soldiers, first made intoxicated
by the wine in private cellars or the liquors in the government
buildings, now became beastly drunk in their glee at the sight of the
destruction they had wrought. The women and children followed the dark
back-ground of that part of the city not yet in flames. The Federal
officers, instead of offering assistance or a helping hand to the
ruined and distressed people, added insult to injury by joining in
with the private soldiers in the plundering of the city, insulting the
women and adding fuel to the flame.

All night long did the flames rage, leap, and lick the clouds as
one block of buildings after another fell--food for the devouring
elements. This drunken orgies was kept up until their craven hearts
were fully satisfied. A few squares in the north-eastern part of the
city were left, also several churches, and into these the women and
children were huddled and packed, and had to remain for days and some
for weeks, almost on the verge of starvation. The Federal commander,
through the boundless dictates of his sympathetic heart, after
destroying all that fire and rapine could reach, left the starving
thousands a few rations each of the plunder he had robbed of the
planters in the country.

No vehicles nor horses were left in the city's limits--the bridges
burned that led across the river to the west. To the east, Blair's
Corps was laying waste everything in their pathway, while above and
below the city, for a distance of fifty miles, Sherman had swept the
country as bare as if a blight had fallen upon it. How the people
of Columbia subsisted during the time they were penned in the city
churches and the few buildings left, will ever remain a mystery, and
to none so much as the sufferers themselves.

Grains of corn were eagerly picked up in the streets as they dropped
from the wagons, and the women and children of the lower class and the
negroes flocked to the deserted camps to gather up the crumbs left by
the soldiers or the grains trampled under foot of the horses.

Every house in a stretch of fifty miles was entered and insults and
indignities offered the defenseless women which would have shamed
the savage Turk. Ladies were forced to disclose, at the point of the
pistol or the sabre, the hiding-place of their little valuables. Some
were forced to cook meals and wait upon the hell hounds, while they
regaled themselves upon the choice viands of medicinal wines of the
planters' wive