On this day in 1865, the soldiers from Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army ransack Columbia, South Carolina, and leave a charred city in their wake.
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Sherman is most famous for his March to the Sea in the closing months of 1864. After capturing Atlanta in September, Sherman cut away from his supply lines and cut a swath of destruction across Georgia on his way to Savannah. His army lived off the land and destroyed railroads, burned warehouses, and ruined plantations along the way. This was a calculated effort–Sherman thought that the war would end more quickly if civilians of the South felt some destruction personally, a view supported by General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of all Union forces, and President Abraham Lincoln.
After spending a month in Savannah, Sherman headed north to tear the Confederacy into smaller pieces. The Yankee soldiers took particular delight in carrying the war to South Carolina, the symbol of the rebellion. It was the first state to secede and the site of Fort Sumter, where South Carolinians fired on the Federal garrison to start the war in April 1861. When Confederate General Wade Hampton’s cavalry evacuated Columbia, the capital was open to Sherman’s men.
Many of the Yankees got drunk before starting the rampage. 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.” Sherman claimed that the raging fires were started by evacuating Confederates and fanned by high winds. He later wrote: “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.”
Belatedly, some Yankees helped fight the fires, but more than two-thirds of the city was destroyed. Already choked with refugees from the path of Sherman’s army, Columbia’s situation became even more desperate when Sherman’s army destroyed the remaining public buildings before marching out of Columbia three days later.
I was ‘schooled’ in a yankee brainwashing camp in ct. There I learned of “Sherman’s Valiant March To The Sea”. Years later, when I developed a critical thinking capacity and read the 1st account of the valiant march written by a southern sympathizer-one book- I realized that in actuality it was a gang of marauding, raping, murdering thugs led by an escapee from an insane asylum. It also led me to think just what other bullshit I was fed back then. Everything, except 1+1=2. The rest, as Napoleon said was a fable agreed upon.
Here in north Georgia as you drive on Rte 41 over the Etowah River you pass railroad piers still there, the rails destroyed by Confederate troops trying to stop the satanic wave headed their way, a silent testimony to the desperation and agony of those poor souls trying to protect their families. It’s said when it was clear Atlanta would fall General John Bell Hood cried like a child. Hood, not the brightest bulb on the Confederate marquee, was as tough as a man can be. I think of him when I pass over that spot and how I despise that fucking lincoln.
It is the fate of those who lose wars to die, have their homes burnt, their wives raped and their children sold into slavery. We had better remember that before we lose.
Remember Rhodesia
14
What he did to Columbia was NOTHING compared to what was done to Meridian Mississippi.
One house left as a HQ; the others either burned or shelled down. Salted the earth so nothing would grow. The largest rail hub other then Atlanta in the CSA had all tracks torn up for 30 miles in every direction.
A few days earlier my family members kill a few of Sherman’s men
I had a chance to meet with the descendant of the Mayor of Columbia at the time of Sherman’s occupation. He had copies of the letters written by the Mayor in which he described how Sherman’s men got drunk and torched the town….not Wade Hampton . He said many of the men were ashamed of what others did but were powerless to stop them and Sherman enjoyed it…Lincoln too .