Muscogee County GaArchives Photo Place.....Columbus Ca 1860' ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Christine Thacker http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00033.html#0008100 May 5, 2007, 11:33 pm Source: Sesquicentennial Supplement III, Ledger-Enquirer Photo can be seen at: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/muscogee/photos/columbus12727gph.jpg Image file size: 55.4 Kb Warner, Gift, Jones: The Past is People By Dr. Maxine Turner Guest Columnist Southerners live in two orders. There is the world of the here and now, but within that world there are reminders of the past. Columbus, like other southern cities, has its historical markers, its rusting cannon and its weathered markers over Confederate graves. More than that, Columbus today has a past bound up in stories of sailing ships, Iron-clad ships and the romance of the Civil War. As the leading industrial center of the South at the beginning of the Civil War, Columbus became a major production center for a variety of war materials: fire arms, swords, tenting, uniforms, harness - even drums and fifes. Its major accomplishment, however, was the construction, over a period of three years, of the ironclad gunboat Muscogee. Columbus was also a headquarters for naval activities in the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola areas. Steamers brought news from Apalachicola and from various points northward as the Union blockade restricted traffic on the rivers. Especially important to the south of Columbus was Saffold in Early County, the site of a navy yard which constructed the three-masted schooner, the gunboat Chattahoochee. But the past is not just the story of the dimensions of vessels and the fire power of cannons. It is not just a record of facts. A large part of the order of the past is the people. In the dual order of past and present, family talk flows easily between present and past with references like, "Yes, Aunt Lucy always added ginger," or "I remember one time Papa. . ." Family members live in anecdotes, often very vivid, almost always fragmentary. In much the same way, historical figures become very real to the historian. A young naval officer can take on a life of his own apart from the recorded facts about him, just as one would never question whether there is a Rhett Butler. Recently when someone mentioned Napa, California, in conversation, I shifted to the order of the past and said half to myself, "Yes, one of my officers settled there after the War." This living in two orders which Southerners do can be a puzzlement to the Westerner and to the Northerner: it can also be a frustration to the historian because we so often know so little about the people who made the obscure chapters of history along lazy Southern rivers. For that reason, this article will lie partially in fact; the rest will be what you the reader choose to project beyond the loose ends and open questions about the people who live in this chapter of history. This is history as a function of the imagination, not just as a matter of recording facts. As historical figures become real to us, they become models: they serve the same function as fictional characters with whom we can identify. One of the men of the Civil War era who lives through momentos and anecdotes of the past is Chief Engineer James H. Warner. His portrait and his sword are on display at the Confederate Naval Museum. His house stands at the comer of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Street. His granddaughter Miss Joan Warner was a teacher for many years in Columbus. The Warners are woven into Columbus' past. At the beginning of the Civil War, Warner was the only Chief Engineer in the Confederate Navy. It is an Indication of the importance of Columbus that Warner was sent here to mobilize its industry for military use. During the war, he kept the factories running, many of them on 24-hour shifts. He dealt with the difficulties of finding labor, with the shortage of supplies and with the constant threat that the Union blockaders would ascend the rivers to attack Columbus. A civilian who worked with Warner during these years was Charles Blain who had come from Delaware in 1834 to settle in Columbus. As a ship builder who had constructed river steamers, Blain worked with Warner to design and build the Muscogee. They were plagued with delays, however. The accounts of cost over- runs, delayed shipments, labor troubles and design revisions have a strangely contemporary ring. The naval officer who worked with Warner and Blain was Lt. Augustus McLaughlin. Of his origins nothing is known but he reveals a great deal of himself in what he writes. One can see him as efficient and officious, never commander but the perfect assistant, a figure always there in the background. He is the one who wrote that the crew of the Chattahoochee were neat and well behaved. He wrote a touching account of a young sailor's death to his former commander. As Wilson's Raiders threatened Columbus, he carefully noted the weather each day in his diary before he gave the increasingly desperate facts of the war news. There were more swashbuckling people along the rivers than McLaughlin. Catesby ap R. Jones was such a one. Just one sentence in a source can tease the fancy: Jones was wounded slightly as a bystander in a Paris riot in 1848, a year sometimes called the most exciting in the history of the world because of its revolutions. Jones was there. Why? In what role? For how long? We don't know. But that one fact adds a dimension to the man-the man of fact and of imagination. Jones was also present when history was made at Hampton Roads as he served as executive officer of the Merrimac in its duel with the Monitor. Fresh from that excitement Jones was sent to Early County in 1862 to See PEOPLE, Page S-21 Continued From page S-20 supervise the final arming of the, gunboat Chattahoochee. Delays on the ship and the restrictions of the blockade off Apalachicola were too much to justify keeping a man like Jones inactive, so he was sent to Selma, Alabama, to command the Naval Iron Works. There he supervised the production of a rifled cannon, one of the most advanced weapons of the time. Jones remained in Selma after the war. His portrait hangs in the Alabama State Archives. His sons Catesby ap Roger and Catesby ap Catesby carried both his name and the curious Welsh designation for "son of." What an aura Jones must have carried with him as he walked along the street in Selma in the years after the War. Succeeding Jones on the gunboat Chattahoochee was George W. Gift. Gift is another figure in this story about whom there is a curious isolated fact: James K. Polk's first official act as President