The Burning of Columbia

On the morning of February seventeenth, eighteen sixty-five, the mayor of Columbia, Thomas Goodwyn, rode out to meet General Sherman's advancing forces and surrendered the city. What followed that night remains one of the most disputed events of the entire Civil War.

By midnight, much of Columbia was on fire.

Who set those fires is a question historians have been arguing about ever since. Confederate cavalry under General Wade Hampton had been loading cotton bales onto the streets before they retreated, partly to deny the crop to Union forces. Some of those bales may have been set alight as the Confederates left. Union soldiers entered a city already in chaos, with cotton fibers floating through the air like snow. Some soldiers got into stores of alcohol. Some were actively throwing torches. The fires spread rapidly through the dry February air.

By morning, roughly one-third of the city was ash. Scores of buildings along Main Street, hundreds of private homes, warehouses, and churches were gone. The old State House burned. The unfinished new State House, still under construction, was damaged but survived.

Modern historians have generally settled on a version that distributes responsibility: the Confederate bale-burning started things, the drunken riot among some Union troops accelerated it, the wind did the rest. Sherman himself insisted in his memoirs that his army had not intended to burn the city. The South Carolina interpretation held for generations that the burning was deliberate and total, a story that served the purposes of Reconstruction-era grievance and then of Jim Crow politics for decades afterward.

What is beyond dispute is that thousands of residents woke up on February eighteenth to a transformed city. Columbia would spend the next several decades rebuilding, physically and politically, in ways that shaped everything that came after.