l, 1902.

WHO BURNED COLUMBIA?

The story goes that when General Sherman lived in New York City, which
was during the last five years of his life, he attended one night a
dinner party at which he and an ex-Confederate general who had fought
against him in the southwest were the chief guests; and that an
Englishman present asked in perfect innocence the question, Who burned
Columbia? Had bombshells struck the tents of these generals during the
war, they would not have caused half the commotion in their breasts that
did this question put solely with the desire of information. The
emphatic language of Sherman interlarded with the oaths he uttered
spontaneously, the bitter charges of the Confederate, the pounding of
the table, the dancing of the glasses, told the Englishman that the
bloody chasm had not been entirely filled. With a little variation and
with some figurative meaning, he might have used the words of Iago:
"Friends all but now, even now in peace; and then but now as if some
planet had outwitted men, tilting at one another's breast in opposition.
I cannot speak any beginning to this peevish odds."

But the question which disturbed the New York dinner party is a delight
to the historian. Feeling that history may be known best when there are
most documents, he may derive the greatest pleasure from a perusal of
the mass of evidence bearing on this disputed point; and if he is of
Northern birth he ought to approach the subject with absolute candor. Of
a Southerner who had himself lost property or whose parents had lost
property, through Sherman's campaign of invasion, it would be asking too
much to expect him to consider this subject in a judicial spirit. Even
Trent, a moderate and impartial Southern writer whose tone is a lesson
to us all, when referring, in his life of William Gilmore Simms, to
"the much vexed question, Who burned Columbia," used words of the
sternest condemnation.

Sherman, with his army of 60,000, left Savannah February 1, 1865, and
reached the neighborhood of Columbia February 16. The next day Columbia
was evacuated by the Confederates, occupied by troops of the fifteenth
corps of the Federal army, and by the morning of the 18th either three
fifths or two thirds of the town lay in ashes. The facts contained in
these two sentences are almost the only ones undisputed. We shall
consider this episode most curiously if we take first Sherman's account,
then Wade Hampton's, ending with wha