CIVIL WAR
Georgia was especially hard-hit by the Civil War. It provided the second-highest per capita number of soldiers—112,000—from the Confederacy’s most able officers to farm boys. Columbus is the site of the last Civil War land battle east of the Mississippi River. On April 16, 1865 (a week after the Surrender at Appomattox), Wilson's Federal Raiders overran a Confederate entrenchment over a mile long in Alabama, crossed the Chattahoochee River and captured Columbus.

RECONSTRUCTION
One of the most tumultuous events linked to the Chattahoochee Valley during the Reconstruction period was the Ashburn Murder Trial. In 1868, a party of masked men assassinated George W. Ashburn, a radical Constitutional delegate from Georgia who shared a rooming house with African Americans on 13th Street in Columbus. The murder and subsequent trial attracted much controversy and debate throughout the state.

This is the single-breasted dress uniform red tailcoat that Watkins Banks wore while he served in the Columbus Guards.

At midnight on March 30, 1868, a party of men wearing hoods and masks assassinated George W. Ashburn, a state Constitutional delegate. A white Radical, Ashburn shared a rooming house with African Americans at the northwest corner of 13th Street in Columbus. The murder created much excitement throughout the state, and the military made several rounds of arrests.

A military court was finally organized to try the prisoners in Atlanta on June 29, 1868. Hon. James B. Beck, who had served in the US Congress and was known as the “Savior of the South,” presided. The prisoners were released on bond and returned to Columbus. In appreciation for their release, the Columbus Prisoners presented Beck with an inscribed gold-hilted ebony cane.

In 1868, Clifford Bowdre Grimes was arrested in connection with the Ashburn murder case and was briefly imprisoned at Fort McPherson but was not indicted. The obverse of this carte d’visite reads: “Taken soon after being released from prison, July 1868.”