“The day of Jubilo has come”
Sherman led his horse across the pontoon bridge and rode into the city with Oliver Howard, Black Jack Logan, Frank Blair and other general officers. It was about two o’clock, February 17. The procession of Federal horsemen moved among roaring throngs. A few people welcomed them by waving handkerchiefs from windows—Northern sympathizers trapped there by war, or turncoats currying favor with the conquerors.
For the rest of his life the general was to be branded by Southerners as a ruthless vandal whose most brutal act was the burning of Columbia, but he apparently did not intend to devastate the city. A few hours earlier he had dictated orders that libraries, asylums and private dwellings be spared, but that most public buildings, including railroad depots, factories and machine shops, should be burned. Ten years later, with the publication of his memoirs, Sherman recalled this bitterly cold, blustery day of his entry into Columbia:
We found seemingly all its population, white and black, in the streets. A high and boisterous wind was prevailing from the north, and flakes of cotton were flying about in the air and lodging in the limbs of the trees, reminding us of a Northern snow-storm. Near the market-square we found Stone’s brigade halted, with arms stacked, and a large detail of his men, along with some citizens, engaged with an old fire-engine, trying to put out the fire in a long pile of burning cotton-bales, which I was told had been fired by the rebel cavalry on withdrawing from the city that morning. I know that, to avoid this row of burning cotton bales, I had to ride my horse on the sidewalk.
Oliver Howard, who was at Sherman’s side, later recorded the same memory of long rows of burning cotton bales: “Certainly,” Howard wrote, “this was done before any of our men reached the city.”
Sherman made slow progress through the streets. Blacks pressed about his horse and touched his hand, shouting that he was a savior. Other Negroes were busily ladling out liquor from pails to Sherman’s eager troops. Amid the cheers of soldiers and civilians, army bands blared “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail, Columbia.”
Among those who cheered the general were men of the 100th Indiana Regiment, who had been in the city for an hour or more and were already becoming drunk. A soldier wearing a top hat and an elegant silk dressing gown staggered toward Sherman, lifted his hat and said solemnly: “I have the honor—hic!—to present you—hic!—with the freedom of the city.”
Uncle Billy smiled and an officer hurried the drunk to the rear of the regiment. Sherman pointed out other drunk soldiers, and Oliver Howard ordered in fresh regiments to patrol the city.
Several ragged men pushed through the crowd toward Sherman and said they were Federal soldiers just escaped from the city’s prison pen. Among them were Adjutant S.H.M. Byers and his friend Devine. Sherman dismounted and held out his hands to them. Major Nichols of the general’s staff saw changes on Sherman’s grizzled face: “Not when meeting his dearest friends, not in the … moment of victory … have I seen his face beam with such exultation and kindly greeting.” The general told the escaped prisoners to report to Howard when order was restored so that they could march with the army. Devine handed Sherman a copy of the song Byers had written. The general thrust it into his pocket and rode away.
Major Goodwyn appeared and begged Sherman to save the city from fire. “Not a finger’s breadth of your city shall be harmed, Mr. Mayor,” the general said. “You can sleep tonight satisfied that your town will be as safe in my hands as in yours.”
Sherman asked about the city’s fire engines, and when Goodwyn said that they were in good condition, the general said, “I’m pleased to hear it.”
The mayor led Sherman and his staff to a large deserted house, the home of Blanton Duncan, a Kentuckian who had been printing Confederate money in the city under contract but had fled.
When he had settled in this headquarters an hour or so later, Sherman went through the dispatches that had come during the day, “overhauled” his pocket, and found Byers’ song. He was so taken with it that he read several verses aloud to his staff and sent Major Nichols off to search for the prisoner—but he was not to find the reticent Byers for several days.
Mayor Goodwyn came to Sherman’s headquarters with word that one of his old friends from Charleston now lived in the city, and the general went out to visit her, the sister of one of his hunting companions of twenty years before, when Sherman had been stationed at Fort Moultrie. He and Dr. Goodwyn found the woman’s house near the depot. Chickens and ducks wandered about the yard and outbuildings, and shrubs were intact; obviously the place had not been raided.
