A gripping tale of love, murder, and betrayal in antebellum North Carolina. In 1853, Reverend George Carawan was arrested for murdering the timid schoolteacher Clarence Lassiter in the small town of Rose Bay, North Carolina. The subsequent trial was a media sensation at the time, with the story being reported in newspapers as far as London, England. The idea of a well-respected preacher shooting an unarmed schoolteacher would have been enough to gain an audience's attention, but Reverend Carawan was thought to have done many more sinister things in his lifetime, all of which he found necessary in order to maintain his position of power and wealth in the community where he had made a name for himself. Beneath the Splendor tells the story of what might have happened to propel these tragic events just as the corroded foundation of the South began to crack in the years before the Civil War.