When the Union soldiers of Colonel Stone's brigade entered the city, they were at once supplied by citizens and negroes with large quantities of intoxicating liquor, brought to them in cups, bottles, demijohns, and buckets. Many had been without supper, and all of them without sleep the night before, and none had eaten breakfast that morning. They were soon drunk, excited, and unmanageable. The stragglers and "bummers," who had increased during the march through South Carolina, were now attracted by the opportunity for plunder and swelled the crowd. Union prisoners of war had escaped from their places of confinement in the city and suburbs, and joining their comrades were eager to avenge their real or fancied injuries. Convicts in the jail had in some manner been released. The pillage of shops and houses and the robbing of men in the streets began soon after the entrance of the army. The officers tried to preserve discipline. Colonel Stone ordered all the liquor to be destroyed, and furnished guards for the private property of citizens and for the public buildings; but the extent of the disorder and plundering during the day was probably not appreciated by Sherman and those high in command. Stone was hampered in his efforts to preserve order by the smallness of his force for patrol duty and by the drunkenness of his men. In fact, the condition of his men was such that at eight o'clock in the evening they were relieved from provost duty, and a brigade of the same division, who had been encamped outside of the city during the day, took their place. But the mob of convicts, escaped Union prisoners, stragglers and "bummers," drunken soldiers and negroes, Union soldiers who were eager to take vengeance on South Carolina, could not be controlled. The sack of the city went on, and when darkness came, the torch was applied to many houses; the high wind carried the flames from building to building, until the best part of Columbia--a city of eight thousand inhabitants--was destroyed. Colonel Stone wrote, two days afterwards: "About eight o'clock the city was fired in a number of places by some of our escaped prisoners and citizens." "I am satisfied," said General W. B. Woods, commander of the brigade that relieved Stone, in his report of March 26, "by statements made to me by respectable citizens of the town, that the fire was first set by the negro inhabitants." General C. R. Woods, commander of the first division, fifteenth corps, wrote, February 21: "The town was fired in several different places by the villains that had that day been improperly freed from their confinement in the town prison. The town itself was full of drunken negroes and the vilest vagabond soldiers, the veriest scum of the entire army being collected in the streets." The very night of the conflagration he spoke of the efforts "to arrest the countless villains of every command that were roaming over the streets."