“I’m glad to see you haven’t been visited by my soldiers,” Sherman said. “They’re usually pretty rough on poultry and anything else they can find.”
“I owe it all to you.”
“Not at all. I didn’t know you were here until a few minutes ago.”
She showed him a book which he had inscribed to her twenty years before. “Your soldiers came over my fence and chased my ducks and chickens, but I took out this book and showed it to one of them, and he said he knew this was Uncle Billy’s handwriting, and so they went away. They even left me a guard.”
“Has he treated you well?”
“He’s in the next room now, minding my baby. He’s a nice boy from Iowa—not five minutes ago he ran off some of your soldiers who came to rob me.”
Sherman spent almost an hour in the house, and when he returned to headquarters, sent the woman a supply of rice and ham.
Other Federal regiments moved into the city during the afternoon of February 17, among them diarists who left conflicting accounts of conditions they saw in the streets. Many of these men agreed with Sherman that cotton bales were already blazing in the streets when they entered. The 4th Minnesota’s files were forced out of a street onto the sidewalk by the blaze. And the Illinois Lieutenant Matthew Jamison recorded that he had looked up into the city before his entrance to see “small groups of rebels darting in and out, to and fro, carrying the torch—cotton burning in the streets.” The 50th Illinois, one of the first regiments to enter, passed civilians who were trying to put out the flames in “an immense quantity” of burning cotton.
But by the time the 2nd Iowa entered the city, the bales were no longer burning. Private John Bell wrote, “The cotton had been drenched and the street flooded with water and, to all appearances, the fire entirely subdued.”
It was only a temporary respite. Flames were soon to reappear, and the worst fears of the city’s waiting civilians were to be confirmed. Columbia’s apprehensive women, alone as they faced the invaders, saw that their time had come.
Emma LeConte, the daughter of a chemistry professor at South Carolina College, first heard the roar of Sherman’s troops about one o’clock in the afternoon, and peering across the city from her home on the campus, saw an American flag flying atop the statehouse. With the fervor of a seventeen-year-old, she wrote in her diary: “Oh, what a horrid sight! What a degradation! After four long bitter years of bloodshed and hatred, now to float there at last. That hateful symbol of despotism!”
Federal guards came to the college soon afterward and built a shed outside the campus walls, where they settled to protect the place. The college was now used as a hospital for the sick and wounded of both armies, and peace was maintained there throughout the day. Still, young Emma could not look at the Federal guards without “loathing and disgust,” though she confessed to her diary that she did not now feel the terror of the Yankees which had seized her a few days earlier: “I do not feel half so frightened as I thought I would.”
From a mile outside the city, perched on the roof of her Barhamsville Female Academy, Mme. Sophie Sosnowski watched apprehensively as she saw the first smoke and flying sparks rise above Columbia during the afternoon. Madame’s pupils, “the loveliest flowers that could adorn a nation,” had been sent off to safety by train, and the formidable old woman and her two daughters awaited the invaders, determined to save the buildings of the school.
Within the city itself, the nuns of the Ursuline convent and their sixty girl students watched through shuttered windows as the first Federal soldiers marched past their building. These women waited with a special sense of security, since Mother Superior Baptista Lynch had been a schoolmate of Sherman’s sister and had taught his daughter Minnie.
During the morning Sister Baptista sent an aged priest to seek help from Sherman. The priest returned with guards and an assurance from the general that the convent would not be disturbed. The day passed quietly within the massive walls, but in late afternoon a young cavalry officer, Major Thomas Fitzgibbon, called on the mother superior to offer his protection “as an individual.”
“Thank you, Major, but I have General Sherman’s word that we will be safe.”
The major persisted: “This is a doomed city. The whole army knows it. I doubt that a house will be left standing.”
When Fitzgibbon had gone, Sister Baptista sent another message to Sherman, reminding him that the nuns and students in the convent were dependent upon his protection.
