tizens
rushed in every direction, and the reeling incendiaries dashed, torch in
hand, from street to street, spreading dismay wherever they went."

"Some escaped prisoners," wrote General Howard, commander of the right
wing, April 1, "convicts from the penitentiary just broken open, army
followers, and drunken soldiers ran through house after house, and were
doubtless guilty of all manner of villainies, and it is these men that I
presume set new fires farther and farther to the windward in the
northern part of the city. Old men, women, and children, with everything
they could get, were herded together in the streets. At some places we
found officers and kind-hearted soldiers protecting families from the
insults and roughness of the careless. Meanwhile the flames made fearful
ravages, and magnificent residences and churches were consumed in a very
few minutes." All these quotations are from Federal officers who were
witnesses of the scene and who wrote their accounts shortly after the
event, without collusion or dictation. They wrote too before they knew
that the question, Who burned Columbia? would be an irritating one in
after years. These accounts are therefore the best of evidence. Nor does
the acceptance of any one of them imply the exclusion of the others. All
may be believed, leading us to the conclusion that all the classes named
had a hand in the sack and destruction of Columbia.

When the fire was well under way, Sherman appeared on the scene, but
gave no orders. Nor was it necessary, for Generals Howard, Logan, Woods,
and others were laboring earnestly to prevent the spread of the
conflagration. By their efforts and by the change and subsidence of
wind, the fire in the early morning of February 18 was stayed. Columbia,
wrote General Howard, was little "except a blackened surface peopled
with numerous chimneys and an occasional house that had been spared as
if by a miracle." Science, history, and art might mourn at the loss they
sustained in the destruction of the house of Dr. Gibbes, an antiquary
and naturalist, a scientific acquaintance, if not a friend, of Agassiz.
His large library, portfolios of fine engravings, two hundred paintings,
a remarkable cabinet of Southern fossils, a collection of sharks' teeth,
"pronounced by Agassiz to be the finest in the world," relics of our
aborigines and others from Mexico, "his collection of historical
documents, original correspondence of the Revolution, especially that