The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (156 page)

That was February 15. Beauregard stayed through the following day and set out north by rail for Chester after nightfall, leaving Wade Hampton, whose splendid peacetime mansion rivaled the new brick State House as the showplace of the capital, to conduct the final stage of the withdrawal before the Federals arrived. Placed in command of all the cavalry, the post he had filled in Virginia until Lee detached him for his present task, the South Carolina grandee was promoted to lieutenant general over Wheeler, who, though nearly two decades his junior in age — Hampton would be forty-seven next month; Wheeler was twenty-eight — had half a year’s seniority on him as a major general. Like most evacuations under pressure, this one was attended with considerable disorder and a confusion enlarged by particular circumstances. Columbia, a neat, well-laid-out little city with a charm befitting its uplands heritage as a center for culture and commerce, had grown in the course of the past two years from a population of about 8000 to better than 20,000, largely as a result of the influx of people from threatened areas on the seacoast and, more recently and in even larger numbers, from regions along or near the Georgia border thought to lie in the path of Sherman’s burners. Convinced that the capital was strategically unimportant, especially in comparison with directly menaced Charleston and Augusta, prominent landowners and businessmen sought refuge here for their families, as well as for their valuables and house slaves. Before the war, there had been three banks in Columbia; now there were fourteen, including all of bombarded Charleston’s, shifted beyond reach of the heaviest naval guns. Moreover, this notion of inland security persisted well beyond the time that Sherman left Savannah. Just last week, on February 9, the editor of the local
South Carolinian
had assured his readers that there was “no real tangible cause” for supposing that the Yankees had Columbia in mind.

Then suddenly they knew better; Sherman was two days off, then one, then none, guns booming from the Congaree bottoms, just across the way; there was neither time nor means for removing their sequestered
goods beyond his reach. Offers as large as $500 hired no wagons, and men and women competed testily for seats or standing room on every northbound train. Earlier, the authorities had ordered all cotton transported from intown warehouses for burning in open fields beyond the city limits, and the bales were trundled into the streets for rapid loading when the time came. They sat there still, spilling their fluffy, highly combustible fiber through rents in the jute bagging. Columbia thus was a tinderbox, ready to burst into flame at the touch of a match or a random spark, by the time the rear-guard handful of gray troopers pulled out Friday morning, February 17, and Mayor T. J. Goodwyn set out with three aldermen in a carriage flying a white flag, charged by Hampton with surrendering the capital to the bluecoats already entering its outskirts.

Sherman rode in about midday, close on the heels of Howard’s lead brigade. Part of Logan’s XV Corps, whose mere proximity he had said would obviate the need for sowing any hated place with salt, its members were given the customary privilege, as the first troops in, of policing the captured town and enjoying all it had to offer in the way of food and fun. A blustery wind had risen and was blowing the spilled cotton about the streets in wisps and skeins. Asked later why, under these explosive circumstances, he had not kept his veterans in formation and under control while they were in occupation of the surrendered capital, the red-haired Ohioan replied indignantly: “I would not have done such a harshness to save the whole town. They were men, and I was not going to treat them like slaves.”

Liquor shops were among the first establishments to be looted when the troops broke ranks and scattered. But this was more from habit than from need, since friendly house slaves stood in front of many residences, offering the soldiers drinks from bottles they had brought up from abandoned cellers. “Lord bless you, Massa. Try some dis,” a genial white-haired butler said, extending a gourd dipper he kept filled with fine old brandy from a bucket in his other hand. Breakfastless and exuberant, a good part of the command was roaring drunk in short order. Slocum, whose left wing crossed upstream and went into camp beyond the city, saw in this the main cause for what would follow after sundown. “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,” he afterwards remarked, “particularly when for a series of years you have urged him to come so that you might have an opportunity of performing a surgical operation on him.” Sherman apparently thought so, too. “Look out,” he told Howard, observing the effect of all this proffered whiskey, “or you’ll have hell to pay. You’d better go and see about it in person.”

Howard did go and see about it. Alarmed, he stopped the informal distribution of spirits and, after nightfall, ordered the drunken brigade
relieved by another from the same division, which had marched through the city earlier to camp on the far side. But it was altogether too late by then. The men of the first having scattered beyond recall, the practical outcome was that a second XV Corps brigade was added to the milling throng of celebrants and looters. By then, moreover, the frightened citizens had learned what the soldiers meant when, passing through the windy streets that afternoon, they told them: “You’ll catch hell tonight.” Sherman could have interpreted for them, though as it happened he only found out about the prophecy after it had been fulfilled. Weary, he took an early supper and lay down to rest in a bedroom of the house his staff had commandeered for headquarters. “Soon after dark,” he would remember, “I became conscious that a bright light was shining on the walls.”

