and the Seventeenth Corps (General Blair) occupied the place during that night.  I remember to have visited a large hospital, on the hill near the railroad depot, which was occupied by the orphan children who had been removed from the asylum in Charleston.  We gave them protection, and, I think, some provisions.  The railroad and depot were destroyed by order, and no doubt a good deal of cotton was burned, for we all regarded cotton as hostile property, a thing to be destroyed.  General Blair was ordered to break up this railroad, forward to the point where it crossed the Santee, and then to turn for Columbia.  On the morning of the 13th I again joined the Fifteenth Corps, which crossed the North Edisto by Snilling’s Bridge, and moved straight for Columbia, around the head of Caw-Caw Swamp.  Orders were sent to all the columns to turn for Columbia, where it was supposed the enemy had concentrated all the men they could from Charleston, Augusta, and even from Virginia.  That night I was with the Fifteenth Corps, twenty-one miles from Columbia, where my aide, Colonel Audenried, picked up a rebel officer on the road, who, supposing him to be of the same service with himself, answered all his questions frankly, and revealed the truth that there was nothing in Columbia except Hampton’s cavalry.  The fact was, that General Hardee, in Charleston, took it for granted that we were after Charleston; the rebel troops in Augusta supposed they were “our objective;” so they abandoned poor Columbia to the care of Hampton’s cavalry, which was confused by the rumors that poured in on it, so that both Beauregard and Wade Hampton, who were in Columbia, seem to have lost their heads.

On the 14th the head of the Fifteenth Corps, Charles R. Woods’s division, approached the Little Congaree, a broad, deep stream, tributary to the Main Congaree; six or eight miles below Columbia.  On the opposite side of this stream was a newly-constructed fort, and on our side—­a wide extent of old cotton-fields, which, had been overflowed, and was covered with a deep slime.  General Woods had deployed his leading brigade, which was skirmishing forward, but he reported that the bridge was gone, and that a considerable force of the enemy was on the other side.  I directed General Howard or Logan to send a brigade by a circuit to the left, to see if this stream could not be crossed higher up, but at the same time knew that General Slocum’s route world bring him to Colombia behind this stream, and that his approach would uncover it.  Therefore, there was no need of exposing much life.  The brigade, however, found means to cross the Little Congaree, and thus uncovered the passage by the main road, so that General Woods’s skirmishers at once passed over, and a party was set to work to repair the bridge, which occupied less than an hour, when I passed over with my whole staff.  I found the new fort unfinished and unoccupied, but from its parapet could see over some old fields bounded to the north