A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia

by William Gilmore Simms

Book Overview

A dramatic eyewitness account of a city under siege during the Civil War

In the first reissue of these 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 one of the nation's foremost men of letters, was in Columbia and witnessed firsthand the city's capture and destruction. A renowned novelist and...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570035962
• ISBN13: 9781570035968
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Primary Document Finally Available

This eye-witness account of US troop atrocities on civilians can no longer be hidden. Scholars may have had an excuse for ignoring it, but now that excuse is removed by this easily available, beautifully produced university press edition. The majority of the so-called historians who have attributed the burning of Columbia SC to accident, alcohol, burning cotton, etc., are now shown to be the apologist propagandists for a sanitized American history that they most surely are. In contrast to the eye-witness account, their work now appears laughable. How can we take these "historians" seriously in anything else they do? Truth has a way of getting outside its bottle, and like the genie, it can't be put back. Congratulations to the editor and press for a job well done.