A thoroughly researched account of a memorable Civil War battle Columbus, Georgia, 1865 is a comprehensive study of the Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865, conflict, which occurred in the dark of night and extended over a mile and half through a series of forts and earthworks and was finally decided in an encounter on a bridge a thousand feet in length. This volume offers the first complete account of this battle, examining and recounting in depth not only the composition and actions of the contending forces, which numbered some three thousand men on each side, but meticulously detailing the effect of the engagement on the city of Columbus and its environs. Misulia’s study fills in an omission in the grand account of our cataclysmic national struggle and adds a significant chapter to the history of an important regional city. In addition, Misulia takes on the long-vexing question of which encounter should be recognized as the last battle of the Civil War and argues persuasively that Columbus, Georgia, qualifies for this distinction on a number of counts.

The Battle of Columbus was one of the last events in the long and violent American Civil War. The Union Cavalry Corps commanded by Major General James H. Wilson attacked the composite remnants of both Alabama and Georgia troops commanded by Major General Howell Cobb. The industrial center of Columbus, Georgia was a target in a series of planned attacks in a campaign that had begun that spring. Sweeping eastward across Alabama and Georgia to eliminate Confederate resistance, destroy materiel and industrial facilities, "Wilson's Raid" was a brilliant Union success.On April 16, 1865 the Union cavalry forces attacked the western earthwork defenses that guarded the Confederate industrial center of Columbus, Georgia. While the war effectively ended with Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, Wilson was attacking a region with severed lines of communications and he was uncertain of this rumored circumstance until days after the battle of Columbus. Sweeping eastward Wilson's Union cavalry then shattered resistance in Selma, Alabama on April 2nd, and intimidated the old Confederate capital of Montgomery into surrendering without a fight on April 12th. As the demoralized Confederates fled into Georgia, hasty defenses were organized along the strategic bridges of the Chattahoochee River at Columbus, Georgia. The Confederate trenches that defended the key bridges along the Chattahoochee River were the final barrier the last bastion standing in the Confederacy. Fought on April 16-17, 1865, this bloody yet often overlooked battle served as the final struggle of significance in the Civil War.Columbus, Georgia was a valuable Confederate commodity as the town was a large industrial center. With the exception of the arsenal and manufacturing done at Richmond, Columbus was a Confederate lifeline providing pistols, swords, bayonets, shoes, uniforms, tents, buckets, and a multitude of accoutrements. It also served as a Naval port and shipbuilding facility. Furthermore, Columbus served as the regional hub for cotton warehousing and transshipment via the Chattahoochee River, which empties southward into the Gulf of Mexico.The Confederate defenders were determined to keep the Union raiders out of Georgia.

Yankee Blitzkrieg is the first comprehensive survey of Wilson's Raid, the largest independent mounted expedition of the Civil War. The Confederacy was reeling when Wilson's raiders left their camps along the Tennessee River in March 1865 and rode south. But there was talk of prolonged rebel resistance in the deep South using the agricultural and industrial facilties of a sweep of territory that ran from Macon to Meridian. That area had hardly been touched by the war, and in Columbus, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama, the South had two of its most productive industrial communities. Twenty-seven year-old General Wilson was certain his large, well-officered, well-trained, and well-armed cavalry corps could deny the Confederates a redoubt in the heart of Alabama and Georgia. Wilson, like many cavalry leaders, north and South, believed the mounted arm had been grievously misused through four years of war. But in March 1865, armed with support from Grant, Sherman, and Thomas, Wilson at last could test the theory that massed heavily armed cavalry could strike swiftly in great strenghth and press to quick victory.... Wilson's strategy was to get there "first with the most men," and it would be tested against the man who had invented the very phrase, Nathan Bedford Forrest. —from the book