Once more the general assured her that the convent was safe.
Other Federal officers were becoming more concerned for the fate of the people of the city. A few of Sherman’s unruly troops broke into the home of Mrs. Louisa Cheves McCord during the afternoon and littered her yard with debris. In the midst of the turmoil, Mrs. McCord was handed a note by a bluecoat officer: “Ladies, I pity you. Leave this town—go anywhere to be safer than here.”
It was a prophetic warning to the women of the city of a fate soon to befall them. But until now, the people of Columbia had been anxiously optimistic. Though some 30,000 of Sherman’s troops were in or near the city, unpleasant incidents had been few and there was no threat of a catastrophic fire. Some cotton ignited in the early morning still burned and tossed sparks into the wind; two burning depots still sent smoke plumes skyward; and the inmates of the city’s prison, in the spirit of the occasion, had twice tried to set their building on fire.
The city began to burn as dusk approached. Sherman was among the first to realize that the crisis was at hand. Worn by a long day’s activities, he had fallen asleep in headquarters during the late afternoon, and awoke to find his room aglow with orange light. Major Nichols, sent to investigate, learned that a block of buildings was burning and that the blaze was spreading rapidly in the high wind. Sherman sent messengers to Howard and was told that though the army had begun fighting the fire, the flames were already raging out of control.
The general did not leave his headquarters until about eleven that night, but though he walked for several blocks with Colonel Dayton, he saw none of the violence or looting reported by other observers. But the fire had by now become a raging holocaust, and Sherman tried to help his men control some of the flames.
“The whole air was full of sparks and flying masses of cotton, shingles, etc.,” he wrote later. “Some were carried four or five blocks and started new fires.” As to his troops, he noted only that they “seemed generally under good control, and certainly labored hard to girdle the fire …”
The reporter David Conygham, who was in the streets at the same time, wrote of it:
I trust I shall never witness such a scene again—drunken soldiers rushing from house to house, emptying them of their valuables and firing them; Negroes carrying off piles of booty … and exulting like so many demons; officers and men revelling on the wines and liquors until the burning houses buried them in their drunken orgies …
A troop of cavalry were left to patrol the streets, but I did not once see them interfering with the groups that rushed about to fire and pillage the houses.
True, Generals Sherman, Howard and others were out giving instructions for putting out a fire in one place, while a hundred fires were lighting all around them. How much better it would [have] been had they brought in a division or a brigade of sober troops and cleared out the town …
The novelist William Gilmore Simms, who had fled to the city from the ruins of his home near Orangeburg, was out during the height of the great fire, watching groups of Federal soldiers in the streets,
drinking, roaring, revelling, while the fiddle and accordion were playing their popular airs … Ladies were hustled from their chambers, their ornaments plucked from their persons … Men and women bearing off their trunks were seized … and in a moment the trunk burst asunder with the stroke of an axe or gun butt, the contents laid bare, rifled … and the residue sacrificed to the fire.
You might see the ruined owner, standing woebegone, aghast, gazing at his tumbling dwelling, his scattered property, with a dumb agony on his face … Others you might hear … with wild blasphemies assailing the justice of Heaven, or invoking, with lifted and clenched hands, the fiery wrath of the avenger. But the soldiers plundered and drank, the fiery work raged, and the moon sailed over all …
There were no reports of raped white women, but black women of the city suffered terribly, Simms claimed: “The poor Negroes were victimized by their assailants, many of them … being left in a condition little short of death. Regiments, in successive relays, subjected scores of these poor women to the torture of their embraces …”
Colonel Dayton of Sherman’s staff reported, however, that he shot a man who was trying to rape a white woman in a street, an incident of which no further mention was made.
Years later, looking back to this night of February 17, 1865, Sherman wrote: “Many of the people thought that this fire was deliberately planned and executed. This is not true. It was accidental, and in my judgment began with the cotton which General Hampton’s men had set fire to on leaving the city (whether by his orders or not is not material), which fire was partially subdued early in the day by our men; but, when night came, the high wind fanned it again into full blaze, carried it against the frame houses which caught like tinder, and soon spread beyond our control.”
