ce of the army.
The officers tried to preserve discipline. Colonel Stone ordered all the
liquor to be destroyed, and furnished guards for the private property of
citizens and for the public buildings; but the extent of the disorder
and plundering during the day was probably not appreciated by Sherman
and those high in command. Stone was hampered in his efforts to preserve
order by the smallness of his force for patrol duty and by the
drunkenness of his men. In fact, the condition of his men was such that
at eight o'clock in the evening they were relieved from provost duty,
and a brigade of the same division, who had been encamped outside of the
city during the day, took their place. But the mob of convicts, escaped
Union prisoners, stragglers and "bummers," drunken soldiers and negroes,
Union soldiers who were eager to take vengeance on South Carolina, could
not be controlled. The sack of the city went on, and when darkness came,
the torch was applied to many houses; the high wind carried the flames
from building to building, until the best part of Columbia--a city of
eight thousand inhabitants--was destroyed.

Colonel Stone wrote, two days afterwards: "About eight o'clock the city
was fired in a number of places by some of our escaped prisoners and
citizens." "I am satisfied," said General W. B. Woods, commander of the
brigade that relieved Stone, in his report of March 26, "by statements
made to me by respectable citizens of the town, that the fire was first
set by the negro inhabitants." General C. R. Woods, commander of the
first division, fifteenth corps, wrote, February 21: "The town was fired
in several different places by the villains that had that day been
improperly freed from their confinement in the town prison. The town
itself was full of drunken negroes and the vilest vagabond soldiers, the
veriest scum of the entire army being collected in the streets." The
very night of the conflagration he spoke of the efforts "to arrest the
countless villains of every command that were roaming over the streets."

General Logan, commander of the fifteenth corps, said, in his report of
March 31: "The citizens had so crazed our men with liquor that it was
almost impossible to control them. The scenes in Columbia that night
were terrible. Some fiend first applied the torch, and the wild flames
leaped from house to house and street to street, until the lower and
business part of the city was wrapped in flames. Frightened ci