COLUMBIA — During his tenure as South Carolina’s attorney general, now-Gov. Henry McMaster fought in court to retrieve a trove of Civil War gubernatorial papers taken from the government’s possession in 1865.
He argued the case through U.S. Bankruptcy Court, U.S. District Court and subsequent appeals, said Eric Emerson, director of the state Department of Archives and History.
As governor, he backed efforts to preserve the seven state constitutions adopted throughout South Carolina’s history, beginning with a temporary framework enacted in 1776 and culminating in the document ratified in 1895 that still governs the state…