THE BATTLE OF GRISWOLDVILLE
One Last Valiant Stand

The last days of the Confederacy were coming to an end.  General Sherman's army was poised in Atlanta ready to march east to Savannah to split the Confederacy in half.  General Grant's army was still laying siege against General Lee's army in Richmond and Petersburg.  Many men in the Southern army were coming home on winter furlough with plans not to return.  One hundred and fifty years ago on November 22, 1864 the largest battle of the Civil War in Middle Georgia took place along the Twiggs - Jones County border east of Macon near the industrial hamlet of Griswoldville.




On October 12th, when it became apparent to Confederate leaders that Sherman's army would march along the Central of Georgia Railroad bound for Savannah, Maj. Gen. Gustavas A. Smith recalled as many men as he could gather.  These men had been sent home on a harvest furlough following the loss of Jonesboro.  The men, mostly young boys, old men, and disabled soldiers, rendezvoused at Camp Lovejoy. Among those men was Sgt. Blanton Nance, Co. E, 7th Ga. Militia, who later lived in Dublin; Laurens County residents J.H. Barbour, A.M. Jessup, and Henry E. Moorman of the 5th Georgia Reserves; along with many other old men and boys from Wilkinson, Jones, and Twiggs Counties.  John A. Braswell,  who lost his father early in the war, left his home near Irwin's Cross Roads in Washington County to join the 5th Georgia Reserves just days after his 18th birthday.  Capt. John McArthur brought his company up from Montgomery County to help hold off the Union army. Companies D and H of the 2nd Regiment were brought up from Wilkinson County.

Following his defeat in Atlanta, Gen. John B. Hood took his Army of the Tennessee to Alabama, along with the cavalry of Gen. Joseph Wheeler.  More than sixty thousand Yankees were moving out of Atlanta toward Lovejoy.  A delaying skirmish was fought on the 16th of November.  Georgia governor Joe Brown sent out a call for all able-bodied men to come to the defense of the state.  The Confederates were forced to retreat to Hampton.   Nance and his men began erecting a barricade across the road leading from Atlanta.   At Hampton, Griffin, and Forsyth, the Confederates were pushed back by the vastly superior Union Army.

By the 20th of November, Sherman's right wing was bearing down on Macon.  The Central Georgia city had been the object of an failed attack in the summer past.  Macon was a key railroad and manufacturing center, but it was well defended.  Sherman wanted the city to allow his forces to liberate his fellow soldiers imprisoned in Andersonville.  He did not, however, want to commit a large portion of his forces to capture the city.    By the time the Union Army reached Macon, the Confederate Force amounted to thirty seven hundred men, with another thirty seven hundred or so cavalrymen.  The Union Army launched an attack beginning at Cross Keys in East Macon with the objective of taking the heights east of the city, which are now the site of the Ocmulgee National Monument and old Fort Hawkins.  Sherman's forces were able to get a foothold on the Dunlap Farm, which allowed them to shell parts of the city.  The resulting artillery fire led to the naming of the Macon landmark, "The Cannonball House."  The small band of Confederates was able to hold off the Federals, who retreated to the east, tearing up railroad tracks, destroying Eleazar McCall's old mill, and pillaging the countryside for anything of monetary or military value .

Just east of Macon on the Central Railroad was the hamlet of Griswoldville.  The community of five hundred citizens and one hundred slaves was located at the southern tip of Jones County.  Its founder was Samuel Griswold, a native of Connecticut who accumulated five thousand acres of land on which he erected a cotton gin, a candle factory, a soap factory, and a saw mill.  The most important industry was the pistol factory that manufactured the famed Griswold revolver.  The Confederate Army leased the gin building to manufacture pistols, which were turned out at the rate of one hundred per month.  The Griswoldville factory turned out more pistols than all other factories combined. On the morning of the 21st,  the Union Army moved into Griswoldville.  They destroyed over thirty five hundred weapons, burned anything they couldn't carry, and continued their destruction of the railroad.  That night the clouds dumped a torrential rain in advance of a cold front.  The temperature dropped over twenty four degrees in twenty four hours.