Columbia was burning, and burning fiercely, in more than a dozen places simultaneously. Hampton’s mansion was one of the first to go, along with Treasury Secretary Trenholm’s, and lest it be thought that these had been singled out because of their owners’ wealth or politics, the Gervais Street red-light district was put to the torch at the same time, as well as Cotton Town, a section of poorer homes to the northwest, and stores and houses along the river front. One object of special wrath was the Baptist church where the South Carolina secession convention had first assembled, but the burners were foiled by a Negro they asked for directions. As it happened, he was the sexton of the church they sought and he pointed out a rival Methodist establishment just up the block, which soon was gushing flames from all its windows. So presently was the nearby Ursuline convent, whose Mother Superior was known to be the sister of Bishop Patrick N. Lynch, an outspoken secessionist who had celebrated the breakup of the Union, back in ’61, with thanksgiving rites in his Charleston cathedral. Hardest hit of all was the business district. Terrified pigeons flapped and wheeled in the drifting smoke, unable to find a place to light, and the hysterical screams of women combined strangely with the lowing of cattle trapped in their stalls. “All around us were falling thickly showers of burning flakes,” a seventeen-year-old girl wrote in her diary next day. “Everywhere the palpitating blaze walled the streets as far as the eye could reach, filling the air with its terrible roar. On every side [was] the crackling and devouring fire, while every instant came the crashing of timbers and the thunder of falling buildings. A quivering molten ocean seemed to fill the air and sky.”

Mindful perhaps of a statement he had made to Mayor Goodwyn, who served as his guide on an afternoon tour of inspection: “Go home and rest assured that your city will be as safe in my hands as if you had controlled it,” Sherman himself turned out to fight the flames, along with his staff, a number of unit commanders, and as many of their troops as could be rounded up and persuaded to serve as firemen. Of the rest,
unwilling to end their fun or too drunk to follow orders, 370 were placed in arrest, two were shot and killed, and thirty wounded. That still left enough at large to defeat the efforts being made to confine the conflagration. Some among them hurried from block to block, carrying wads of turpentine-soaked cotton for setting fire to houses so far spared, while others used their rifles to bayonet hoses and cripple pumpers brought into play by the civilian fire department. Before the night was over, another whole division was summoned into the city to help subdue the arsonists and the flames, but even that did not suffice until about 4 o’clock in the morning, when the wind relented enough to let the flames die down and save the capital from annihilation. As it was, when the sun rose two hours later, blood red through the murk of heavy smoke, two thirds of Columbia lay in ashes. Fire had raged through 84 of its 124 blocks, with such effect that the girl diarist could see nothing from her position near the center “but heaps of rubbish, tall dreary chimneys, and shattered brick walls.” Burned-out families gathered in the parks and on the common, huddled among such possessions as they had managed to save. Some of the women were weeping uncontrollably. Others were dry-eyed, either from shock or from a sharpened hatred of the Yankees. An Illinois surgeon moved among them for a time, then withdrew sadly. “I talked with some,” he wrote in his diary that night, “but it made me feel too bad to be endured.”

Sherman had a different reaction. “Though I never ordered it, and never wished it,” he was to say of the burning, “I have never shed any tears over it, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for — the end of the war.” As for blame, he fixed that on Hampton for starting the fire and on God for enlarging it. He charged the rebel general with “ripping open bales of cotton, piling it in the streets, burning it, and then going away”; at which point “God Almighty started wind sufficient to carry that cotton wherever He would.” Originally, while the fire was in progress, he had seen whiskey as the overriding cause of the catastrophe, available in quantity because the departed graybacks had foolishly made “an evacuated city a depot of liquor for an army to occupy.” Under its influence, he admitted, his soldiers “may have assisted in spreading the fire after it once began, and may have indulged in unconcealed joy to see the ruin of the capital of South Carolina,” but he did not dwell long on this aspect of the case, saying instead: “I disclaim on the part of my army any agency in this fire, but, on the contrary, claim that we saved what of Columbia remains unconsumed. And without hesitation I charge General Wade Hampton with having burned his own city of Columbia, not with malicious intent, or as the manifestation of a silly ‘Roman stoicism,’ but from folly and want of sense in filling it with lint, cotton, and tinder.” So he declared in his formal report of the campaign, although he conceded in his memoirs, ten years later, that there had been method in his arraignment of his adversary for the
burning. “I distinctly charged it to General Wade Hampton,” he wrote then, “and confess I did so pointedly, to shake the faith of his people in him, for he was in my opinion a braggart, and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina.”

