Darkness closes around you at the entrance to the Provost Dungeon, the space beneath the Old Exchange that held prisoners during the Revolutionary War's most turbulent years. When British forces captured Charleston in May 1780 — the largest British military victory of the war — they occupied the city for over two years. The dungeon became a place of suffering.
American patriots who refused to pledge loyalty to the Crown were imprisoned here in wretched conditions: overcrowded, poorly ventilated, with inadequate food and water. Disease spread rapidly. Some prisoners died in these rooms.
But the Provost Dungeon held others as well. Enslaved people who had escaped their enslavers or who were seized as property of rebel colonists were also confined here. The British Army offered freedom to enslaved people who escaped from Patriot owners and joined British lines — an offer that thousands accepted, fundamentally reshaping the demographics of the conflict.
The dungeon thus held both the freedom-seeking patriots who owned enslaved people and the freedom-seeking enslaved people whom those patriots owned — an almost unbearable compression of American contradiction. Consider that the word freedom meant entirely different things to everyone imprisoned in this space, and that the Revolution itself was never a single story for you to simplify.