Two nuns, conferring apart if it would not be well to take the children into the woods, heard a deep, sad voice saying: “Your position distresses me greatly!” Startled, they turned to perceive a Federal officer beside a tombstone just behind them. “Are you a Catholic,” they asked, “that you pity us?” “No; simply a man and a soldier.” Dawn came, and with it some Irish soldiers to early Mass. Appalled, they cried: “O, this will never do! Send for the General! The General would never permit it!”
At reveille all arson, looting and violence had ceased as by magic, even as conflagration had started as by magic in the early hours of the night when four signal rockets went up from as many corners of the town. But the look of the desolated city in the glare of daylight was indescribable. Around the church were broken and empty trunks and boxes; in the entrance stood a harp with broken strings.
General Sherman came riding by; the Mother Superior summoned him; calmly facing the Attila of his day, she said in her clear, sweet voice: “General, this is how you keep your promise to me, a cloistered nun, and these my sacred charges.” General Sherman answered: “Madame, it is all the fault of your negroes, who gave my soldiers liquor to drink.”
General Sherman, in official report, charged the burning of Columbia to General Hampton, and in his “Memoirs” gives his reason: “I confess that I did so to shake the faith of his people in him”; and asserts that his “right wing,” “having utterly ruined Columbia,” passed on to Winnsboro.
Living witnesses tell how that firing was done. A party of soldiers would enter a dwelling, search and rifle; and in departing throw wads of burning paper into closets, corners, under beds, into cellars. Another party would repeat the process. Family and servants would follow after, removing wads and extinguishing flames until ready to drop. Devastation for secession, that was what was made plain in South Carolina; if the hotbed of “heresy” had to be destroyed for her sins, what of the Confederate Capital, Richmond, the long-desired, the “heart of the Rebellion”?
THE RUINS OF MILLWOOD
Millwood was the ancestral home of General Hampton, and was burned by Sherman’s orders.
The property is now owned by General Hampton’s sisters.