For two more days the army remained in and around Columbia, probing the rubble for overlooked spoils and expanding the destruction by burning down the Confederate arsenal and a Treasury printing office, legitimate targets which somehow had survived the conflagration. The Preston mansion, where Hood had visited his fiancée on his way to Richmond two weeks back, escaped entirely: first, because John Logan occupied it during the three-day stay, and finally because Sherman gave permission for the homeless wards of the Ursuline convent to take up residence there on February 20, the day his troops moved out. Logan was supervising the placement of barrels of pitch in the cellar, intending to set them ablaze on his departure, when the white-clad pupils were herded in by the Mother Superior, armed with Sherman’s order. Black Jack loosed a string of oaths at this sparing of a rebel general’s ornate property, but had no choice except to let the house go unburned when he took up the march.

It was northward, as before. The feint now was at Chester, fifty miles away, and at Charlotte, about the same distance farther on, across the North Carolina line. Beyond Winnsboro, however — which the outriding bummers set afire next day, though not soon enough to keep the main body from coming up in time to save most of it from the flames — both infantry wings turned hard right for a crossing of the Wateree River, a dozen miles to the east, and a fast march on Cheraw, en route to Fayetteville and Goldsboro, where Sherman had arranged for Schofield to meet him with supplies brought inland from Wilmington and New Bern.

Alas, it was just at this critical stage, with by far the worst stretch of the march supposedly behind him, that the pace slowed to a crawl. Coming down to the Wateree on February 23, Howard’s wing made it over the river in a driving rain, but only half of Slocum’s crossed before the bridge collapsed under pressure from logs and driftwood swept downstream by the rush of rising water; Davis’s XIV Corps was left stranded on the western bank, and the other three, having made it over, soon had cause to wish they hadn’t. The mud, though thinner, was slick as grease on the high red ground beyond the river, and grew slicker and deeper throughout the record three-day rainfall, until at last — “slipping, stumbling, swearing, singing, and yelling” — the head of the column reached Hanging Rock Post Office on February 26, having covered barely twenty miles in the past four days; while the XIV Corps, still on the far side of the Wateree, had made no miles at all. Furious, Sherman called a halt and ordered Slocum to ride back and expedite a crossing. If necessary, he was to have Davis burn his wagons, spike his guns, shoot
the mules, and ferry or swim his troops across; he was in fact to do anything, within reason or beyond, that would avoid prolonging the delay now that a solid half of the long trek to Goldsboro was behind the main body, slathered with mud and resting close to exhaustion at Hanging Rock, within twenty air-line miles of the North Carolina line.

No such drastic steps were needed. That afternoon the sun came out, beaming down on “bedraggled mules, toiling soldiers, and seas of mud,” and by the next the river had fallen enough for Davis to improvise a bridge; his laggard corps got over that night with its guns and train, followed by the cavalry, which had kept up the feint against Chester after the infantry swung east. Sherman meanwhile improved the interim by sending a reinforced brigade to nearby Camden, with instructions to destroy all “government property, stores, and cotton.” Reinspired despite their bone-deep weariness, the detached troops accomplished this and more, burning a large flour mill and both depots of the South Carolina Railroad, along with the Masonic Hall, and looting almost every private residence in town, then returned to Hanging Rock in time to take their place in column when the reunited army resumed its march on Cheraw, just under fifty miles away. They had recovered their high spirits, and so too, by now, had their commander. He had learned from newspapers gathered roundabout that Charleston, evacuated by Hardee on the night Columbia burned, had been occupied next morning by units from Foster’s garrison at Savannah: a splendid example of what Sherman had meant when he told him to be ready to “pick up the apples.” Symbolically, at any rate — for it was here, not quite two months under four long years ago, that the war began — this was the biggest apple of them all. Four days later, moreover, while the inland marchers were turning east to cross the Wateree, Schofield had captured Wilmington, freeing his and Terry’s men for the appointed meeting in the interior next month.