Charles Reagan Wilson documents that for over half a century there existed not one, but two civil religions in the United States, the second not dedicated to honoring the American nation. Extensively researched in primary sources, Baptized in Blood is a significant and well-written study of the South’s civil religion, one of two public faiths in America. In his comparison, Wilson finds the Lost Cause offered defeated Southerners a sense of meaning and purpose and special identity as a precarious but distinct culture. Southerners may have abandoned their dream of a separate political nation after Appomattox, but they preserved their cultural identity by blending Christian rhetoric and symbols with the rhetoric and imagery of Confederate tradition. “Civil religion” has been defined as the religious dimension of a people that enables them to understand a historical experience in transcendent terms. In this light, Wilson explores the role of religion in postbellum southern culture and argues that the profound dislocations of Confederate defeat caused southerners to think in religious terms about the meaning of their unique and tragic experience. The defeat in a war deemed by some as religious in nature threw into question the South’s relationship to God; it was interpreted in part as a God-given trial, whereby suffering and pain would lead Southerners to greater virtue and strength and even prepare them for future crusades. From this reflection upon history emerged the civil religion of the Lost Cause. While recent work in southern religious history has focused on the Old South period, Wilson’s timely study adds to our developing understanding of the South after the Civil War. The Lost Cause movement was an organized effort to preserve the memory of the Confederacy. Historians have examined its political, literary, and social aspects, but Wilson uses the concepts of anthropology, sociology, and historiography to unveil the Lost Cause as an authentic expression of religion. The Lost Cause was celebrated and perpetuated with its own rituals, mythology, and theology; as key celebrants of the religion of the Lost Cause, Southern ministers forged it into a religious movement closely related to their own churches. In examining the role of civil religion in the cult of the military, in the New South ideology, and in the spirit of the Lost Cause colleges, as well as in other aspects, Wilson demonstrates effectively how the religion of the Lost Cause became the institutional embodiment of the South’s tragic experience.

Joseph E. Brown was governor of Georgia from 1861-1865.

By: John H. Martin, Pub. 1874, reprinted 2023, 487 pages, New Index, soft cover, ISBN #978-1-63914-141-8. This rare and valuable book on the early history of Columbus, Georgia (located in Muscogee County) was originally published in two volumes. The book has lasting value for both historian and genealogist because of the painstaking efforts of the author to present as detailed and accurate a history of the city as was possible from the various sources of information available. Information to be found within: minor local incidents, the Creek War and various Indian skirmishes along with lists of the dead and wounded, personal sketches of lives of deceased persons, marriages and death from newspapers prior to 1839, marriage from office of the Ordinary from 1839-1865, proceedings of the Council pertaining to local questions facing these residents, militia companies with membership rosters and muster rolls, business and professional men with some biographical sketches, Civil War companies with muster rolls along with various raids culminating with Wilson's Raid in 1865. This book contains the names of approximately 25,000 persons.

"A project of the New Georgia Encyclopedia"

"The Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl" is Eliza Frances Andrews' diary in which she describes in detail the situation in Georgia during the last year of the Civil War. Andrews wrote about the anger and despair of Confederate citizens, caused by the General Sherman's devastation.

Provides a brief history and "certain information such as organization, campaigns, losses, commanders, etc." for each unit listed in "Marcus J. Wright's List of Field Officers, Regiments, and Battalions in the Confederate States Army, 1861-1865."--Intro., p.xi.

“This is a powerful, vitally important story, and Lane brings it to life with not only vast amounts of research but with a remarkable gift for storytelling that makes the pages fly by.” —Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt and Hero of the Empire Freedom’s Detective reveals the untold story of the Reconstruction-era United States Secret Service and their battle against the Ku Klux Klan, through the career of its controversial chief, Hiram C. Whitley In the years following the Civil War, a new battle began. Newly freed African American men had gained their voting rights and would soon have a chance to transform Southern politics. Former Confederates and other white supremacists mobilized to stop them. Thus, the KKK was born. After the first political assassination carried out by the Klan, Washington power brokers looked for help in breaking the growing movement. They found it in Hiram C. Whitley. He became head of the Secret Service, which had previously focused on catching counterfeiters and was at the time the government’s only intelligence organization. Whitley and his agents led the covert war against the nascent KKK and were the first to use undercover work in mass crime—what we now call terrorism—investigations. Like many spymasters before and since, Whitley also had a dark side. His penchant for skulduggery and dirty tricks ultimately led to his involvement in a conspiracy that would bring an end to his career and transform the Secret Service. Populated by intriguing historical characters—from President Grant to brave Southerners, both black and white, who stood up to the Klan—and told in a brisk narrative style, Freedom’s Detective reveals the story of this complex hero and his central role in a long-lost chapter of American history.