South Carolina founded Columbia in 1786 as a compromise capital, planted at the geographic center of the state to settle a long argument between the Lowcountry rice planters around Charleston and the upcountry yeoman farmers around the Saluda. A grid was laid out at the Fall Line, where the Broad and Saluda Rivers meet to form the Congaree and where the coastal plain ends. The University of South Carolina followed in 1801 as South Carolina College, then a finishing school for sons of the planter class - a class whose wealth was, in 1801 as in 1860, almost entirely built on enslaved Black labor. The state government, the college, and the city itself were funded by that labor, taught its principles to the next generation of slaveholders, and went to war in 1860 to preserve the system. South Carolina was the first state to secede. Columbia was the capital from which that decision was issued.

When General William Tecumseh Sherman's army arrived at the Congaree in February 1865 after burning a path through Georgia, the surrender of Columbia was negotiated by the mayor, Confederate troops withdrew to the north, and Union soldiers entered the city. By that night the downtown was burning. Roughly a third of the city was destroyed - houses, churches, the original State House under construction, the offices of the South Carolina state government, much of Main Street. Some Columbians lost everything they owned. The fire and its causes filled court testimony, memoirs, and political arguments for the next eighty years. What got less attention in those accounts was the parallel event: in the days surrounding the burning, thousands of enslaved people from plantations across the Midlands left those plantations, by foot, on their own decision, and entered Columbia. They were not waiting for a federal proclamation to take effect on paper. They walked into the city the day the slaveholders' army left, and many of them did not stop walking until they had reached families separated by sale, found work that paid them, or claimed land of their own.

Reconstruction gave Columbia, briefly, an interracial state government - the first in South Carolina's history, with Black legislators outnumbering white ones in the lower house. That government founded schools, including ones that would educate Black children for the first time at state expense. It did not last. When Reconstruction was crushed in 1877, the city's Black institutions had to sustain themselves without state support. They did. Allen University, founded by the AME Church in 1870, moved into Columbia in 1880; Benedict College, founded the same year, settled a few blocks away. Both still teach. Trinity Episcopal Cathedral rebuilt across from the State House. St. Peter's Catholic parish - whose Irish canal-digger members had built the city's first canal in the 1820s - eventually became the basilica that is now the only one in South Carolina. The State House itself, begun before the war and incomplete when it burned, was finally completed in 1907. The bronze stars on its western wall mark where Sherman's cannonballs struck.

Modern Columbia calls itself Soda City after the old soda-fountain abbreviation Cola, and it is a city of around 144,000 with roughly 750,000 more in the surrounding metropolitan area. Fort Jackson, just east of town, is the US Army's largest initial entry training installation - tens of thousands of soldiers begin their service careers here every year. Prisma Health and Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina anchor the private economy alongside the state government and the university. The Congaree Vista along the river, where freight warehouses once stored Civil War supplies for the Confederacy, now holds art galleries, restaurants, and the South Carolina State Museum in the old Columbia Mill. Riverbanks Zoo draws a million visitors a year. Segra Park hosts the Columbia Fireflies of the Carolina League. The Soda City Market closes Main Street to vehicles every Saturday morning. The Columbia Museum of Art's Botticelli hangs three blocks from the State House. And on Harden Street, Chappelle Auditorium still echoes with the speeches of Mary McLeod Bethune and Martin Luther King Jr., in a building paid for by people the state once forbade to read.