Description
Within the first reissue of those documents since 1865, A City Laid Waste captures in riveting detail the destruction of South Carolina’s capital city. William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a native South Carolinian and probably the most nation’s foremost men of letters, was once in Columbia and witnessed firsthand town’s capture by Union forces and its subsequent devastation by fire. A renowned novelist and poet, who was once also an experienced journalist and historian, Simms deftly recorded the events of February 1865 in a series of eyewitness accounts published Within the first ten problems with the Columbia Phoenix and reprinted here. His record of burned buildings constitutes probably the most authoritative information to be had at the extent of the wear and tear.