Wheeler's Cavalry moved out early on the morning of the 22nd.   The Union Army had already vacated the smoldering town and were bound for Gordon, McIntyre, and Irwinton.  The infantry followed and arrived in Griswoldville about noon.  The temperatures was 12 degrees.  It was snowing.  The rain-soaked ground was frozen. Gen. Samuel Ferguson's Mississippi Cavalry with 4000 men ran head long into the rear of the Union column just east of Griswoldville .

Gen. Oliver Wolcott's Union forces were about two miles southeast of Griswoldville on the Duncan farm, which was situated on the Jones-Twiggs County line.  Skirmishers came in contact with the Union forces,  who stopped their advance and dug in on the high ground.  Upon the report of the fire from the Duncan farm, more cavalrymen and the infantrymen who had just entered the town were drawn toward the direction of the fire.

The Confederate forces were placed  in a precarious position.  A large open field was  between them and the Union army.  The Union forces were surrounded on three sides by Big Sandy Creek which was a natural barrier to an attack on the Federal left, front, and rear.  The Confederates began an ineffective artillery fire on the hill.  The Union artillery was also similarly ineffective.  The Confederates crossed the creek and advanced to within two hundred fifty yards of the Union lines.  The first ranks were decimated by rifle fire. There were seven thousand men firing at each other within the bounds of the 190 acre field.  The Confederates kept advancing, filling in the gaps in the lines with reserves.

By 4:30 p.m. the battle was all but over.  Near the end of the fighting, Sgt. Blanton Nance, part of Anderson's force which attacked from the railroad at the north end of the battlefield, was shot in the shoulder and the neck.  He fell to the ground.  Nance was lucky.  He was picked up by Union soldiers and taken back to a field hospital for treatment.  Many other wounded men froze to death that night.  Nance, a forty-six year old veteran of the Mexican War, survived and lived in Dublin until 1910, when he died at the age of ninety two.  The Confederates retreated to Griswoldville, returned to Macon the next day,  and  never mounted another threat to Sherman and his men.  Gen. Smith was furious that the militia engaged the Union army contrary to his instructions.

Most of the Montgomery County men survived. Addison McArthur and Groves Conner were killed, and John McArthur and Thomas Adams were wounded.  Southern casualties totaled  six hundred killed and wounded, which was about ten percent of their force.  Northern casualties were fourteen killed, seventy nine wounded and two missing in action.  The town of Griswoldville was never rebuilt.  Today several organizations are seeking to preserve a portion of the battlefield for posterity.

WILLIAM JOSHUA BUSH

The End of the Long Gray Line

William Joshua Bush was the last of his kind, or perhaps one of the last of his kind.  As a teenager, he fought for his country, the Confederate States of America.  As a centenarian, Bush was celebrated as one of the last Confederate veterans of the Civil War, or the War Between the States, which ended in 1865.  When he died, Bush was the last Georgian to have worn the gray, or butternut, uniform of the Confederacy.  

William Joshua Bush was born in Wilkinson County, Georgia on July 10, 1845 or by some accounts in1846.   That is his recorded date of birth, but the 1850 Census indicated that he was one year old and therefore was born in 1848 and not in 1845.  His father Francis Marion Bush and his mother Elizabeth Pattisaul Bush lived in the western regions of the county, possibly near Gordon.   

In July of 1861, just before the war began in reality, William enlisted in the Ramah Guards, designated as Company B of the 14th Georgia infantry.  He lied about his age. He wasn't about to turn sixteen the next day.  He was about to celebrate his first full day in the Confederate Army as a thirteen-year-old.  The 14th Georgia saw action that month in the Battle of First Manassas, or Bull Run.  When the fighting ceased for the fall and winter months, William was discharged and sent home to Wilkinson County.   

A few months after his real 16th birthday, William enlisted in the Georgia Militia in October  1864.  Only a few enrolling officers asked questions about age in those days.  The Confederacy, and Georgia in particular, needed bodies who could fire a gun.  General Sherman was in Atlanta, ready and poised to begin his climatic "March to the Sea." 

