Secession Hall, From the Street

The brick side walls of South Carolina Institute Hall on Meeting Street, standing without a roof, without floors, without a front — and beyond them, a street east, the tiered steeple of St. Philip's, untouched.

On the evening of 20 December 1860 the delegates of the South Carolina convention, having passed the Ordinance of Secession at St. Andrew's Hall that afternoon by a vote of 169 to nothing, walked here and signed it before a packed house. From that evening the building was Secession Hall. It stood for not quite a year afterward: the Great Fire of 11 December 1861 began about a third of a mile away and took the hall, the Circular Church beside it, and a diagonal third of the city in one night.

The hall where South Carolina left the Union burned down by accident, eleven months into the war it had declared there. Another view of these ruins, made from the porch of the Circular Church next door, is published in this collection with the diary of a woman who sat up that night listening to the roofs fall in.