was to appoint Gift to the Naval Academy. Gift serve in "the Pacific Fleet, for a time settled in California, and came east to join the Confederate Navy at the beginning of the war. It was during Gift's service on the Chattahoochee that the only noteworthy event of her career occurred: the boners of the ship exploded at Blounstown Bar in May of 1863. Other stories of people, some heroic and some not so heroic, emerge from the fiasco. When the ship's boilers exploded, pandemonium followed the burned and scalded sailors ran about the deck, and as those who were merely scared out of their wits ran pell mell to abandon ship. The ship's surgeon (with a classical name befitting a physician of that time) Marcellus Ford went about tending the injured. An issue arose, however, out of the actions of the ship's commander J. J. Guthrie. Gift threatened action against Guthrie because, while the confusion went on about him, he went about administering baptism to the wounded and dying rather than to give orders to control the situation. Even some bitter letters about his actions were exchanged in newspapers along the river. No more than that is known of Guthrie. He like McLaughlin, is said to have settled in Eufaula. Did the question of whether he had been negligent in crisis hang over him during his years after the War? We may wonder about Guthrie, but Gift is not so shadowy a figure as the others. His letters of the war years were published by his daughter many years later. They reveal much about the life of the naval officer during that time. Like so many young Confederates as they are portrayed in history and in fiction, Gift was always spoiling for a fight with the Yankees. The closest he came was in an expedition of small boats downriver to Apalachicola where he and his men hoped to board a Union blockader. Accompanying Gift was midshipman Jonathan Schart who later became the first historian of the Confederate Navy and a prominent reporter in Baltimore. Scharf's account of the mission in his history puts a good face on the matter, but in fact the Confederates had to retreat ignominiously up the river, empty handed. Lt. Gift was more successful in his campaign for the hand of Ellen Shackleford, the daughter of an Early County family. 'Their love affair - the time of waiting and testing, the separations brought on by war, their fears for each other's safety - these may not be as flamboyant as' "Gone With the Wind," but it is the stuff of reality and of history, as well as the stuff romance is made of. After the War, Gift and Ellen returned to his home in Napa, California, where he became a newspaper editor and she played out the role so many Columbus girls have played - transplanted Southerner. The story of the people who made the history along the Chattahoochee and Apalachicola Rivers might stop here if we assumed, as people do in particular about the Civil War, that only the glamorous figures made the history. But what of the less glamorous people: the laborers, the women, the blacks? They had a part too. After all, some of the people who made this story actually drove the spikes and planed the timbers that went Into the ships. They earned from $1.50 to $5 a day as carpenters, blacksmiths, laborers, teamsters, joiners, caulkers. Pay rolls carry familiar local names like Blackman, Parsons, McGee, Floyd, Bozeman, Montgomery, Phillips, Bass, Morton, McAllister, McDougall. Blacks labored alongside whites in the war effort. Women also worked in the factories, just as generations of Columbus women have gone to the mills to work each day. It was a time of hard labor and sacrifice for everyone which perhaps only the Depression has recalled Columbus to since then. The more privileged women, as one would expect in a story of the Civil War added touches of grace to the story. The officers of the gunboat Chattahoochee often entertained parties of ladies onboard at Saffold and at Chattahoochee, Florida. They impressed their guests with artillery drills before refreshing themselves with strawberries and cream and pound cake supplied by the ladies. As in all wars, women took on grimmer tasks also. This was especially true in the Soldier's Home, a two story wooden building donated by George Woodruff which stood at the southwest corner of Broad and Ninth Streets. When wounded were brought to the hospital, carriages would crowd the streets bringing women to nurse the soldiers and sailors. Columbus residents donated many supplies for the hospital. The St. Elmo home was then "in the county out from town" and the mistress of the house would send a servant in on horseback with food for the wounded. Flour found its way to the hospital while townspeople contented themselves with corn meal. One Columbus man complained that each time he looked for a clean shirt he found that his wife had used it to shroud a casualty. One patient at the Soldier's Home was the brave sailor called "Little Mallory." A seaman from Maryland, he had distinguished himself in the fight of the Monitor and the Merrimac, but he was badly scalded in the explosion on the Chattahoochee. Accounts of his death are as touching, if more starkly real, than the famous deathbed scenes in nineteenth-century novels. The usual fate of the sailors was best described by Gift in a letter to his wife: "If one dies, we put him away according to military form; some sinner like myself reading the burial service; a headboard marks his resting place for a few years, and then all is oblivion." The history of the Confederate Navy in this area of Georgia is largely oblivion. Neither the schooner Chattahoochee nor the ironclad Muscogee ever saw action; neither was ever more than an unfulfilled threat to the blockade off Apalachicola. Both were put to the torch by retreating Confederates as Wilson's Raiders swept into Russell County. Yet the stories of the people survive just as most of the people survived the War. Ellen Shackleford Gift probably told many stories of plantation life to her California-born children. The Union trooper who picked up Warner's letter book, only very recently recovered, probably had yarns to spin about his military service. Surely this chapter of history lives for every Southerner who lives in two orders. We have a polarity with the past, especially with the personalities of the past. This gives us, perhaps, overactive imaginations. But history taken in that light also lends a depth and perspective a resonance, to the here and the now Special Sesquicentennial Supplement III Ledger-Enquirer, Sunday, April 30, 1978, pages S-20-21. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/muscogee/photos/columbus12727gph.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/gafiles/ File size: 13.8 Kb