Robert C. De Large

Robert Carlos De Large was born on the fifteenth of March 1842 at Aiken, South Carolina — into Charleston's free Black elite by most accounts, though some records say he was born enslaved; his father was a tailor, his mother a Haitian-born cloak maker. Schooled in North Carolina and at Charleston's Wood High School, he worked as tailor and farmer, was employed by the Confederate Navy in the war years — and afterward gave most of those earnings to the Republican Party.

Freedom's work claimed him early: agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention, and member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1868, where he chaired Ways and Means. As state land commissioner in 1870-71 his office moved some two thousand small tracts of land toward the freedpeople; his tenure was marred by allegations of fraud that his opponents pressed and no court ever proved.

In 1870 he was elected to the Forty-second Congress over the incumbent Christopher Bowen by fewer than a thousand votes, and sworn in on the fourth of March 1871. That April, in the Ku Klux Klan debates, he told the House plainly: the naked facts stared the nation in the face, and the strong arm of the law must interpose. Bowen contested the seat; the House found irregularities on both sides and vacated it in January 1873 — with nearly the whole term served and his health already failing.

Charleston made him a magistrate in 1873; tuberculosis took him on the fourteenth of February 1874, at thirty-one, and the magistrates of the state closed their offices on the day he was buried in the Brown Fellowship cemetery. Honored be Robert Carlos De Large, who at thirty stood in the people's House and asked the law to protect the people.