Private Bell of the 2nd Iowa, who had noted the sodden bales of cotton in the early afternoon, was marching through the streets about dusk when he saw whiskey being passed by the bucketful to soldiers who would pause to drink; during this time, “a high wind rose … and the smoldering fire in the cotton bales was fanned into flames unnoticed in the excitement and by dark the fire had reached the business houses lining the street …”
But, as Bell reported, it was the discovery of a local distillery by Federal soldiers that caused bedlam in the city, scattering “ten thousand drunken soldiers” through the streets, men who halted civilians who were fighting the blaze with small fire engines. The drunk soldiers stabbed fire hoses with bayonets and chopped them with axes. Bell remembered it for years: “Hundreds of houses were on fire at once; men swore and women and children screamed and cried with terror; drunken soldiers ran about the streets with blazing torches, the fire engines were manfully worked; soldiers and citizens heartily joined in the effort to subdue the flames as long as there was any hope of success, and long lines of sentries did all in their power to restrain their reckless and desperate comrades.”
Officers of high rank were carried away by drink or excitement. The Illinois Lieutenant Matthew Jamison saw General Giles A. Smith sitting on horseback in the middle of a street, surrounded by flames. The general shouted, “Damnation to the Confederacy,” raised a flask and drank.
Jamison stopped an old Negro who was passing. “What do you think of the night, sir?”
“I think the day of Jubilo has come,” the Negro said.
An elderly white man passed with three pale-faced daughters, fearful that his house would burn. He shrugged off advice that he send a boy to his roof to put out falling sparks, and chattered on, “indifferent and reckless.” “I’d sooner lose all I have than have my daughters misused,” the old man said.
Jamison heard the band of a regiment from the XX Corps playing in the red light, surrounded by cheering soldiers who taunted nearby civilians. One young soldier shouted to an old man whose store was wrapped in flames: “Did you think of this when you hurrahed for Secession? How do you like it, hey?”
The Reverend Mr. Connor, a Methodist minister whose parsonage was burned, emerged with a sick child wrapped in a blanket. A soldier seized the blanket. “No!” Connor said, “he’s sick.” The soldier tore off the blanket and threw it into the fire. “Damn you,” he said. “If you say one more word I’ll throw the child after it.”
Men of the 1st Missouri Engineers, whose homes had been burned by Confederate raiders in Rolla, Missouri, long before, carried torches through the streets and tossed them into houses.
Escaped prisoners from Camp Sorghum begged the troops for matches and turpentine. Fourteen-year-old Mike Garber, the son of Sherman’s quartermaster, never forgot these men: “Ragged clothes exposed the bare skin in places and rags and skin and the men all over were one hue—a dirty dust color. I had never seen any human beings look so … They had hidden in the prison shacks … burrowed in the earth and been covered by comrades with dirt.” There were few of these survivors: Most of them had been moved away by the rebels—and others had died in their underground warrens when guards burned the shanties of their prison camp.
Colonel M. C. Garber, Sherman’s chief quartermaster, who had industriously seized tons of Confederate supplies during the day, lost all in the flames. He, too, ascribed the destruction of the city to heavy drinking among soldiers: “The fire was terrible, the scenes too horrible to describe. Large quantities of whiskey were found, which the men drank to an alarming extent. My estimate is that forty blocks were burned. So much for giving soldiers liquor.”
The women of the city confronted the night’s terrors with an unexpected courage. Mme. Sosnowski, the mistress of Barhamsville Female Academy, had been assigned a small guard for the night, but except for one young Tennessee soldier, found them worthless. Madame had hidden her valuables and now defended them resolutely. With the aid of the Tennessean she turned several raiding parties from her door, but was then besieged by a drunken band of eighty men fresh from the looting of a neighboring house, where they had found a wine cache, raped several Negro women, and burned the house to the ground.
