On February 17, 1865, the soldiers from Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army ransack Columbia, South Carolina, and leave a charred city in their wake.
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.
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Totalitarians forcing their will upon men. It always looks the same, regardless of the justification.
Oh but some people will say this is how war should be fought. Since the men were away fighting, terrorize the women and children, burning them out of their homes in the Winter, stealing or destroying all the food, leaving nothing to provide for the next season of food production, releashing the negroes who had nothing amoungst the population, all the while not taking the time to go to the aid of Yankee prisoners in Andersonville, because it would slow them down.
The whole purpose was to punish the South, and so they did and the people where I live HATE them to this day.
The war was first and foremost about slavery. There is a lot revisionist nonsense finding its way into discussions about the war being about state’s rights – Rubbish. Slavery was a festering wound on the national character and it was abolished. Interestingly, right up until the first shots were fired, Sherman was adamant about the need for moderation. He extolled his northern family, friends and colleagues to temper their calls to end slavery because of what he knew of the southern mindset. But once engaged, he knew two things probably better than anyone. One, how ill prepared the South was once the North’s industrial capacity got up to speed. Second, what it would take to win the war; everything from casualties to the destruction of the means of production.
First example of a modern army bombarding a civilian population………. yep Lincoln really deserves that giant monument.
P.S. The sovereign Southern states had every right to secede from the Republic………
The Persians burned Athens to the ground. Ever heard of medieval sieges? What do you think that was? They even had germ warfare throwing infected bodies and animal carcasses over the castle walls and poisoning wells etc. Sherman was nothing new at all, it sucked for my ancestors but let’s not pretend it was unique.
You missed the word modern. I’m not sure I agree with OP’s assessment but…
William T. Sherman, war criminal. Had tanks named in his “honor.”
Damn Yankees! Charleston didn’t look much better.