How a Meaningless Post-Civil War Skirmish Gave Us Coca-Cola
It was called the Battle of Columbus, and it was fought over the course of around 24 hours from April 16, 1865, to April 17, 1865 - a full week after Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to General Grant and his Army of the Potomac at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia.
It was culmination of what’s since been dubbed Wilson’s Raid, so-named for Union General James H. Wilson, who led the month-long scorched earth campaign. Its primary purpose was to destroy two of the Confederacy’s largest remaining supply depots - one in Selma, Alabama, the other in nearby Columbus, Georgia. His 13,000-man invasion force got moving on March 22, and just 10 days and five bloody skirmishes later, took Selma and its arsenal after overwhelming the 2,500 defenders under the command of future Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. From there, Wilson’s army headed east to the Confederacy’s last major stronghold in the state, Montgomery, which ultimately fell on the 12th, and then on to Columbus, just across the state’s border with Georgia.
3,500 Confederate defenders led by Major General Howell Cobb were waiting for them when Wilson’s raiders arrived in the early afternoon of April 16 - that year’s Easter Sunday. They’d spent the previous few days digging themselves in on and around two parallel bridges spanning the Chattahoochee River, which connected the small inconsequential Alabama border town of Girard with Columbus.
The bridges were originally designed by the remarkable architect Horace King, who though born into slavery in Birmingham in 1807, eventually rose to become one of the Deep South’s most esteemed bridge architects. He designed dozens of bridges in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia from the start of his career in the 1820s, to his retirement in the 1870s. By 1846, he’d earned enough money to buy his freedom, and after the war, briefly served as the Alabama state representative for Russell County.
The raiders broke through Cobb’s first line of defense at around 10 PM that night, and by morning, all of the 3,500 defenders were either dead, captured, or, in the case of 34-year-old future Coca-Cola inventor Lieutenant Colonel John Pemberton of the Third Georgia Cavalry Battalion, very badly wounded. He’d been both shot and slashed across the stomach by a Union sabre at some point during the defense of the southern bridge, on the Girard side, and so managed to avoid capture when the city fell the following day. He took no further part in the futile Confederate war effort, which limped on for another 10 or so days before the last clash between the two sides wrapped up after a few mostly bloodless hours at Bennett Place in North Carolina.
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