government. In areas that had witnessed military action, they often saw devastation of their homes and property. Middleton Place, plundered and burned by invading troops in 1865, was no exception. Williams and his family fled to Charleston where they lived while renting the plantation grounds to a “Yankee captain.” In 1867 Williams borrowed money from a sister in Philadelphia and began the task of restoring the burnt-out southern flanker building to serve as a family residence. In 1871, before repairs were complete, the Middletons and their two children were again living at Middleton Place in the shadow of the ruined mansion that had housed five generations of their family.