• Any reader who needs this introduction at all probably needs to understand a little more than that they "split up" in the early 18th century. A couple of sentences concerning the Barbadian roots of the South Carolina coastal settlement would be helpful.

Additionally, the parliament had the duty of maintaining the church with funds and building the church in the colony. The Church of England remained established in South Carolina until the Constitution of 1778 which replaced Anglicanism with Christianity as the officially recognized religion. Finally in 1790, the state no longer officially endorsed a specific religion and declared that “the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever hereafter be allowed within this state to all mankind.” Although this Constitutional provision came with a few caveats (religion could not be used as an excuse for licentiousness or for disrupting the peace and safety of the state), it officially marked the end of the established church in South Carolina.

The fall of the established church in South Carolina, like in most other states, could potentially be attributed to the rise of enlightenment thinking and a trend toward religious tolerance.

• Well, it could at any rate be related to the disestablishments elsewhere in the independent republics. The argument you're trying to set up would make more sense if it were put in the context of the surrounding discussions, including most importantly the one in Virginia.

Although this probably was a factor, it does not tell the whole story of disestablishment. Another key driving force behind this trend toward disestablishmentarianism was the colony's desire for sustained economic development. South Carolina in the 17th and 18th Centuries was still a fairly wild and developing place. The economy was in its infancy and needed stability to ensure steady growth. An established church and the religiously divided population that such an institution amplifies, seem at odds with stable economic growth. Consequently over the course of the 18th Century, there have been several pushes in the general direction of disestablishment and unity. Several of these pushes were not driven by the idea that religious freedom was seen as a fundamental right and ideal in itself, but because disestablishment was a pragmatic way of ensuring that there will be sustained economic development. This article illustrates several instances where the economic ramifications of the established Church are considered.

• "Are considered" means "were mentioned," as we see below. This raises analytic problems. You wind up having to argue that the Enlightenment isn't "the cause" of disestablishment because some people made some appeals to other arguments sometimes. Using the recitations in a statute to explain what the statute is about has some limitations, isolated quotation from the pamphlet rhetoric has others. At length, in a monograph, one can build up a sufficient reservoir of material taken from the pamphlet literature to establish the major points of view present in a dialogue, as for example John Reid did for two decades in his Constitutional History of the American Revolution.

• In truth, of course, not only is the proof troublesome, but the proposition being contended for is poorly selected. No one said anything was "the whole story" of disestablishment, much less that the "whole story" could be told without inter-colonial and inter-social comparison, deep background, and a broader chronological focus. But no one who thinks that broad intellectual changes occurring in the period from 1650 to 1850 altered the relation of politics and religion in the English-speaking world is going to be much affected by the recitations in a backwater statute, either. So when you're done working out your instances, the analysis will be the same as it was before: if we are writing broadly about the roots of disestablishment in the first British Empire and its progeny, this is merely a too-small incident to contain "the whole story," and if we are writing about this particular situation, a broad question is not the one our sources can shed light on.

• I don't think you've understood what they are saying here correctly. Look again.

b) that such an act would drive away many and discourage settlement (“such a treatment of Protestant Dissenters . . . would drive away many and keep back more from adventuring to transport themselves [to Carolina]”); and c) negatively affect trade in the colony (“hinder the exportation of many English Manufactures, prove a great Discouragement to trade and lessening of Her Majesty’s Customs”).

• Actually you mean the Privy Council nullified it for reasons of constitutional repugnance, I think. You might want to catch up with whatever parts of the Privy Council process are available without going to the Public Records Office, in some secondary source or reprint, but you probably should also try to see if the relevant series from the PC2 collection (which is where the report of counsel recommending to the Privy Council will be found in the PRO) is online.

• Maybe, but it's not disestablishment either. The source is indicative of a desire by real estate developers to have tenants regardless of religion. You might find that in New York every year from roughly 1629 on. Mightn't you want to compare this to other situations in other neighboring republics?

• I think you're missing here the fundamental point that conversation in South Carolina is always like this: maintenance of white supremacy in the only part of North America with an immense black majority is a constant of all South Carolina discourse, whether spoken or unspoken, throughout its colonial and post-colonial history. The classic work for understanding this aspect of the situation is, of course, Peter Wood's Black Majority.

• But it's also about other matters, and takes other points of view. Rather than consider how to interpret the thought of the author of one document, you quote that document selectively in order to show that it contains material for which you are filtering. But even if that constituted responsible interpretation of the document itself, which it doesn't, it wouldn't constitute evidence for the proposition it's supposed to support, because without some idea how the ideas you show him expressing are related to the rest of what he has to say, we can't tell whether their expression is perfunctory or intensely important to his own intentions, to take only two polar possibilities among many.

• Are you going to go the whole distance without ever asking what makes Christian black people "outsiders"? Isn't the problem that disunion of any kind among owners raises the danger that slaves will not accept social death and radical deprivation peacefully? Is that really an argument for religious toleration, or simply an argument for the cardinal importance of racial subordination regardless of religion?

• The weakest possible form of the thesis, and it still won't be carried by the evidence adduced. You showed nothing about what was a factor leading to disestablishment: you showed that some rhetoric was present in a few documents bearing (in some cases) only tangentially on disestablishment. Rather than attempt in revision to nail down that argument, it seems to me, you should devote yourself instead to turning your materials in the direction of a question or two that they can resolve. In this connection, comparison with other disestablishments in the post-Independence Southern Colonies might be useful, as I've mentioned above.