The Battle of Congaree Creek (also known as the Skirmish at Congaree Creek) was a four-hour action that took place in the waning days of the American Civil War, fought in Lexington County, South Carolina, on February 15, 1865, just south of Columbia on the site of the former town of Granby.
The battle featured the Union's Army of the Tennessee against the Confederacy's Army of Tennessee meeting at a half-mile-long earthwork erected by Southern forces near the Old State Road Bridge over Congaree Creek. Confederate General George Dibrell's dismounted cavalry brigade, supported by infantry and artillery, manned the earthworks, but General Charles Woods' 1st Division of General John A. Logan's XV Corps pushed skirmishers ahead while one of Woods' brigades crossed upstream and turned the Southerners' right flank. Dibrell's force withdrew from Congaree Creek and then from its earthworks, retreating to Columbia. Though the Confederates set fire to the bridge, the Federals saved it and made their camp nearby that night, according to a historical marker erected at the site by the 15th Regiment S.C. Volunteer Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Two days later, Union General William T. Sherman's army advanced to Columbia.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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