In large part because the major Civil War campaigns occurring within Alabama’s borders took place near the end of the war, there has long been a tendency to overlook them by historians. We have remained ignorant of some of the most compelling actions of the war as a result. Had the largest cavalry force mounted during the war swept through one of the Confederacy’s most important industrial states and wreaked a swath of havoc and destruction for some 200 miles in 1862, for example, I would think we might remember as something more than a footnote in the story of the conflict. Yet that is exactly what happened in the spring of 1865 in Alabama in the form of a devastating raid by Gen. James H. Wilson, and that is exactly how we have unfortunately often remembered the affair.
Wilson’s Raid deserves better, for it involves an incredible story and rendered a final, crippling blow to the Confederacy’s ability to make war with unprecedented speed and precision. In the course of just over two weeks, Wilson cut through the heart of northern and central Alabama, beginning at the banks of the Tennessee River and exiting the state at the Chattahoochee at the border city of Columbus, Georgia. Along the way he and his men defeated two armies, rendered useless numerous iron-making facilities (and burned no few private homes in the process), captured and destroyed two of the South’s largest military-industrial complexes, secured the surrender of the first capital of the Confederacy, dismantled a state university, and handed Nathan Bedford Forrest one of his very few whippings. In the days after the fighting concluded, Wilson’s men would go on to become involved in the capture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. To say the raid was eventful and is worthy of remembrance is an understatement.
There have been attempts to chronicle the raid, most of them a chapter or two in length and presented as part of a series of studies of several end-of-war campaigns, such as Noah Trudeau’s Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June, 1865. The most notable study of the raid in its own right is James Pickett Jones’ Yankee Blitzkrieg: Wilson’s Raid Through Alabama and Georgia, a book that by its very title communicates the fact that Wilson’s tactics presaged the advent of what we recognize as modern mechanized cavalry tactics but appeared many years ago. Here now, is retired businessman Russell Blount’s effort at tracing Wilson’s footprints, in the form of Wilson’s Raid: Final Blow to the Confederacy. As we have detailed previously in this blog, Blount is already an accomplished author (Besieged: Mobile 1865) and has a demonstrated interest in the often-overlooked last days of the war.
Blount tells a rollicking tale in the fast-moving book, providing an overview of military operations but at the same time allowing space to incorporate civilian perspectives in what promises to be an essential introduction to the topic for the next generation. He follows Wilson’s path and lays out his strategy, providing us with some of the best summaries of the fighting that occurred at places such as Selma and Columbus that one is likely to read and bringing the communities touched by the campaign to life. These accounts along with his use of accounts of the raid from a variety of civilians shows a command of the available resources on the topic. His prose is smooth, his pace just right, and the key players in the story he tells emerge as real people. Wilson’s Raid is a quick read but one that thoroughly treats it subject. If you have an interest in Alabama or Civil War history, this book is definitely worth your time.
Leave a Reply