Mme. Sosnowski, her daughters and the Tennessee soldier barred the doors and finally drove off these intruders, but a few hours later there was a ringing of axes from her stables. Madame charged into the darkness alone and confronted twenty half-drunk soldiers. “When I appeared they looked with astonishment at the coming of a single lady, and really appeared to be ashamed of themselves, as well they might be.”
“What are you, thieves or soldiers? To any person of honor you are a disgrace to the military profession.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
By the time the Tennessee soldier arrived in support, Madame had subdued the marauders and sent them away. She then led her livestock into the house, the cows into the basement dining room, and the horse upstairs and into a dressing room.
Little more than a mile away, Sister Baptista Lynch had been agonizing over the safety of her convent and its young women and girls. When she heard the first reports of spreading fire and violence across the city, the mother superior had written Sherman once more, a reminder of her “personal as well as religious claim” upon his protection through her acquaintance with Minnie and his sister.
Sherman responded once more that the convent was in no danger, and that she and her charges should remain where they were.
It was now too late. The wall of fire advancing through the city raged ever nearer the convent grounds. Father O’Connell, “looking sad and anxious,” came in from the streets to whisper with the nuns, who called the girls aside, helped them to tie clothing into small bundles and gave instructions for evacuating their building. The girls listened gravely. The youngest of them was five, and several were under the age of ten.
At nightfall, for the first time flames were visible through the convent windows, and the roar of the doomed city’s consuming flames could be heard behind the thick walls. The priests tried to remove the Host from the altar, but were dissuaded by the nuns, who wished to keep it as long as possible. Father O’Connell led a final benediction. The schoolgirls were kneeling, reciting the rosary, when the chapel door was broken in by “the most unearthly battering … like the crash of doom. Drunken soldiers piled over each other, rushing for the sacred gold vessels of the altar, not knowing they were safe in the keeping of one blessed of God.”
The girls filed past the cursing men into the night: “We marched through the blazing streets with the precision of a military band. It was our safety.” Father O’Connell led, followed by Sister Baptista. Sara Aldrich, whose mother had sent her here from Barnwell, thought she would remember the scene for life: “Not a cry, not a moan. The roaring of the fires, the scorching flames on either side … did not create the least disorder. That majestic figure of the Mother Superior in the graceful black habit of the Ursuline order … The long line of anxious, white young faces of the schoolgirls …”
Father O’Connell led them into a nearby church, from which they saw the burning convent roof collapse into a fiery grid of timbers. The sturdy building endured until long after nearby structures had burned to the ground, but at three in the morning its cross plunged earthward in a cascade of flames and embers.
Laughing soldiers taunted the nuns and blew cigar smoke in their faces. “Oh, holy! Yes, holy! We’re just as holy as you are!… Now, what do you think of God? Ain’t Sherman greater?”
Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, the wife of the director of the local army medical laboratory, had stayed behind with her six children and her elderly mother when her husband fled with his staff and supplies into North Carolina. She had been warned of the terrible punishment in store for Columbia, but refused to leave her home. Like many another victim of Sherman’s bummers, she never forgot nor forgave the plundering of her home during the Federal occupation—but she found the invaders the most gentlemanly brigands imaginable, even in their most terrifying actions.
At dusk, when the first soldiers pounded on her door, Mrs. Ravenel was assailed by crowds of “drunken, dancing, shouting, cursing wretches,” all carrying torches. It was a procession that ended only with the dawn: “A roaring stream of drunkards passed through the house, plundering and raging, and yet in a way curiously civil and refraining from personal insult.” The soldiers found little of Harriott Ravenel’s treasure, for she wore dozens of gold double eagle coins in a belt about her waist, and had buried almost five hundred silver dollars in her garden. And though they swore incessantly at every breath, the soldiers addressed Mrs. Ravenel as “lady,” even while they were rending apart everything they could not carry away. When Mrs. Ravenel stood quietly beside them as they fought over a trunk, the men turned away as if in shame.
