| Popis: |
Columbus was a booming plantation town along the Tombigbee, surrounded by rich soil ideal for cotton. Steamboats plied the river, taking bales downriver to Mobile and the Gulf of Mexico. During the “Flush Times” of the antebellum era, enslaved people from Africa built mansions of brick and wood for white planters. By the 1840s and 1850s, Blacks outnumbered the Anglo-Americans in Columbus and surrounding area. Throughout the Civil War, Columbus found itself in the hurricane’s eye of fighting. The closest major battle, Shiloh, was 100 miles north in 1862; thousands of sick and wounded, including Union prisoners, were brought to Columbus to makeshift hospitals. In the end, 2,100 Confederate and 40 Union soldiers were buried in Friendship Cemetery by the banks of the Tombigbee. Another 10 Union soldiers, 9 Black and 1 white, were buried in Sandfield, a Black cemetery. Four local white women, “touched with pity for these dead exiled from home,” in 1866 went to Friendship Cemetery to care for both the Confederate and Union graves. This act of commemoration resulted in the creation of one of the nation’s earliest versions of Memorial Day. After reading about the Columbus women, New York judge Francis Miles Finch wrote a poem, published in Atlantic Monthly, “The Blue and the Gray.” |
