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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia
William Gilmore Simms. Edited with an Introduction by David Aiken
Illustrated, notes, index, 133 pp., 2005. University of South Carolina Press, 1600 Hampton St., 5th Floor, Columbia, SC 29208, $24.95 plus shipping
The assertion that William T. Sherman and his army purposefully burned the city of Columbia, S.C., has long been an essential part of the Lost Cause view of the Civil War. In 1865, noted Palmetto State author William Gilmore Simms penned a series of newspaper articles (later published in pamphlet form) which played an important role in the formulation of the “Sherman-the-Brute-burned-Columbia” thesis. Simms described the Union army in a variety of harsh terms including “wretches utterly heartless in humanity, and hardened to every crime and against every human feeling.” A major book on this topic and a variety of other publications have long discredited this view. Marion B. Lucas, Sherman and the Burning of Columbia (1976), has especially provided convincing evidence in opposition to Simms’ position. Bell I. Wiley, the eminent historian of the Confederacy, synopsized Lucas’ conclusion in the Foreword he wrote for that book. Wiley indicated that Lucas “exonerates Sherman of the charge of burning the city, and he deems it impossible to attribute sole blame for the conflagration to any individual or group.” “He concludes that the burning of Columbia was ‘an accident of war,’ resulting from a mixture of influences and circumstances, including remissness on the part of both Confederates and Federals. The principal demons in the drama were cotton, whiskey, and wind.” Since the Lucas book is the standard account of the Columbia fire, the only justification for a new edition of the original emotionally charged one-sided Simms publication is to provide an opportunity to place Simms’ words within the context of modern scholarship. This would be a worthwhile task. Unfortunately, this is not what the Introduction does. David Aiken, who is a part-time instructor in English at the Citadel and the College of Charleston and one of the founding fathers of the William Gilmore Simms Society, presents in his Introduction a hagiography of Simms and similar high praise for pre-Civil War Columbia. The influence of modern scholarship is visibly absent in Aiken’s negative treatment of Abraham Lincoln, for example, displaying no awareness of the vast body of Lincoln literature, while his condemnation of William T. Sherman ignores the extensive writing on this Civil War general published in the 1990s and early 21st century. Even two doctoral dissertations on Simms, completed in 2001 and 2004 at the University of South Carolina, are not mentioned. Most astonishingly, Aiken ignores the existence of slavery in his discussion of pre-war Columbia and Simms’ place in literature and history. The University of South Carolina Press is a respected publisher of scholarly books. Its publication of this 1865 narrative which its 2005 editor uncritically treats as accurate is difficult to comprehend.
John F. Marszalek
John F. Marszalek is Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, Mississippi State University. He is the author of numerous books including Sherman, As Soldier’s Passion for Order. His biography of Henry W. Halleck will appear in 2004.
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