Scott A. Weiss

Charleston: 1856

History EN ↓ 2 episodes

In Charleston, South Carolina, in the years before the Civil War, a white attorney and son of a prominent plantation owner fights to prove that a former slave is a free man — as the city slowly tears itself apart. Charleston is a narrative podcast set at one of the most explosive moments in Charleston history — the decade before the Civil War, when the city that had long considered itself the cultural and intellectual capital of the American South was hardening into something more dangerous, more certain of itself, and more willing to defend what it had built at any cost. Follow the show on In...

Author

Scott A. Weiss

Episodes

Deed and Title 11.06.2026 23:18

On a Tuesday morning on Chalmers Street, a man runs. He makes it forty yards before they catch him and bring him back through the gate. Within thirty seconds the people on the sidewalk have returned to their business. Nothing happened here. That is what Charleston decides within thirty seconds. Nothing happened here. Eight minutes away, Thomas Hale is preparing for his first hearing in Arthur Beau...

The Caning 20.05.2026 28:26

May 22nd, 1856. A congressman from South Carolina walks onto the floor of the United States Senate with a metal-tipped cane and beats a Massachusetts senator unconscious at his desk. In Charleston, the city celebrates. Four days later, a lawyer named Thomas Hale steps off a train and walks through that celebration without saying a word. He grew up in this city. He left it for Harvard and came back...