Mrs. Ravenel’s mother, Mrs. Rutledge, sat through the night in a rocking chair, sewing without betraying the slightest sign of fear. “Old lady, why don’t you look scared?” one soldier asked. “Because I’m not.” He nodded approvingly and returned the scissors he had snatched from her.
“I’m sorry for the women and children,” one soldier said. “But South Carolina’s got to suffer. Got to be destroyed.”
Some of the men tried to burn the Ravenel house by tossing burning books on the porch or torches into closets, but did not persist when the women and children scurried to beat out the flames—“dreadfully fatiguing work,” Mrs. Ravenel said.
Mrs. Ravenel sent to General Frank Blair’s nearby headquarters to ask for a guard, but the servant returned with the message that General Blair “was very sorry, but was too sleepy to do anything.”
The Reverend P. J. Shand, the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, driven from his home by the flames, carried out a trunk filled with the communion silver of the church. He and a servant were carrying the trunk and Mrs. Shand was with them when five soldiers surrounded them.
“Put it down. Whatcha got in there?”
“My church silver.”
“Give us the key.”
When Shand said he had no key, four of the soldiers banged at the chest and the other drew a pistol, grabbed the minister by the collar and demanded his watch.
“I have no watch.”
After being thoroughly searched, Shand was left in the street by the five, who disappeared with the trunk.
Young Emma LeConte and her mother were frightened by swarms of drunk soldiers staggering about the South Carolina College campus, cursing and singing such ribald songs that “we were forced to go indoors.” The women barricaded themselves in the cellar of their home and tried to sleep, but at four in the morning, when the roar of flames awakened them, they went up to the front door and saw the statehouse wrapped in fire. The burning city had a terrible beauty for Emma:
Imagine night turning into noonday, only with a blazing, scorching glare that was horrible—a copper-colored sky across which swept columns of black rolling smoke glittering with sparks and flying embers … Everywhere the palpitating blaze walling the streets as far as the eye could reach—filling the air with its terrible roar … every instant came the crashing of timbers and the thunder of falling buildings. A quivering molten ocean seemed to fill the air and sky. The Library building opposite us seemed framed by the gushing flames and smoke, while through the windows gleamed the liquid fire.
Several college buildings burst into flames, and Emma saw scores of dark figures fighting the flames: “All the physicians and nurses were on the roof trying to save the buildings, and the poor wounded inmates, left to themselves, such as could, crawled out …” Many wounded Confederate soldiers died in the blaze that consumed their emergency hospital.
The storm of sparks began to subside near dawn of February 18, and bugles called through Columbia’s streets. Soldiers disappeared and flames receded. By seven o’clock the last fire had flickered out. Emma noted: “The sun rose at last, dim and red through the thick, murky atmosphere. It set last night on a beautiful town full of women and children—it shone dully down this morning on smoking ruins and abject misery.”
Mme. Sophie Sosnowski, no longer confident that she could save the Barhamsville Female Academy from roaming bands of troops, walked into the city alone on the morning of February 18, seeking more guards. She made her way to Sherman’s headquarters, where scores of the city’s civilians had taken their troubles during the day and night.
Madame, the widow of a Polish army officer, noted with disdain the shambling, informal air of Sherman’s troops, so unlike the highly trained soldiers she had known in Europe. She found the general himself equally informal, for she was shown into his room without delay, as if he welcomed all comers. The Polish woman asked him for a guard, and then proceeded to lecture the general:
“I am surprised and indignant that your army should behave so toward a conquered people who have surrendered their city and do not resist. I have always told people we had nothing to fear, except the accidents of war—but I do not consider the deliberate burning of a city an accident.”
Sherman glared at her.
“I have told my friends private property and females would be protected when you came. But no, instead of this you have waged warfare that is a disgrace to our history.”
“What do you mean by that, Madam?” Sherman said angrily.
“I meant exactly what I have said.”
