Wilson's Raid was a cavalry operation through Alabama and Georgia in March–April 1865, late in the American Civil War. U.S. Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson led his U.S. Cavalry Corps to destroy Confederate manufacturing facilities and was opposed unsuccessfully by a much smaller force under Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest.
After his victory at the Battle of Nashville, U.S. Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas and his Army of the Cumberland found themselves with virtually no organized military opposition in the heart of the Confederacy. Thomas ordered Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson (who commanded the Cavalry Corps of the Military Division of the Mississippi, but was attached to Thomas's army) to lead a raid to destroy the arsenal at Selma, Alabama, in conjunction with Maj. Gen. Edward Canby's operations against Mobile. Selma was strategically important as one of the few Confederate military bases remaining in Southern hands. The town contained an arsenal, a naval foundry, gun factories, a powder mill, military warehouses, and railroad repair shops.
Wilson led approximately 13,500 men in three divisions, commanded by Brig. Gens. Edward M. McCook, Eli Long, and Emory Upton. Each cavalryman was armed with the formidable 7-shot Spencer repeating rifle. His principal opponent was Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose Cavalry Corps of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana consisted of about 2,500 troopers organized into two small divisions, led by Brig. Gens. James R. Chalmers and William H. Jackson, two partial brigades under Brig. Gen. Philip D. Roddey and Colonel Edward Crossland, and a few local militia.
Wilson was delayed in crossing the rain-swollen Tennessee River, but he got underway on March 22, 1865, departing from Gravelly Springs in Lauderdale County, Alabama. He sent his forces in three separate columns to mask his intentions and confuse the enemy; Forrest learned very late in the raid that Selma was the primary target. Minor skirmishes occurred at Houston (March 25) and Black Warrior River (March 26), and Wilson's columns rejoined at Jasper on March 27.
On March 28, at Elyton, in present-day Birmingham, another skirmish occurred, and the U.S. Army soldiers destroyed the Oxmoor and Irondale iron furnaces. A detachment of General Emory Upton's division destroyed the C.B. Churchill and Company foundry in Columbiana and the Shelby Iron Works in Shelby on March 31, 1865.
Wilson also detached a 1,500-man brigade under Brig. Gen. John T. Croxton and sent them south and west to burn the Roupes Valley Ironworks at Tannehill and Bibb Naval Furnace at Brierfield on March 31. They then burned the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, which was a prominent military school, on April 4. This movement diverted Chalmer's division away from Forrest's main force. Croxton continued his raid across Alabama, destroying several iron works and fighting Confederate General Benjamin J. Hill's brigade at Munford. He finally rejoined Wilson at Macon, Ga., on May 1, 1865.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
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