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204 { 14 } Hail Columbia, Happy Land When Union troops arrived on February 17, 1865, the capital city of Columbia served as South Carolina’s educational center, a major railroad center, and an important center for manufacture and storage of war matériel for the Confederacy. It was also a tinderbox. Most structures in the city had been constructed with wood. In their hurried retreat, Confederate troops left behind artillery shells stored on the grounds of the old Statehouse and elsewhere in the city. More than four hundred bales of cotton lay grouped in four or five piles in Richardson Street, the city’s main street, placed there by Confederate troops to be burned. Large amounts of cotton had been placed in four other streets. During the day, a high wind blew from the northwest, widely scattering the loose cotton. Retiring Confederate forces set fire to the Charlotte railroad terminal, and arriving Union troops found piles of cotton smoldering and some burning. The troops joined the city’s firemen in fighting a blaze involving a hundred or more cotton bales near the town hall on Richardson Street. By one o’clock, the firemen, aided by Union troops, had the cotton fire nearly extinguished. During the day, other fires broke out and some cotton fires rekindled, requiring efforts to control them. Citizens had stored large amounts of liquor in the city, making liquor easily obtainable by the troops, which reduced the effectiveness of the brigade charged with maintaining order. Numbers of straggling troops, some of them drunk, thronged the city. Some sixty or more Union soldiers held near Columbia as prisoners of war had escaped during their removal. Highly resentful of their treatment and under no one’s control, their presence further added to the confusion. By dark, the wind speed had increased. The necessary conditions for a major conflagration existed, which is precisely what occurred.1 Hail Columbia, Happy Land • 205 The entry before noon of the XV Corps into Columbia foreshadowed trouble. General John A. Logan’s biographer, James Pickett Jones, reported that “as the men marched they sang: ‘Hail Columbia, happy land. If I don’t burn you, I’ll be damned.’”2 The Second Division marched through Columbia about 5:30 p.m. and camped a mile beyond near the Columbia and South Carolina Railroad. Irish-born First Lieutenant William White’s comments on Columbia indicate something of the attitude of the troops of the XV Corps and the Legion toward the city: “And if we review the history of the city, we shall find little in it to conciliate the favor of a Yankee army. Here it was the first ordinance of secession was adopted. Here was the germ of all the evils that for four years have beset the nation, and this the capital of the state, which by a bullying spirit and violent fanaticism frightened other states into following her example. Here it was they shaved men’s heads, tarred and feathered them and rode them on a rail, for no other offence than loyalty to the old flag.” White described the case “of an Irish stone cutter who worked on the new state house. Powers by name, and those who knew him say as fine a young man as there was in the city, had been served in this manner by the vigilance committee, shipped to Charleston and warned, by the first steamer to quit the Confederacy. When I think of this, as I heard many of those deeply interested say, ‘if only the guilty suffered it would be well.’”3 The morning of February 17 started out uneventfully for the soldiers of the 90th Illinois. According to Lieutenant White, the troops had a bit of fun as they relaxed near the present location of the city’s zoo and waited to enter Columbia: “The boys had caught a fox and were having lots of sport chasing him, until about ten o’clock when the voice of the artillery was hushed, the river was passed, and finally the firing died away in the distance and Columbia was ours! It had been formally surrendered to a brigade commander of the 1st Division by the Mayor.” At 3 p.m., the 90th Illinois troops joined their brigade and crossed the pontoon bridge over the Broad River. White saw a number of rather ominous sights upon entering the capital: “Towards town we passed any number of stragglers coming out with boxes of tobacco, sugar, whiskey, wine and...

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