Sherman burst forth “in strong terms of the responsibility of Columbia, of South Carolina, of the sufferings by Secession; indeed, as he only advocated one side of the question, he spoke well.” The general ended with a threat: “You have suffered much already, but if I have to come back again …”
He refused Mme. Sosnowski’s repeated requests for guards: “There will be no need. I expect to leave tomorrow, and must have all troops at their posts.”
“Then I will detain you no longer, Sir.”
Sherman escorted her to the door and she returned to the school, where she was fortunate enough to find a band of Irish soldiers who protected the academy from drunken bluecoats the rest of the night.
Another high-spirited Columbia woman who invaded Sherman’s headquarters browbeat the general into assigning her a guard.
Mrs. Campbell Bryce, who was resolved to save her family property from the marauders, found the general busily writing at his desk. She waited as his pen scratched on. He was, Mrs. Bryce noted, “decidedly untidy” in his soiled, rumpled shirt: “He was quite pale, his hair light and stood up from his brow, his eyes blue and penetrating, and a large, firm mouth. Altogether his appearance was to me rather that of a pedagogue than a great general.”
Sherman turned to face her. “What can I do for you?”
“I want a guard.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Of your soldiers.”
“Oh, you needn’t be. The poor fellows are hungry, and want a chicken. Give them a chicken.”
Mrs. Bryce then ripped off a sheet of his paper and pushed it toward the general. “Would you please give me an order for a guard?”
“Oh, yes. But you won’t need one.”
Mrs. Bryce stood until he had written an order, and then went home with her guard. Her house was not seriously molested thereafter.
Other women were less fortunate in the assignment of guards. Mrs. Agnes Law, a seventy-two-year-old widow who was in ill health, was allowed four guards for the tall brick house in which she had lived most of her life. Mrs. Law, her sister and a niece with a young baby were the only occupants of the place. The four Federal soldiers, Mrs. Law was relieved to note, were “well-behaved and sober.” She served them supper and faced the evening with growing confidence that they would protect her.
Fires broke out in the neighborhood in late afternoon, and Mrs. Law wanted to move her furniture from the house. The guards protested. “Your place is in no danger,” they said. “Leave everything just where it is.”
But the guards then took lighted candles and went up to the second floor. Mrs. Law’s sister, who followed them, clattered back down in excitement: “They’re setting the curtains on fire!” The women could already hear the crackling of flames overhead. Mrs. Law hurried her sister, niece and the baby from the house to find a place of safety.
The guards came downstairs, their manner abruptly changed: “Old woman, if you don’t want to burn up with your house you’d better get out.”
Mrs. Law went onto her porch to look for help in descending the steps and passing through the streets, but she saw only a mob of soldiers and was forced to go alone, moving slowly for fear of falling, though trembling in terror of the walls of flames between which she passed. She reached the home of a friend, where she spent the night without harm under the guard of a sympathetic officer.
Despite her survival of the ordeal, Mrs. Law, a devout Presbyterian, was unforgiving toward the invaders: “I cannot live long. I shall meet General Sherman and his soldiers at the bar of God, and I give this testimony in full view of that dread tribunal.”
Harriott Ravenel was one of the few women in Columbia whose house escaped the flames, a miracle accomplished by a young Irish soldier who had come in off the streets, drawn by the sweet Irish accent of Mrs. Ravenel’s maid. The boy soldier had pretended to be a guard, though his musket lacked a bayonet, and he had driven away bands of men who threatened to burn the house.
Late in the night of the fire the Irish boy went to Mrs. Ravenel: “I’m going to keep safe everything you own—but there is one thing I would like to have. Will you give it to me?”
“Anything! Anything I own is yours. Please take what you wish. We owe everything to you.”
The soldier ran up the stairs and reappeared a few minutes later wearing a purple velvet cloak and doublet and white satin hose—an old fancy dress costume that Dr. Ravenel had once worn to a ball, dressed as Sir Walter Raleigh.
Soon afterward, at the roll of reveille drums, the men in the Ravenel house hurried away, the Irish Walter Raleigh last of all, waving farewell and vanishing with a swirl of the purple velvet cloak.