“We’ll destroy no private property”
Despite daily warnings of the approach of Sherman’s army, life in Columbia had continued much as usual, with a round of parties and bazaars. A symbol of this resolute gaiety in the face of danger was a remarkable, if somewhat dilapidated, carriage that appeared daily on the city’s streets, a huge black coach known as “The Beauty Box,” gleaming with broad glass windows and silver trim, upholstered in scarlet velvet, drawn by a team of bobtailed bays driven by a lordly black man in livery of scarlet and silver.
This was the carriage of Columbia’s reigning belle, nineteen-year-old Marie Boozer, in whose passage most men were apt to forget war and the approaching enemy. Marie was the daughter of Mrs. Amelia Sees Harned Burton Boozer Feaster, a brunette beauty now estranged from her fourth husband. The alluring Philadelphia-born woman was said to harbor Union sympathies.
Amelia, still beautiful at thirty-seven, was said to be so charming that “if she made up her mind to captivate man, woman or child, it was useless to resist—the only safety was in flight.” She smoked small Cuban cigars brought through the blockade. Amelia was rumored to have had a succession of lovers and to have visited the Federal prisoners at Camp Sorghum so often that some said she was a Yankee spy. Her estrangement from Feaster was said to date from his enlistment in the Confederate army.
The two women made something of a career of their carriage rides through the city. Mrs. Thomas Taylor, who was not among their admirers, paid tribute to the passage of Marie and Amelia: “The Boozer coach, with the glass windows folded back on hinges, ‘exploited’ a rare vision. A mother and daughter—Mrs. Feaster and Marie Boozer—the one rich, dark in coloring and costume, the other (occupying the whole front seat) a girl of golden hair, rose shades, blue orbs, healthy, poised, delicious, pressing into the soft cushions, wrapped in ceil blue and swans-down, leghorn hat, from which plumes fell, curling under the white and pink throat. It was an angel’s seeming—and she, beautiful as Venus, the goddess of the chariot.”
There was universal agreement that Marie was the most dazzling woman in South Carolina. Old General John S. Preston, who was regarded as an authority, said unabashedly, “Marie Boozer was the most beautiful piece of flesh and blood my eyes ever beheld.” Her eyes were said to be her most dazzling feature—large, lustrous and either dark blue or hazel, changing in the light. “Her Roman nose, in exquisite proportion, had that cold, delicate outline and thin nostril that indicate the bird of prey,” a sophisticated male observer said. Mrs. James Chesnut, the wife of a Confederate general and a woman who had reigned as a South Carolina belle in her own youth, said of Marie, “The Boozer is a beauty, that none can deny, and they say she is a good girl.” But Mrs. Chesnut was uneasy over reports that Marie had been seen walking with Federal officers on parole from the city’s prison, and was suspected of hiding one of them in her home: “Why doesn’t she marry some decent man, among the shoals who follow her, and be off and out of this tangle while she has a shred of reputation left?”
The daughter of Amelia’s second husband, Marie had been adopted and endowed by his successor, and educated by an English governess and at South Carolina College. She was lithe and agile after a childhood spent as a tomboy, was an accomplished rider and rifle shot, and was as friendly, natural and charming as she was beautiful. Gossips did not yet savor tales of her as they did of her mother.
Mrs. Chesnut was of much more serious bent than Amelia and Marie. She saw unmistakable signs of Columbia’s approaching doom as reports of Sherman’s progress reached the city. Elderly spinsters became flighty: “The fears of old maids increase in proportion to their age and infirmities and hideous ugliness.”
Mrs. Chesnut had spent most of the war in Richmond, where her husband served as an aide to President Davis; she knew the shortcomings of Confederate generals, who were “as plenty as blackberries” in Columbia. She despaired as she observed their endless councils of war. “They congregated at our house. They laid their fingers on the maps spread out on the table and pointed out where Sherman was going and where he could be stopped. They argued over their plans eloquently. Every man Jack of them had a safe plan to stop Sherman, if …”
The state legislature devoted itself to debating States’ rights and condemning the encroachments of the Confederate government.
