On February 17, 1865, Major General William T. Sherman entered Columbia, South Carolina, the conquered state capital, and found a city in chaos. The population, both white and Black, filled the streets. A strong wind from the north sent flakes of burning cotton floating through the air, lodging in the trees like a northern snowstorm.
Confederate cavalry had set fire to bales of cotton as they withdrew that morning, and soldiers from Stone’s Brigade were working frantically with an old fire engine near the Market Square, trying to extinguish the long pile of burning cotton bales. Sherman himself had to ride his horse up onto the sidewalk to get past the blaze. Among the crowd pressing around the general was the mayor, Dr. Thomas Jefferson Goodwin, a respectable old gentleman anxious to protect his citizens.
Sherman told him not to be uneasy, that the Union army did not intend to stay long and had no purpose to injure private citizens or private property. As he spoke, several men tried to push through the crowd to reach him. Sherman called to some Black people nearby to make room for them. When the men reached him, they explained that they were Union officers who had been prisoners of war, had escaped from the rebel prison, and were overjoyed to find themselves safe.
Sherman told them to report to General Oliver O. Howard once things settled down, and Howard would provide for their safety and allow them to travel with the army. One of the escaped prisoners handed Sherman a piece of paper, asking him to read it at his leisure. Sherman, as was his habit, took the paper, put it in his breast pocket, and continued with the day’s business.
He had collected numerous documents that day, and this one seemed no more important than any other. Sherman rode on with General Howard, moving down the street that led to the Charleston Depot. They found the depot and a large storehouse burned to the ground, with piles of cotton bags filled with corn and corn meal partially burned on the platform and nearby ground. A detachment of Stone’s Brigade was guarding the site, separating the good from the bad.
Continuing along the railroad track some three or four hundred yards, they reached a large foundry, where a man rode up and warned them that rebel cavalry were close by and they might get shot. Sherman turned back toward the Market Square, noticing on the way that several of the men were evidently in liquor. He called General Howard’s attention to it, and Howard left to ride toward the head of the column, which was defiling through the town. Back at the Market Square, Sherman again met Mayor Goodwin and asked where he proposed to quarter him.
The mayor had selected the house of Blandon Duncan, a citizen of Louisville, Kentucky, then residing in Columbia. Duncan had held the contract for manufacturing Confederate money and had fled with Confederate General Wade Hampton’s cavalry. Sherman and his staff rode some six or eight squares back from the new state house and found a good modern house, completely furnished, with stabling and a large yard. They took it as headquarters and occupied it during their stay.
Sherman considered General Howard in command of the place and referred the many applicants for guards and protection to him. Before the headquarters wagons arrived, Sherman strolled through the streets of Columbia. He found sentinels posted at the principal intersections and generally good order prevailing, but he did not return to the main street, as it was filled with a crowd of citizens watching the soldiers march by. Around two in the afternoon, settled into Blandon Duncan’s house, Sherman overhauled his pockets according to his custom, to read more carefully the various notes and memoranda received during the day.
He found the paper given to him by the escaped prisoner. It proved to be the lyrics of a song called “Sherman’s March to the Sea,” composed by Adjutant Samuel Hawkins Marshall Byers of the Fifth Iowa Infantry while he was a prisoner of war in the Asylum at Columbia. The song had been beautifully written out by a fellow prisoner and handed to Sherman in person. Byers had been captured earlier in the war and held in Confederate prisons, most recently in Columbia, where he and other prisoners endured harsh conditions.
Despite his captivity, Byers had written the song as a tribute to Sherman’s campaign, and it had become popular among the prisoners themselves. An excellent glee club among the prisoners in Columbia used to sing it well, often with an audience of rebel ladies, Byers later recalled. The song’s verses described the army’s march from the mountains to the sea, the battle at Resaca, the frowning heights of Kennesaw, the fall of Atlanta, and the final capture of Savannah. It ended with the army standing where the pine trees darkly towered, when Sherman told his weary men that Savannah was theirs.
Each chorus repeated the refrain that the stars in the banner shone brighter as Sherman marched down to the sea. Sherman was so taken with the song that he immediately sent for Byers. He attached Byers to his staff, provided him with a horse and equipment, and took him as far as Fayetteville, North Carolina. There, Byers was sent to Washington as a bearer of dispatches.
By 1875, when Sherman published his memoirs, Byers had risen further still. He was serving as the United States consul at Zurich, Switzerland, and Sherman noted that he had since been Byers’s guest there. That act of civility, a general taking a moment to read a paper handed to him by a bedraggled escaped prisoner, changed Byers’s life forever. An adjutant and prisoner of war, recently escaped and still wearing the marks of captivity, became a member of Sherman’s staff, a bearer of dispatches, and eventually a United States diplomat.
The song itself was preserved for history because Sherman inserted it into his 1875 memoir for convenient reference and preservation, ensuring that the words of a prisoner in a Columbia asylum would long outlive the war that inspired them.