The State House and Its Bronze Stars
Near Columbia, South Carolina
The South Carolina State House sits at the center of the city's original grid, exactly where the planners intended it when they drew up Columbia in seventeen eighty-six. But the building you see today is not the one they built. It is a structure shaped as much by war as by architecture.
Construction on the current State House began in eighteen fifty-one. It was unfinished when the Civil War started, a massive skeleton of granite and marble rising over the capital of a state that had voted to leave the Union. By February of eighteen sixty-five, General William Sherman's army was closing in from the west.
On February sixteenth, eighteen sixty-five, Union artillery on the opposite bluff of the Congaree River opened fire on the unfinished dome. Several shells struck the western facade of the building. The next day, the city was occupied.
In nineteen twenty-nine, the General Assembly ordered six bronze stars placed on the State House walls to mark every spot where a Union artillery shell had hit. Brass plaques accompanied them, bearing an inscription that described the marks as "honorable scars." The language was not accidental. It was written by the secretary of the Historical Commission of South Carolina, who borrowed the very phrase used for the amputations of Confederate veterans. For generations of South Carolinians, those bronze stars were not just damage markers. They were an argument, a way of casting the Union bombardment as an act of barbarism and keeping the grievance visible for anyone who walked past.
The State House grounds also hold a Confederate soldiers monument erected in eighteen seventy-nine, and a series of other statues whose placement and purpose have been contested in nearly every decade since they went up.
The building itself was finally completed after the war, in a slightly different style than originally designed. It remains the active seat of South Carolina's government, its starred western wall facing the Congaree River and the hill from which the guns once fired.
