n weather, the army had now to face the
wintry storms that blew in from the neighboring coast. Instead of the
dry Georgia uplands, his route lay across a low sandy country cut by
rivers with branches at right angles to his line of march, and bordered
by broad and miry swamps. But this was an extraordinary army, which
faced exposure, labor and peril with a determination akin to contempt.
Here were swamps and water-courses to be waded waist deep; endless miles
of corduroy road to be laid and relaid as course after course sank into
the mud under the heavy army wagons; frequent head-water channels of
rivers to be bridged; the lines of railroad along their route to be torn
up and rendered incapable of repair; food to be gathered by foraging;
keeping up, meanwhile a daily average of ten or twelve miles of
marching. Under such conditions, Sherman's army made a mid-winter march
of four hundred and twenty-five miles in fifty days, crossing five
navigable rivers, occupying three important cities, and rendering the
whole railroad system of South Carolina useless to the enemy.

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