Right in the line of his march was Wilkinson County.  William's company first saw action in the area of East Macon near Cross Key's.    He may have participated in the attack on the rear of  the Union line near Griswoldville, Georgia, an attack which resulted in a devastating defeat for the militia, composed primarily of older men, wounded regulars and boys.  According to Bush, he fought in the Battle of Atlanta.  After viewing Gone With The Wind, he pronounced the depiction of Atlanta to be accurate.  When he visited the Cyclorama in Atlanta, the circular painting brought back old memories of the climactic battle.  It is said that he even pointed out the tree he hid behind, though  the painting is merely an artist's conception.   There is even a story that when he saw Union General William T. Sherman depicted on horseback, Bush, vowing "let me at him,"  had to be restrained by his wife.

         Bush remained with his company until it surrendered at Stephen's Station on the Central of Georgia Railroad in 1865.    Like many veterans, Bush loved to tell stories about his experiences in the war.  He related the often told tale about the ransacking of the family home and how it was stopped when a Union officer discovered that the owner was a Mason.  Masons, their homes and personal possessions, were considered off limits to looters and souvenir hunters.  He told one interviewer, "when I got into the war we wore overalls, and when we surrendered in 1865, I didn't even have a pair of shoes."

  After the war, Joshua, as he was most well known, married Mary Adeline Steeley.  They had six children and were married until her death in 1915.  In 1922, at the age of 54 or so, Bush married Effie T. Sharpe, a widowed mother of two small children.  

For seventy-five years, Bush lived the normal life of an aging Confederate veteran.  Bush ran a store on the Levi Harrell place and moved from Rhine in Dodge County to Fitzgerald the early 1870s.  He received a pension check to help pay his bills.  He was a regular church goer, serving as a senior deacon in the Baptist Church.  He followed in his father's footsteps and became a member of a Masonic Lodge.   He worked as long he could, taking jobs with the railroad, turpentine companies and even a short stint as a butcher in a grocery store.  

It was in 1938 when Bush and the few surviving veterans of the war began to acquire celebrity status.  That year marked the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.  Those veterans who could, gathered in the Pennsylvania town for one final reunion to commemorate the "High Water Mark of the Confederacy."  As a souvenir of the event, Bush brought home a large rebel flag.

Joshua Bush spent his last years in Fitzgerald, which had been founded as a colony by former Union soldiers.  For many years, Bush and Henry Brunner, the last surviving Union veteran in town, would meet at the city cemetery and place flowers on the graves of their deceased comrades. When Brunner died, Bush sent a flower from "the last of the gray to the last of the blue."  As his status grew, the Judge of the Ordinary Court would personally deliver his pension check and bring the requisite amount of cash to cash the check and eliminate the need for Bush to go to the bank.    He was often given an escort home by police officers when he stayed out late.  He liked to stay out late.

Bush became somewhat of a celebrity.  Admirers addressed the one-blue eyed centenarian  (he lost an eye in a sawmill accident) as "General Bush."  The owners of 20th Century Fox presented the general with a new uniform befitting his newfound stature.  The aged rebel commented, "when I got into it we were in overalls.  In 1865, when the army surrendered, I didn't even have a pair of shoes."  In gratitude  Bush vowed to be buried in the only uniform he ever owned.    The uniform was donated to the Cyclorama Museum in Atlanta and later transferred to the Atlanta Historical Society.  The producers of I'll Climb the Highest Mountain invited him to attend the movie's premiere in Atlanta.  

As the decade of the 1950s came, the number of living veterans of the war began to dwindle rapidly.    For the first time in his life, Joshua Bush boarded an airplane for Norfolk, Virginia.   Bush joined John Sailing of Virginia and William Townsend of Louisiana for the 1951 Confederate Veteran's Reunion. (See below)   It would turn out to be the last reunion of the Long Gray Line.  By the spring of 1952,   the remaining Confederate veterans outnumbered their Union counterparts - a stark contrast to the superior Northern armies during the war. In 1952, the Sons of the Confederate Veterans held their annual meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, with only Joshua Bush and William Townsend of Louisiana in attendance.  The delegates sadly voted to end the reunions. 

On November 11, 1952, Joshua Bush, Georgia's last Confederate veteran died. His body was laid to rest in Evergreen Cemetery in Fitzgerald with Masonic and military honors.  For the last time in history, Confederate flags were flown all over the state at half mast in his honor.  It was a time that brought a great sorrow to those who still remembered the tales of their fathers and grandfathers of days of long ago.