Leslie Carbone

The Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon is a quirky museum in Charleston, South Carolina, and a backdrop to some of the defining events in American history. Decades later, in 1780, between the Charleston Tea Party and President Washington’s visit, the British captured Charleston and used the Exchange building as a barracks and the dungeon as a provost, a military prison. Hayne was declared guilty of treason and espionage, without trial, and held in the provost dungeon until he was hanged on August 4, 1781, at the age of 36, at White Point like Stede Bonnet. Outraged by what they considered an unjust execution, approximately 2,000 men joined the Continental Army in South Carolina under General Nathaniel Greene, helping turn the tide of the War in the Americans’ favor.

It was one of my favorite winter Sunday dinners growing up in New England. To me, it represents home and family, warmth when it’s cold outside, hearty sustenance on a leisurely afternoon. I used to help my mother by chopping up the vegetables in the morning. I use my own low-carb white sauce, but you can substitute your preferred béchamel if you like or even a can of cream soup in a pinch.

It is set in the author’s fictional Wessex, England, in the 1870s, during the Long Depression, an economic contraction considered even harsher than the later Great Depression. The story is primarily set during the early 20th century in the Salinas Valley in central California, the author’s home area. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is narrated in the first person by a young girl whose father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer facing social disapproval for representing a black man falsely accused of a horrific crime. It is set during the late 1870s, the sunset years of the wild west, and the changing of the place and its culture reflects the characters’ own sense of growing older.

Charleston’s Battery and Rainbow Row faded from view as my travel companion and I sailed aboard the ferry toward Fort Sumter, perched on a small island in Charleston Harbor, site of the first battle in America’s bloodiest war. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise provided that Missouri would enter the Union as a slave state and that Maine would enter as a free state. In 1857, the Dred Scott Decision, one of the most appalling examples of judicial activism in the history of the Supreme Court, held that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, that “Negroes”–free or slave–were not citizens of the United States, and that slaves were legal property and their owners’ In the early morning hours of April 12, envoys representing Confederate Brigadier General P. G.T. Beauregard notified Yankee Major Robert Anderson, commanding officer at Fort Sumter, that the Confederacy would open fire on the Fort in one hour.