Mrs. Chesnut realized that Richmond’s last-minute moves to shore up Confederate defenses near Columbia were futile, even when Jefferson Davis was forced to surrender command of the armies to Robert E. Lee after clinging to control of them throughout the war. “General Lee is generalissimo of all our forces,” Mrs. Chesnut reported. “That comes rather late, when we have no forces.” As the Federal columns drew near, Mrs. Chesnut prepared to leave for Lincolnton, North Carolina, in the western foothills, where Sherman was unlikely to march. She filled a box with food, but her husband ordered her to leave it at home; he assured her there would be plenty to eat. North Carolina, he said, was a land of milk and honey. She left in the last train available to civilians: “I took French leave … slipped away without a word to anybody.” She rode in a car “inches deep in liquid tobacco juice” to the dull little town of Lincolnton, where she found mean accommodations: “Bare floors. For a featherbed, a pine table and two chairs I pay $30 a day. Such sheets!” She mourned the box of food she had left behind.
Nowhere in Columbia did Sherman’s approach stir such excitement as in the crude pens where captured Federal soldiers were imprisoned—some of them moved here from Andersonville and other Confederate prisons. Behind the high brick walls of the insane asylum, huddled against the cold in makeshift huts, were almost a thousand of these men.
Among the captives was Adjutant S.H.M. Byers, an infantryman who had spent more than a year in rebel prisons. The inmates were isolated from news of the outside world, and guards tormented them with daily reports that Sherman had been defeated and turned back—but all the while newspapers were being smuggled into the prison. Each morning a Negro brought in loaves of bread to sell to the prisoners, and Byers tore open his loaf every morning to find a copy of the tiny Columbia newspaper folded into a wad no larger than a walnut. The paper’s news was distorted by rebel propaganda, but the progress of Sherman’s army could not be concealed—it had already swept through Milledgeville and was marching on.
Byers and his friends almost gave up hope, since it seemed that the army would not come near Columbia, but one morning in December, when they read that Sherman had reached the sea, Byers was tremendously excited. In the next two days he composed a poem to celebrate Sherman’s feat: “I wondered what so curious a campaign would be called. It was not a series of battles—it was a great march. And then the title, almost the words, of the song came to me.”
The prison glee club sang the poem, set to the music of “The Red, White and Blue”:
Our camp-fires shone bright on the mountain
That frowned on the river below,
As we stood by our guns in the morning,
And eagerly watched for the foe;
When a rider came out of the darkness
That hung over mountain and tree,
And shouted, “Boys, up and be ready!
For Sherman will march to the sea!”…
Then sang we a song of our chieftain,
That echoed over river and lea;
And the stars of our banner shone brighter
When Sherman marched down to the sea! …
The prisoners cheered the song and author, and Byers was hailed as a hero. The song soon reached New York, smuggled out by a lucky prisoner who had been exchanged, and it became a sensation, sold more than a million copies, and gave Sherman’s campaign its popular name.
Byers and the remaining bluecoat prisoners became more hopeful by the day as they read of Sherman’s occupation of Savannah and of his thrust into South Carolina. On the day they learned of his approach to Columbia, the prisoners saw their rebel guards making hurried preparations for evacuation. The guards notified prisoners to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, and in the next two days more than six hundred officers were shipped out of town in cattle cars, destined for other prisons. Byers and a companion, Lieutenant Devine, were two of a very few who evaded their captors. They spent the night of February 15 cutting through a board in the ceiling of the prison hospital shed, and were crouched in the attic when the last of the other prisoners were led away at dawn. Guards searched the camp for them all day, tearing up huts, digging into old tunnels and stamping through buildings. It was in vain.
Byers and his friend emerged about midnight and made a daring escape from the prison grounds into the city itself. They pulled their old blankets about them, and looking like rebels themselves, joined a group of swearing guards about a campfire. They attracted no attention. The prisoners then approached a sentinel at a gate.
“The captain sent us for water buckets.”
“Pass out,” the sentinel said.
The two ran into the city streets, where they found a friendly Negro, one Edward Edwards, who hid them in his hut to await the entry of Sherman’s troops, which was expected hourly.
In spite of ample warning of Sherman’s approach, and the presence of nine generals in Columbia, there was no plan for the city’s defense. Confederate resistance was as haphazard here as it had been throughout most of Sherman’s march. It was only on the day of the Federal entry that Wade Hampton was promoted to lieutenant general and placed in command of all Confederate cavalry, outranking Wheeler, who was his subordinate. General Beauregard was also at hand, ostensibly in overall command of combined forces—though there was virtually no infantry in the city.
