by Shelby Foote
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 s
lick 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.
One other piece of news there was, but Sherman was not sure, just yet, whether he was glad or sorry to receive it. Joe Johnston, he learned, had replaced Beauregard as commander of the “scattered and inconsiderable forces” assembling in his front.
* * *
Often, down the years, it would be said that Lee’s first exercise of authority, following his confirmation as general-in-chief, had been to recall Johnston to active duty; whereas, in fact, one of his first acts at his new post was the denial of a petition, signed by the Vice President and seventeen prominent Senators, urging him to do just that by restoring his fellow Virginian to command of the Army of Tennessee. “The three corps of that army have been ordered to South Carolina and are now under the command of Genl Beauregard,” he replied on February 13, one week after his elevation. “I entertain a high opinion of Genl Johnston’s capacity, but think a continual change of commanders is very injurious to any troops and tends greatly to their disorganization. At this time, as far as I understand the condition of affairs, an engagement with the enemy may be expected any day, and a change now would be particularly hazardous. Genl Beauregard is well known to the citizens of South Carolina, as well as to the troops of the Army of Tennessee, and I would recommend that it be certainly ascertained that a change was necessary before it was made.” Besides, he told Stephens and the others, “I do not consider that my appointment … confers the right which you assume belongs to it, nor is it proper that it should. I can only employ such troops and officers as may be placed at my disposal by the War Department.”
Old Joe it seemed would have to bide his time in the Carolina piedmont, awaiting the outcome of further efforts by his supporters. But developments over the course of the next week provoked a reassessment of the situation. For one thing, Beauregard’s health was rumored to be “feeble and precarious,” which might account for his apparent shakiness under pressure. Shifting his headquarters, formerly at Augusta, from Columbia to Chester, then to Charlotte, the Creole seemed confused and indecisive in the face of Sherman’s “semi-amphibious” march through the boggy lowlands. “General Beauregard makes no mention of what he proposes or what he can do, or where his troops are,” Lee complained to Davis. “He does not appear from his dispatches to be able to do much.” Columbia by then had been abandoned, along with outflanked Charleston, and Wilmington was under heavy pressure from Schofield; at which point, on February 21, Davis received and passed on to Lee a wire just in from Beauregard, once more proposing a “grand strategy” designed to bring the Yankees to their knees. In the Louisianian’s opinion, Sherman (who would not turn east, away from Chester, until the following day) was advancing upon Charlotte and Salisbury, North Carolina, on his way to a conjunction with Grant in rear of Richmond, and Old Bory saw in this — as he so often had done before, under drastic circumstances — the opportunity of a lifetime. “I earnestly urge a concentration of at least 35,000 infantry and artillery at [Salisbury], if possible, to give him battle there, and crush him, then to concentrate all forces against Grant, and then to march on Washington and dictate a peace. Hardee and myself can collect about 15,000 exclusive of Cheatham and Stewart, not likely to reach in time. If Lee and Bragg can furnish 20,000 more, the fate of the Confederacy would be secure.”
Unknowingly, Beauregard had proposed his last air-castle strategy of the war. “The idea is good, but the means are lacking,” Lee told Davis two days later. He had by then made up his mind that the Creole had to go, and by way of providing a successor he had already sounded out Breckinridge on the matter. “[Sherman] seems to have everything his own way,” he informed the War Secretary on February 19, the day after Charleston fell, adding that he could get little useful information from the general charged with contesting the blue advance through the Carolinas. “I do not know where his troops are, or on what lines they are moving. His dispatches only give movements of the enemy. He has a difficult task to perform under present circumstances, and one of his best officers, Genl Hardee, is incapacitated by sickness. I have also heard that his own health is indifferent, though he has never so stated. Should his strength give way, there is no one on duty in the department that could replace him, nor have I anyone to send there. Genl J. E. Johnston is the only officer whom I know who has the confidence of the army and people, and if he was ordered to report to me I would place him there on duty. It is necessary to bring out all our strength.…”
Puzzled by Lee’s indirectness, the Kentuckian asked just what it was he wanted, and when. Lee replied that he had intended “to apply for Genl J. E. Johnston, that I might assign him to duty, should circumstances permit.” Understanding now that by “circumstances” Lee meant the President’s objections, Breckinridge passed the request along, and Davis — despite his recent expression of “a conviction so settled that it would be impossible for me again to feel confidence in [Johnston] as the commander of an army in the field” — agreed, however reluctantly, to the recall and appointment, though he was careful to point out that he did so only “in the hope that General Johnston’s soldierly qualities may be made serviceable to his country when acting under General Lee’s orders, and that in his new position those defects which I found manifested by him when serving as an independent commander will be remedied by the control of the general-in-chief.”
That was how it came about that Johnston received on February 23, the day after they were issued, simultaneous orders from the War Department and from Lee, recalling him to active duty and assigning him to command of the troops now under Beauregard, including the Army of Tennessee. He was then at Lincolnton, North Carolina — “I am in the regular line of strategic re
treat,” Mrs Chesnut, who preceded him there in her flight from threatened Mulberry, had remarked sarcastically when she learned that he was expected any day — thirty miles northwest of Charlotte, where Beauregard had established headquarters after falling back from Chester. Instructed to “concentrate all available forces and drive back Sherman,” Johnston replied much as he had done on his arrival in Mississippi just under two years ago, preceding the fall of Vicksburg: “It is too late.… The remnant of the Army of Tennessee is much divided. So are the other troops.… Is any discretion allowed me? I have no staff.”
Before taking over he went by rail to Charlotte to confer with his predecessor, now designated his second in command. Beauregard assured him of his support, having just wired Lee that he would “at all times be happy to serve with or under so gallant and patriotic a soldier.” Privately, though, the Louisianian was bitterly disappointed at having once more been relegated to a subordinate position, as at Manassas, Shiloh, and Petersburg. “My greatest desire has always been to command a good army in the field,” he had recently declared. “Will I ever be gratified?” Now in the Carolinas — as in Mississippi nearly three years before, following his canny withdrawal from Halleck’s intended trap at Corinth — another chance had come and gone, and he knew this was the last; Fate and Davis had undone him, now as then.
Johnston was by no means correspondingly elated. Though he was grateful for Beauregard’s loyalty, he believed the post afforded little opportunity for success or even survival. He had, as he informed one of his Richmond supporters, “not exactly no hope, but only a faint hope,” and even this was presently seen to have been an overstatement of the case. He said later that he took over in Charlotte, February 25, “with a full consciousness … that we could have no other object, in continuing the war, than to obtain fair terms of peace; for the Southern cause must have appeared hopeless then, to all intelligent and dispassionate Southern men.”