Mary Anna Phinney Stansbury. See note on “The Surprise of
Ticonderoga.”
The story, as related in the poem, is in the main true. The church,
however, was St. Philip’s (Charleston, South Carolina), an earlier
edifice that stood upon the same site as St. Michael’s. The slave,
moreover, received his freedom, not from the city authorities, but from
the vestrymen of the church. The fire occurred in the year 1796.