April 16, 1865: The Last Battle

Easter Sunday, eighteen sixty-five. Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse exactly one week earlier, on April ninth. The news, traveling by telegraph and then by courier and then by word of mouth across a shattered communications network, had not yet reached everyone in the Deep South. Some commanders had received it. Others were still fighting.

In Columbus, Confederate Major General Howell Cobb had assembled approximately thirty-five hundred defenders, mostly Georgia and Alabama home guard units, civilian volunteers, and old men and boys whose regular regiments were long since gone. He knew what was coming. Major General James Wilson's Union cavalry, about nine thousand strong and fresh from a devastating sweep through Alabama, was approaching from the west. The Confederate garrison had constructed earthworks and barricaded the bridges over the Chattahoochee. They held one end. Phenix City, then called Girard, was on the Alabama side.

The attack began between one-thirty and two in the afternoon of April sixteenth. Advance elements of Wilson's force under Major General Emory Upton struck the lower bridge. The Confederates had removed the planking on the eastern approach, a trap meant to funnel Union cavalry onto a burning span. There was fighting in the dark, close and confused, at the upper bridge, where troops from both sides crowded onto the same structure. The Confederates held their artillery fire in the confusion, and Wilson's men crossed.

By morning, Columbus had fallen. Confederate casualties numbered approximately one hundred and fifty killed and wounded, with sixteen hundred more taken prisoner. Ten Union soldiers were killed in the battle; eight others died later of wounds.

The following day, Wilson ordered the destruction of Columbus's Confederate industry: the ironworks, the textile mills, the naval yard, the warehouses of military stores. The fires burned for days.

Emory Upton later reported to the War Department that Columbus represented the closing conflict of the war. Historians debate that designation, a skirmish at Palmito Ranch in Texas came later, technically. But Upton's assessment has weight. What burned in Columbus on April seventeenth was the last serious Confederate industrial capacity east of the Mississippi. The war in the East was, by any measure, over.