Columbus was the great manufacturing center of the Confederacy, and this
destruction inflicted irreparable damage. While little was known at the
North of this sweep of Wilson's columns through the industrial centers and
military storehouses of the Confederacy, it is easy to understand that
these fatal blows at vital points of interior military supply added to the
demoralization and discouragement attending the evacuation of Richmond and
the gathering storm about the armies of Lee and Johnson.
The column moved swiftly for Macon, and about eighteen miles out from it
the officer in advance was met with a flag of truce carrying a note from
General Beauregard notifying the commander of the forces of General
Sherman's truce with General Johnston, stating that an agreement had been
entered upon that the contending forces were to occupy their present
positions till forty-eight hours' notice had been given of the resumption
of hostilities. As General Wilson was eight or ten miles in the rear with
his main command, the note was sent to him, and the officer in the advance
pushed to and into Macon, taking possession of the city. When General
Wilson arrived in the city he went at once to the city hall, where
Generals Howell Cobb, Gustavus W. Smith, and others had been confined.
General Cobb demanded that he and his command should be released, and that
General Wilson should retire to where the flag of truce had met his
advance. General Wilson declared that after receiving the note he had lost
no time in pushing on to the head of his column, and found it in full
possession of the city. He could not accept notification of a truce
through the Confederate authorities, as they were not his channel of
communication with General Sherman, and ended the conference by a positive
refusal to acknowledge the armistice, to retire from the town, or to
release his prisoners. When he announced this decision he said to General
Cobb that he could conceive of but one adequate reason for the truce, and
that was that Lee's army had surrendered. Cobb, however, declined to give
any information, but General Smith, to whom Wilson addressed the same
remark, answered that Lee had surrendered, and that peace would soon
follow. Thereupon General Wilson announced his decision to remain at Macon
and conduct his future operations upon the principle that every man killed
thereafter was a man murdered.
This interview was held on the 20th of April just before midnight, and was
the first definite knowledge which Wilson's column had obtained of the
events which had occurred in Virginia.
The surrender at Macon included a large number of small guns and a great
quantity of military stores and supplies. The next day the Confederate
authorities opened communication over their own telegraph lines between
Wilson and Sherman, and the former received orders from the latter to
desist from hostilities pending an armistice. Soon after he received
orders from the Secretary of War, through Thomas, to disregard this
armistice and resume operations, but before this order reached him he
learned that Johnston had surrendered all the Confederate forces east of
the Mississippi, and that peace was assured.
The closing act of General Wilson's campaign was the capture of Jefferson
Davis by regiments from his command. Thus ended the most noted cavalry
movement of the war.
The above is of necessity a very concise presentation of the salient
points of General Wilson's remarkable campaign, conducted alone by mounted
troops. It is not claimed that the account is new. I have published it
heretofore in extended form, though not in the press. This briefer story
cannot but be a repetition of the facts and a synopsis of the fuller
statement of them. It is a chapter in our war history than which no other
is more replete with thrilling and brilliant incident, with skillful
planning, and bold and successful execution. No purely cavalry campaign
in our war approached it in these features. It is doubtful whether its
parallel can be found in the cavalry annals of any modern nation. And to
this general statement should be added that the officer who commanded it,
who was its organizer and its controlling spirit, the one upon whom
General George H. Thomas leaned as one of his most trusted lieutenants and
advisers, was only twenty-seven years old.
It is not strange that Lee's and Johnston's surrender fixed the attention
of the country and turned it away from General Wilson's campaign. Had
these two events been delayed a month the land would have rung with
Wilson's praises and with new honors for General Thomas. Indeed, had the
withdrawal from Richmond and the events which so quickly followed it been
only delayed in their beginning by a few days necessary to have informed
the country of Wilson's marvelous successes, it is certain that his
breaking up of these interior storehouses of military material, and the
destruction of these many plants for producing more, would have
inseparably and largely connected themselves in the minds of the people
with the eastern surrender as cause and effect.
It was a campaign whose success would have been the same had Lee been able
to hold on to Richmond, and had Johnston so eluded Sherman as to prolong
the contest in Virginia and North Carolina.