February 17, 1865---The Sack of Columbia, S.C.

FEBRUARY 17, 1865:       

 The Sack of Columbia:

The Union army prepares to enter Columbia, South Carolina. At ten A.M. the City Fathers meet with William Tecumseh Sherman just outside the city line and agree to surrender Columbia peacefully if the Union general promises not to burn the city. Sherman agrees.

Sherman, however, does not agree not to sack the city, and the advancing Union army treats Columbia much as did the Vandals in Rome. Shopfronts are smashed and all manner of items seized and dumped out in the streets. Bonfires of clothing, cotton bales, and other things spring up in the cross streets.

As for the saloons and the whorehouses, they do a land office business all day. Sherman’s men are weary after the difficult Carolinas March, and are hungry for the fleshpots of Columbia. Drunken Yankees are soon everywhere, accosting Columbia’s womenfolk, entering private homes, and grabbing whatever seems ripe for the picking.  Undoubtedly, rapes and killings occur.

  

The behavior of the Union troops in Columbia is in marked contrast to their actions in Savannah, and their open disrespect of women goes thoroughly against Sherman’s previous strictures. The usually firm Union general largely ignores these breaches. 

The bacchanalia of destruction goes on all day. Columbia resident James Gibbes later noted, 

"The discipline of the soldiers, upon their first entry into the city, was perfect and most admirable. There was no disorder or irregularity on the line of march, showing that their officers had them completely in hand. They were a fine looking body of men, mostly young and of vigorous formation, well clad and shod, seemingly wanting for nothing . . . But, if the entrance into town and while on duty, was indicative of admirable drill and discipline, such ceased to be the case the moment the troops were dismissed."

Union Private John C. Arbuckle explained:

"This city was full of whisky and wine, and the colored people who swarmed the streets, set it out on the sidewalks by the barrel with the heads knocked in and tin cups provided; bottles and demijohns were passed liberally to the troops passing through the city to camp quarters."

The city’s banks are emptied of money and specie, and the remaining documents in the State House are scattered to the four winds. A heavily armed contingent of Yankees takes up a position atop the State House in order to guard the Stars and Stripes, flying over Columbia for the first time in four years. Here and there, a few closet Unionists break out their flags, and a few frightened Confederates drape their homes with Old Glory. The Federals, angry, keyed up, inebriated, and unused to being challenged, become increasing vile and violent as the day progresses. Numbers of Columbia’s citizens appear at Sherman’s headquarters demanding protection from what is becoming a leaderless mob. Sherman actually posts sober guards wherever requested to do so.

Regardless of Sherman’s orders, as the day goes on intoxicated Union men begin dousing heaps of spoils with kerosene, intending to set them ablaze at nightfall. Whether their intention is to burn Columbia or just illuminate the streets for nightlong destruction is never clear. As the sky grows dark, the Union men begin firing off signal rockets, partly by way of communication, partly for sheer orneriness, and partly in celebration. Before long, parts of the city are burning merrily.

To the end of his life, Sherman insisted that he never ordered Columbia to be burned:

"Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the War."     

 

He certainly sheds no tears that night:

“Sherman, when he "saw the darkness lit up with the lurid hue of conflagration" [ ] remarked, ‘They have brought it on themselves.’”

Conditions in the city degenerate into a riot.

Harriot H. Ravenel recalled,

"Such an awful sight! The . . . street filled with a throng of men, drunken, dancing, shouting, cursing wretches, every one bearing a tin torch or a blazing lightwood knot. The sky so dark a half hour before, was already glowing with light, and flames were rising in every direction."

Union General Henry Slocum observed:

"A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a dark, windy night."

It isn’t dark; the skies are a sullen red, and so are the faces in the streets. But it is windy, very windy, and within a few hours most of the city is ablaze. The glow can be seen for miles, and the smell of burning covers central South Carolina like a shroud. The last sober, terrified civilians run for it. The skeleton of the new, still under-construction Statehouse collapses in a teem of sparks.

  

To their everlasting credit, empathetic groups of Union officers and men begin fighting the blazes. Others take small knots of women, children, the elderly, the ill and the infirm under their protection, defending them against threatening drunks in blue and leering civilian ne’er-do-wells. The Union fire brigades save the University campus and a handful of homes with their remarkable Oriental-style gardens.

A few packed trains manage to leave the depot before it burns, and a veritable exodus of human beings on foot begins to wend its way out of the city in the ashy, sooty, hellish early hours of the morning. A column a mile long, they are met on the roads by people fleeing other nearby towns and villages and farmsteads, all heading for the supposed safety of North Carolina.  How many civilians die in the chaos may never be known.

It is perhaps strange that the unbridled destruction in South Carolina and the riotous burning of Columbia have left almost no imprint on the American collective memory (but for South Carolinian history buffs and local Columbians). Most Americans have at least heard of Sherman’s infamous March To The Sea and The Burning of Atlanta, but the March Through South Carolina and the Burning of Columbia, though infinitely more destructive, are all but forgotten.

In point of fact, the two events have been conflated. Popular memory tells us always of the crazed wrack and ruin of Atlanta, but most of the barbarism attributed to Sherman’s army occurred not in Georgia (or North Carolina) but in South Carolina. Being a victim of the March Through Georgia is almost a point of pride and honor (indeed towns far from Sherman’s route through Georgia claim to have been destroyed by the General) but South Carolinians make no such claims.

It should be recalled that most Georgians remained in their unburnt homes surveying the destruction of their town and city centers, and writing increasingly colorful reminiscences of the events as time passed and memories altered. But what occurred in the Palmetto State was total war; it was only weeks or months later that the effectively exiled rebels of South Carolina had leisure to turn to their diaries or write letters recounting the terrible events of the March. Most, unwilling to relive the disaster in their minds, chose not to do so. Thus, most ironically, we live with Georgia’s memories of the less fearsome Burning of Atlanta rather than the more horrifying memories of the Burning of Columbia.     

General O.O. Howard U.S.A. later remembers regretfully, “We lost control of our men that night.”

Howard University, Washington D.C.

Howard is a truly pious Christian, the man who organizes Union firefighting efforts in Columbia that night. Considered “soft” by Sherman, Howard is later named to lead the postwar Freedmen’s Bureau to aid the newly-emancipated slaves. Howard University is named in his honor. 

As Columbia goes up in smoke, 115 miles away General P.G.T. Beauregard C.S.A. is marching the city garrison of Charleston northward along the coast road before the last escape route out of the port city is cut. Beauregard hopes to link up with Wade Hampton’s forces out of Columbia, and hopes afterward to move into North Carolina.

As in Columbia, a mass exodus of civilians occurs. Communications have broken down; it is unclear whether Beauregard knows that Columbia is burning. Perhaps desperate South Carolinian wanderers tell him. Perhaps he catches a whiff of distant burning on the wind. 

The last palmetto in Charleston S.C.. February 1865

Without its tenuous overland link to the interior of the State, the fate of Charleston is, without question, sealed.