re: #97 Shiplord Kirel: Fan of USPS, Goodyear, and Oreo

I remember reading about a study that compared local folklore and family legends about losses to Sherman’s army with the actual progress of his army. It found a majority of the stories involved locations that Sherman’s troops not likely to have visited. Sherman atrocity/family loss stories that could be pinpointed geographically were an average of 60 miles from his known and documented line of march. He had the exalted status of boogeyman to generations of rural southern whites.

Well, he was definitely in Columbia, SC. And I always liked staying at the old Clarion Hotel.

On February 17, 1865, the soldiers from Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army ransack Columbia, South Carolina, and leave a charred city in their wake.

After spending a month in Savannah, Sherman headed north to tear the Confederacy into smaller pieces. The Yankee soldiers took particular delight in carrying the war to South Carolina, the symbol of the rebellion. It was the first state to secede and the site of Fort Sumter, where South Carolinians fired on the Federal garrison to start the war in April 1861. When Confederate General Wade Hampton’s cavalry evacuated Columbia, the capital was open to Sherman’s men…Sherman claimed that the raging fires were started by evacuating Confederates and fanned by high winds. He later wrote: “Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the War.”

history.com