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.
