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Charleston (SC)

Only hours after being sworn in, Lincoln faced the most momentous decision in presidential history.

On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln’s first day in office, a letter from Major Robert Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, landed on the new president’s desk, informing him the garrison would run out of provisions in a month or six weeks.
Northern SourceAbner Doubleday Journal

With the first flowers of spring, front gates in Charleston swing open to strangers.

I had visited Charleston, South Carolina twice over the years, touring the great house museums that summed up the glory of the eighteenth-century city, ferrying out to Fort Sumter, and dining superbly on she-crab soup and platters of shrimp.

In the quiet luxury of the historic district, a unique form of house plan—which goes back two hundred years—is a beguiling surprise for a visitor

Charleston is and always will be a small town, the citadel of a “hereditary Nobility,” as its founders willed it to be. In its early days Charleston was a walled city, and in some sense it has continued as such, though the walls long ago vanished.

THE WAY I SEE IT

For an example of the way an incident of the distant past can put a revealing light on a problem of today, you might care to spend a moment considering the case of the Swamp Angel.

Courtly, gallant, handsome, and bold, John Laurens seemed the perfect citizen-soldier of the Revolution. But why did he have to seek death so assiduously?

How a nation regards its past is itself a fact of considerable historical significance, and it will be interesting to observe the treatment of the Founding Fathers during the Bicentennial celebration.

In the Low Country of South Carolina, English and Huguenot planters raised up a prosperous American city-state with a high culture and a lasting charm.

The political convention was devised to meet an unforeseen need, and now and then it has an unexpected result

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