February 17th, 2025, marks the 160th anniversary of the burning of Columbia. Although there is already overwhelming proof that General William T. Sherman’s troops deliberately torched the capital city of South Carolina, once in a while, some “new” evidence turns up which can be added to the multitude of other testimonies on record.
“Righteous Cause” adherents (beginning with Sherman himself) claim that the fires that destroyed much of Columbia were accidental, or caused by the Confederates, or, at the very least, that their origin was uncertain. Such error has been refuted in numerous letters, diaries, and other accounts of the period and afterward—yet the error, or lie, still persists, and is recorded in books and taught to students of history, along with a disdain for white Southerners. One egregious example of such misrepresentation can be found in an Annual Report published by the South Caroliniana Society in 2023. In it there is a description of the papers of Columbia Maria Taylor Axson (1826-1871), a new manuscript collection acquired by the South Caroliniana Library. These papers include Mrs. Axson’s lengthy letter about the burning of Columbia—a newly discovered piece of evidence which the Annual Report saw fit to dismiss as an early version of “Lost Cause mythology.”
Mrs. Axson was an eyewitness of the burning of the city, and further, she recorded many details that she learned from others in Columbia—but the Annual Report treats her letter with skepticism and condescension, stating that she “incorrectly described the burning of the city as a planned attack” (emphasis added). It also states that she “included accounts of U.S. Army soldiers describing their nefarious plans in detail to civilians in the area.” The anonymous writer of the piece in this Annual Report seems unaware that numerous incidents of U.S. soldiers sharing their “nefarious plans” with South Carolina civilians have been well documented. This writer is also apparently unaware that most of the horrific details Mrs. Axson recorded are corroborated by many other contemporary eyewitness accounts. The writer notes her description of instances in which “women in labor, newborns, and new mothers [were] threatened by gangs of U.S. soldiers” and dismisses these incidents as “logic-defying” despite the fact that there are a number of corroborating firsthand accounts.
Mrs. Axson’s letter, unknown until a few years ago, is now available in A Barbarous March: The Burning of Columbia, 1865, a new book that includes several other eyewitness narratives, some of which have never published, or which have not been seen in print for over 100 years. One of the latter is an article published in The Pacificator, a Catholic newspaper of Augusta, Georgia. It is a “Special Correspondence” written to the editors in 1865 by a Catholic priest, Rev. Lawrence P. O’Connell (1826-1891). William Gilmore Simms quoted a few lines from O’Connell’s letter in one of his newspaper articles of 1865, but it has not been published in full since that year.
A native of Ireland, Lawrence P. O’Connell was ordained as a priest in Charleston in 1850, and was sent to Columbia that same year. During the war, he served as a Confederate chaplain in Virginia until 1863, when illness brought him back to Columbia. His brother, Rev. Jeremiah Joseph O’Connell (1821-1894) founded St. Mary’s College in Columbia in 1851, and during the burning of the city, he led the Ursuline nuns and their young pupils out of their convent before it was set on fire by Sherman’s soldiers. Rev. Lawrence P. O’Connell was at St. Mary’s College when Sherman’s soldiers arrived. He was arrested, and the college was burned to the ground.
His letter is preceded by the heading: “Occupation and destruction of Columbia by the Yankees. Barbarous treatment of the citizens and vandalism of the incendiary W. T. Sherman and his sacrilegious army. Burning of St. Mary’s Catholic College, nunnery, etc.”
O’Connell’s letter is a damning description of the crimes he saw, and a powerful narrative of the capture, occupation, sack, and destruction of the city. In his closing remarks he states: “If I have written in strong terms, it is because I dipped my pen in the flames of a burnt though defenseless city, and if I have given colouring to my statement it is because my pen was blackened in describing the hellish deeds of a barbarous foe.”
Today many if not most historians subscribe to the “Righteous Cause” myth, which holds that, among other things, the war of 1861-1865 was waged against the South by the North for noble reasons, and that this warfare was conducted according to civilized standards, avoiding civilian victimization as much as possible. This view denies or ignores so many facts of history that it is, to say the least, absurd. The deliberate burning of Columbia is one of those facts—but the gaslighting of history continues.
Edwin J. Scott, a prominent citizen of Columbia, and an eyewitness to its destruction, wrote shortly after the event:
“[T]he universal testimony of our people was that Sherman’s troops burnt the place, and although they left here loaded with plunder from the houses they had destroyed, not one of them, so far as I have ever heard, was punished, tried, arrested, or even questioned for his conduct whilst in this city. Since then I have been in daily intercourse with all classes in and about Columbia, high and low, rich and poor, male and female, white and black; yet I have not met with a single person who attributed this calamity to any other cause. If a transaction that occurred in the presence of forty or fifty thousand people can be successfully falsified, then all human evidence is worthless and all history may be regarded as a collection of fables.”
I commend to all Emma LeConte’s diary, published under the title THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED.
The last sentence of Scotts letter is both true and haunting.