General Hampton responded to his promotion with a defiant gesture. When someone suggested that the city surrender and that a white flag be hung from the city hall, Hampton blustered, “I’ll have it torn down.” The tall cavalryman vowed that his men would fight for the city from house to house, and urged civilians to burn the place, as the Russians had burned Moscow at the approach of Napoleon.
But the cavalry’s defense of the city was a mere charade. Hampton stubbornly refused to allow the mayor, Dr. Thomas J. Goodwyn, to meet the oncoming Federals and surrender the city—but early on February 17, when Federal shells began to fall and a blue column appeared at the riverside, Hampton accepted the inevitable. He rode toward the northern suburbs and safety beyond.
Hampton encountered a band of cavalrymen looting stores and ordered them to move on. The half-drunk troopers, who saw that he was alone, drew their pistols and cursed him. Hampton called to General Chesnut, who was across the street. Chesnut wheeled and galloped headlong at the troopers: “Fall in there! Fall in!” The riders obeyed sullenly and rode off only when Chesnut brought up a squad of infantrymen who had miraculously appeared.
Hampton made no effort to discipline these men. “They didn’t know me,” he said. “They’re too drunk to know anything.”
One of Hampton’s men who left the city at about this time remembered bitterly that no effort was made to defend the city. E. W. Wells, a South Carolina cavalry private, joined Hampton’s rear guard on a hill overlooking the city. The rear guard was no more than a dozen strong, assigned to cover the withdrawal of a wagon train and under orders to defend their wagons with sabers only, since gunfire might provoke the enemy to burn the city.
From his hillside, Wells saw the first of Sherman’s troops enter the city across a pontoon bridge far below, “a line of blue pouring steadily like a river.” Many witnesses, most of them Federals, were to testify later that Columbia had already begun to burn at this hour, but Wells saw only smoke boiling up from the depot, where military stores were afire. He saw no other smoke or flame. It was late morning when Wells rode out of the city, his horse heavily laden with bottles of madeira stuffed in saddlebags and strapped to the pommel. “I do not suppose any one horse ever carried so many bottles before,” Wells said. His last glimpses of Columbians left to face Sherman’s men were of an occasional “anxious female face at an upper window” and a few Negroes drinking whiskey before a plundered army commissary.
A few blocks away, near the abandoned prison and the insane asylum, General Beauregard and his staff rode out of the city, “heads bowed as if in great sorrow.” Excited women ran after them in the street, shrieking, “What is it, General? Don’t leave us! You can’t leave us here.”
One of the general’s aides turned back to explain: “The city’s surrendered. The army has gone.”
It was a few minutes after eight the morning of February 17 when Mayor Goodwyn and three city aldermen rode toward the river in a carriage, carrying a white flag and a message for Sherman: “The Confederate forces having evacuated Columbia, I deem it my duty … to ask for its citizens the treatment accorded by the usages of civilized warfare. I therefore respectfully request that you will send a sufficient guard in advance of the army, to maintain order …”
The mayor’s carriage met Federal troops just outside the city—an advance unit of the 30th Iowa. Goodwyn asked for their commanding officer, and the carriage was led to Colonel George A. Stone, who accepted the letter for Sherman.
Sherman watched this scene through his glasses from the far bank of Broad River, where he stood with Oliver Howard and several staff officers. “It’s no small thing to march into the heart of an enemy’s country and take his capital,” Sherman said. A boy who overheard him was impressed by the general’s tone, which was “without boastfulness, but with deep and evident satisfaction.”
The general gnawed on a cigar, “the same cigar he had in Atlanta,” a soldier said.
The Federal officers saw Colonel Stone and two or three others climb into the carriage with Goodwyn’s party and move back into the city, with files of infantrymen trailing behind.
Sherman was sitting on a log with Howard, watching engineers at work on a pontoon bridge, when Stone’s courier arrived with the surrender message. There was also another message from the city, a request for protection of an Ursuline convent in Columbia, a plea from its mother superior, Sister Baptista Lynch. The sister explained that she had once taught Sherman’s daughter Minnie in Ohio. Sherman passed the note to his brother-in-law, Colonel Charles Ewing: “See this woman and tell her we’ll destroy no private property.”