The ten to fifteen thousand Confederates with which General Hardee had
evacuated Savannah and retreated to Charleston could, of course, oppose
no serious opposition to Sherman's march. On the contrary, when Sherman
reached Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, on February 16, Hardee
evacuated Charleston, which had been defended for four long years
against every attack of a most powerful Union fleet, and where the most
ingenious siege-works and desperate storming assault had failed to wrest
Fort Wagner from the enemy. But though Charleston fell without a battle,
and was occupied by the Union troops on the eighteenth, the destructive
hand of war was at last heavily laid upon her. The Confederate
government pertinaciously adhered to the policy of burning accumulations
of cotton to prevent it falling into Union hands; and the supply
gathered in Charleston to be sent abroad by blockade runners, having
been set on fire by the evacuating Confederate officials, the flames not
only spread to the adjoining buildings, but grew into a great
conflagration that left the heart of the city a waste of blackened walls
to illustrate the folly of the first secession ordinance. Columbia, the
capital, underwent the same fate, to even a broader extent. Here the
cotton had been piled in a narrow street, and when the torch was applied
by similar Confederate orders, the rising wind easily floated the
blazing flakes to the near roofs of buildings.
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