February 23, 1865---"Yankees . . . that word is a synonym for all that is mean, despicable and abhorrent . . ."

FEBRUARY 23, 1865:        

The Union army under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman marches out of Columbia, South Carolina. As a parting gift to the residents Sherman burns the last public buildings in Columbia to the ground, sparing only the University (perhaps because of his tenure as Dean of L.S.U. before the war; Sherman is oddly sentimental at times).

 

This Parthian Shot enrages those Columbians who still have it in them to be enraged.  Emma LeConte, a seventeen year old South Carolinian belle, watches the Yankees march out, noting in her diary:

If only our people will be steadfast. The more we suffer, the more we should be willing to undergo rather than submit. Somehow, I cannot feel we can be conquered. We have lost everything, but if all this --- negroes, property --- all could be given back a hundredfold, I would not be willing to go back to them. I would rather endure any poverty than live under Yankee rule. I would rather far have France or any other country for a mistress --- anything but live as one nation with Yankees --- that word in my mind is a synonym for all that is mean, despicable and abhorrent.

Sherman surprises the South Carolinians by turning almost immediately eastward toward the sea. Many are cheered, thinking that the flame-haired general does not have the guts to fight it out with the Confederate forces lying due north of Columbia. The direction may be a surprise, but Sherman’s behavior is not --- his forces begin scorching the earth once again in a swath nearly eighty miles wide.

While Sherman’s Yankees are burning South Carolina, Major General John M. Schofield’s Yankees are trying to douse the fires in Wilmington, North Carolina. Having marched into the city within scant minutes of the last Confederate troops to leave, they find the city’s factories afire, the riverside quays in flame, the food stocks and medical supplies burning, and the tobacco and cotton warehouses alight. (The burning of the tobacco and cotton supplies in Charleston and Wilmington and later in Richmond is an indicator of how important these commodities were to the Southern economy, but the loss of even tens of thousands of tons of warehoused cotton and tobacco did not even faze the Union brokers in the trades).

Schofield wants to save the city, and his men manage, fairly quickly, to put out the scattered fires with only moderate damage. Schofield immediately begins rebuilding the quays and wharfside buildings. Wilmington is to become the main supply point for Sherman’s assault on the Confederate troops in inland North Carolina.

Faced with a city full of starving rebel civilians, Schofield wisely orders Union supplies distributed to the populace. Sending word to Sherman of this plan, Sherman assents, and simply requisitions more of everything for his army. Within days, even as Schofield is rebuilding the port facilities, Wilmington becomes, if only briefly, the busiest port in the United States.

In another part of the world, the British Parliament begins debating the political status of British North America. The Richmond Post-Dispatch characterizes this as the British “abandonment of Canada” and speculates that the Union will likely invade and annex its neighbor to the north:

We are, therefore, disposed to question the report that England intends to give up Canada, and are inclined to believe the report that she is fortifying it; and moreover, will be easily able to hold, it in the event of a war with the United States; and not only to hold it, but to make it, besides, a base of aggressive durations against that country.