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.
