The Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon rises around you, completed in 1771 as one of the most historically significant buildings in the United States. This Palladian structure served as Charleston's customs house and public exchange — the commercial and political heart of the colonial city. It was here in 1774 that South Carolina's delegates to the First Continental Congress were elected, and here in 1788 that South Carolina ratified the United States Constitution.
George Washington himself was feted in this building during his 1791 Southern Tour, dancing at a grand ball in the Great Hall on the upper floor. But the basement tells a different story entirely. Beneath the elegant commerce and political ceremony above, the British used the Provost Dungeon to imprison American patriots, suspected spies, and enslaved people during their occupation of Charleston from 1780 to 1782.
The building sits on the foundations of the original Half Moon Battery, the city's first fortification, built in the 1690s. You can descend into the dungeon today to see where prisoners were held in appalling conditions. The Old Exchange embodies the paradox that runs through all of American history: the ideals of freedom and self-governance coexisting with the reality of slavery and imprisonment, in the same building, on the same soil.