The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the gray head.
Proverbs 20:29
Based on Confederate Army records, we know that John was present for duty at Columbus through the end of February 1865. Since the depot continued to function until the end of the war in April 1865, it is likely that he did not return to Blun until at least late April of 1865. In fact, the depot was involved in the last major land battles in the east as the Union soldiers attacked Columbus in late April of 1865.
On Easter Sunday, April 16, 1865, a Union force of three divisions under the command of Major General James Harrison Wilson attacked the Confederates defending Columbus. The Confederate forces, commanded by Major General Howell Cobb, totaled about 3,000 soldiers including many pulled from the depot. After initially being repulsed by the Confederates, the Union troops mounted a highly unusual night attack across the 14th Street Bridge. This attack was successful and Columbus fell ending the last major land battle of the Civil War.[i] There is a strong possibility that John Wiggins would have been among the defenders that day.
John M. Wiggins enlisted in the Confederate Army as a private with Company A of the 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry (Burke Guards) on October 10, 1862. The 3rd Georgia was organized in April of 1861 and in the spring of 1862 was assigned to the Army of Northern Virginia where it played a key role in numerous battles including Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor and the surrender at Appomattox Court House in April 1865.
Whether John Wiggins’ enlistment was a result of Southern patriotic fervor or purely financial considerations is not known. However, at his advanced age of 51, he was certainly under no obligation to serve. He enlisted as a substitute for Jonathan Lewis, a member of one of BurkeCounty’s influential families.
Not only was John Wiggins under no legal obligation to serve in the Confederate army, he was also not in the best physical condition to live the life of an infantry soldier. According to his service records, John was detailed to the Confederate Quartermaster Department with duty at Columbus in early December of 1862 due to a disability associated with his age. His duty at the Columbus Depot was listed as making shoes. Since John Wiggins listed his profession as blacksmith in the 1850 and 1860 censuses, our family had always assumed that he would have been employed at the depot using his skills. However, it appears that he was actually making shoes for soldiers, not horses, as listed in his official records from the Confederate Army. The Depot in Columbus functioned as a manufacturer of uniforms and associated items such as shoes for the Confederate army. The Savannah Republican newspaper reported on the total contributions of this depot to the Confederate war effort for the period October 1861 through May 1864:
Work Done in Columbus.—The Columbus Sun states that in the quartermaster’s department in that city, under the control of Major F. W. Dillard, the following amount of work has been done since October, 1861: Shoes, 305,065; jackets, 263,922; pants, 290,092; shirts, 116,146; drawers, 82,948; caps, 122,441, also amount of leather received and disbursed, 682,577 lbs.[iv]
The rolls for various times throughout the next two years confirm Private Wiggins as being present for his detail duty at Columbus. One can only imagine that John Wiggins may have been given a supervisory role at the depot because of his age, experience, and physical condition. The roll of the 3rd GVI for February 28, 1865, the last on file, shows him on detail duty in Quartermaster Department in Columbus, Georgia.
How did John Wiggins manage to join the Confederate Army as such an advanced age? It would seem that John could have avoided service due to his age. As mentioned earlier, he was under no obligation to join and fight for the Confederacy. Recruiting and processing soldier candidates for service in the armies of the Confederacy was an inexact science at best. Many of the surgeons assigned to screen new recruits for service were not trained or prepared to weed out those who should have been disqualified for medical reasons. Factors such as advanced age could be overlooked if the recruit was otherwise in good health.
Based on the available evidence, my best theory is that John Wiggins used his pre-war business association with the original commander of the 3rd GVI, Colonel Ambrose Ransom Wright, to influence his enlistment. The fact of their prior business relationship is attested to by several legal documents from both Burke and Emanuel counties involving the buying and selling of land. It is likely that he was able to obtain the arrangement for joining the 3rd GVI through his prewar connections with the Colonel (later General) Wright.
Wright was definitely a man of considerable influence and it is likely that he would have had no trouble in overcoming the bureaucratic obstacles to enlistment that John Wiggins might have faced. He was born in Louisville, Georgia on April 26, 1826. Wright was a lawyer who was heavily involved in Georgia politics and his brother-in-law was governor of Georgia. During the run-up to the war, he served as a member of the Confederate delegation that attempted unsuccessfully to convince Maryland to secede from the Union. He also served as a delegate from Georgia to the Confederate Provisional Congress. After initially serving as the commander of the 3rd Georgia, Wright was promoted to brigadier general commanding a brigade and leading troops in the numerous battles of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He was wounded at during the battle of Antietam in Sharpsburg, Maryland. It was only a few weeks after this battle that John Wiggins joined the 3rd Georgia. During the battle of Gettysburg, General Wright lead his brigade to what many believe to have been the “high watermark” of the Confederacy during the second day of fighting. Wright was later promoted to major general and assigned to Georgia to command units there until the end of the war. When the Civil War ended, he returned to his legal practice and expanded his business interests into newspapers by obtaining the Augusta “Chronicle and Sentinel.” After losing the 1871 election to the U.S. Senate, Wright finally obtained success in political life on the national level by being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1872. However, he died in Augusta, Georgia on December 21, 1872 before he could take his seat in the House.[v]
[i]“The Last Battle of the Civil War,” A paper read by Charles Jewett Swift at the organizing or first meeting of the Columbus Historical Society, Wednesday night, February 10th 1915. Accessed from http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~bellware/paper.html.
[ii] From the website, Last Battle of the Civil War, accessed from http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~bellware/.
[iii] From the website: The History of the 3rd Georgia Volunteer Infantry, http://www.3gvi.org/ga3history.html
[iv] Savannah Republican, May 24, 1864, access from http://www.uttyler.edu/vbetts/savannah_republican_1864.htm
[v] Adapted from the Biography of Ambrose Ransom Wright, available at http://www.historycentral.com/bio/CWcGENS/CSAWright.html
