The foremost of these was the Jockey Club Ball, the most glamorous social gathering of the entire year, held in Charleston’s St. Andrews Hall, the same venue where delegates to South Carolina’s secession convention had voted the state out of the Union. The ball began at eleven p.m. and ended at six the next morning with dancing and an elaborate banquet; it drew only the “very select,” according to one attendee, “none but the higher classes.” Single men and women alike found it a worthy place to meet potential future spouses, though one visiting British author, Margaret Hunter Hall, found the
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