plemental Report), says: "I hereto subjoin complete details;" but from these details, called complete, the General has omitted all his correspondence between the 16th and the 21st of February—the period covering the destruction of Columbia. Both before and after this event the correspondence submitted is frequent and altogether voluminous, but in these five days not a word is given there. Why are these letters withheld, and where are they?
Such is a brief outline of the case Columbia has against General Sherman. The points above given are not the whole evidence in the case, but merely illustrative items, the great body of proof lying beyond the limits of a paper like this. The Mixed Claims Commission has "settled" one point—shall the United States pay for the property destroyed in Columbia?—in the negative. Let that remain settled. Columbia has another case already in action before the great assize of history. The court are the historians who are to sum up the evidence, and the jury is the civilized world. Before that assize she is preparing the evidence. Her points are sharply defined ones, and she makes them without indirectness or chicanery. A local committee of citizens of Columbia, with Chancellor Carroll, a jurist of ability and purity of character, at its head, has been already several years collecting testimony upon the burning of that city in 1865, and the evidence thus put in legal form will probably have some influence in shaping the opinion of the civilized world.
Columbia expects to make, among probably others, the following points, and she will rely in the strongest of them upon General Sherman's testimony or that of his own witnesses: first, that General Sherman desired the destruction of Columbia; second, that General Sherman knew that his soldiers desired the same thing; third, that General Sherman believed that if the Fifteenth army corps were quartered in that city they would destroy it; fourth, that General Sherman, thus desiring, thus knowing and thus believing, did quarter the Fifteenth corps in Columbia; fifth, that the Federal forces, under Colonel Stone, of the Fifteenth corps, received the city in surrender from Mayor Goodwyn, and took military possession of it about 10 o'clock Friday morning, the 17th of February, 1865; sixth, that the body of the Fifteenth corps entered the city an hour or two later than the command of Colonel Stone; seventh, that the conflagration which destroyed the city began about 8 o'clock in the evening—ten hours subsequent to the occupation; eighth, that the conflagration began in several places by
