South Carolina College is a striking illustration of the effect the war has had upon the institutions of learning at the South. Formerly it had about two hundred and fifty students; it has now but eighteen. The State appropriated annually sixty-five thousand dollars for its benefit; this year a nominal appropriation of eight thousand dollars was made, to pay the salaries of the professors, but when I was in Columbia they had not been able to get that. One, a gentleman of distinguished learning, said he had not had ten dollars in his possession since Sherman visited them.
Of the desolation and horrors our army left behind it, no description can be given. Here is a single instance. At a factory on the Congaree, just out of Columbia, there remained, for six weeks, a pile of sixty-five dead horses and mules, shot by Sherman’s men. It was impossible to bury them, all the shovels, spades, and other farming implements of the kind having been carried off or destroyed.
Columbia must have been a beautiful city, judged by its ruins. The streets were broad and well shaded. Many fine residences still remain on the outskirts, but the entire heart of the city, within their circuit, is a wilderness of crumbling walls, naked chimneys, and trees killed by the flames. The fountains of the desolated gardens are dry, the basins cracked; the pillars of the houses are dismantled, or overthrown; the marble steps are broken; but all these attest the wealth and elegance which one night of fire and orgies sufficed to destroy. Fortunately the unfinished new State House, one of the handsomest public edifices in the whole country, received but trifling injury.
Not much was doing to rebuild any but the business portion of the city. Only on Main Street were there many stores or shanties going up.
[19]. Daily Phœnix.
[20]. Daily Phœnix.
[21]. Nichols’s Story of the Great March.
[22]. An officer taking his punch (they drink punch in the army when the coffee ration is exhausted) from an elegantly-chased silver cup, was saluted thus:—
“Halloa, captain, that’s a gem of a cup. No mark on it; why, where did you get it?”