The Confederate Arsenal and Wilson's Raid
Near Macon, Georgia
During the Civil War, Macon occupied a position that made it too valuable to abandon and too central to ignore. The city served as the official Confederate arsenal for the state of Georgia, manufacturing percussion caps and bullets for the Southern war effort. Camp Oglethorpe, on the edge of the city, held as many as twenty-three hundred Union officers as prisoners of war. The city also served as a Confederate hospital center and laboratory, processing the wounded from battles across the region.
General William Tecumseh Sherman, whose march to the sea in late eighteen sixty-four destroyed much of Georgia, made a deliberate choice to bypass Macon. His route cut through Milledgeville, the state capital, and pushed to Savannah, leaving Macon untouched. The reasons for this decision remain somewhat contested by historians, but the practical result was that Macon's buildings, including the Hay House and much of its antebellum architecture, survived the war intact.
The end came quietly. On April twentieth, eighteen sixty-five, eleven days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Union cavalry under Brigadier General James H. Wilson rode into Macon without resistance. The city's surrender was negotiated and the occupation proceeded without the kind of destruction that had visited other Georgia cities. The war was, effectively, over. Macon had come through it with its bricks standing, which meant that what came next had something to build on, and something to live with.
