Civil War Articles by Julian WilliamsIt Was 1863 At Gettysburg, Pa., and Jacksonville, Ga.
This article is compiled by Julian Williams.
It was 1863 in Gettysburg and Jacksonville. First, let's look at Jacksonville. In fact, let's go just a bit west of Jacksonville, to China Hill (so named because of the chinaberry trees).
She was a "walking cotton gin." It is said the wife of Captain Stephen Boney had an apron with three large pockets - one for the raw cotton, one for the seeds, and one for the ginned cotton. As she walked from place to place, probably many times attending to her "patients," she would "gin" the cotton. Her tough but agile fingers would pull the cotton from the seed and ready it for spinning and looming. In this way, she would provide clothes for everyone on the place. She would grow medicinal herbs and gather others in the wild to come up with concoctions which she would diligently administer to those in need. Martha Williams Boney was an industrious woman who had to adapt to the quickly changing environment coming at her in a short space of time. In 1860, her father, Joseph B. Williams, had been blown up with thirteen other passengers on the steamboat General Manning below the Jacksonville Ferry on the Ocmulgee River. She married Stephen Boney of the China Hill community near Jacksonville, Georgia. He would later serve as a captain in the Confederate forces.
The Boney Clan invited me to their annual reunion this year because they were honoring another of those kin who had given his service as a soldier in that conflict of the 1860's known as the Civil War - for lack of a better designation. They had said words for Captain Stephen Boney a couple of years (or more) ago and this year, they were remembering his nephew, Cullen Cravey, who had lost a leg in Virginia in that War and had somehow, miraculously, made it back to Jacksonville after being turned out of a Union prison. Cullen and his uncle Stephen had been wounded in battle and as an added setback Cullen's leg had to be amputated.
But back to 1863. Martha Williams Boney was not only without her father, but she was having the couple's seventh child, Alexander, this busy year of 1863. And she was seeing her husband, Captain Stephen, heading to action which would carry him to fateful Griswoldville - not a good place to be the next year.
As the Boney people showed me around, I began to feel the great distance, not only in miles, but in custom, that separated my forbears of many years ago from the reality of other worlds. I saw the old shed where almost eternal heart "lighterd" had been used to construct the supporting posts. Lynn and Guy Durward Bland (his mother is a Boney) told me there was enough left over to make a trough (all, mind you, from one tree). In my eye, I could see the vast forest sweeping out from the river's landing and in my mind's eye I could visualize the "tram road" or timber railroad of the Boneys which transported cut trees out of the swamp for milling or down to the river for "rafting to Darien." As I tasted the water from the artesian "flowing" well established by the Boneys I could imagine that this water had tasted like that for a long time. And, at river's edge, looking at the moving current, the little school boy's question (paraphrased) does not seem nearly so out of place - "Is this the same water that flowed by here in 1863?"
And evidently, Martha's "cotton ginning" in the three large pockets of her apron had prompted Stephen to build the first cotton gin in the county. Sayings have it that all he would wear was a white shirt. For want of him to change or for her own curiosity, Martha started planting mulberry trees for raising silk worms for silk. This venture never did get a great distance off the ground but one doesn't know until one tries!
And Stephen, white shirt and all, must have gotten some of his "individuality" from his father, Cullen Boney, who died in 1841 and is buried in the family cemetery at China Hill. On his grave is this unusual epitaph:
"Behold ye strangers passing by
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now so you must be.
Prepare for death and follow me."
An interesting thing about the Boney Cemetery: it inspires a great feeling of permanence and durability. In some cemeteries you walk on dirt. Others you may walk on gravel. The Boney Cemetery is paved. You walk on concrete. Not many weeds are going to be growing in that burial place.
But, from the relative peace and busy work day of Jacksonville in 1863, with the ones staying home trying to support those in the War, we look back at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in that same month, July, in that same year, 1863.
So, when the summer calleth,
On forest and field of grain,
With an equal murmur falleth,
The cooling drip of the rain:
Under the sod and the dew,
Waiting the judgment-day,
Wet with the rain, the Blue,
Wet with the rain, the Gray.
Indeed the rain did fall. And this, at first, seemed to be in President Lincoln's favor: "Now, if General Meade can complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee's army, the rebellion will be over." But, like so many times before, Lincoln's generals did not move as quickly as Lincoln wished. Yes, Lee was stranded awhile at the edge of the rain-swollen Potomac, making it difficult, or almost impossible for him to retreat to the safe banks of the Virginia side. But the delays of General Meade, who also had suffered great casualties, proved to be the difference. Lee crossed safely over and Lincoln had this to say: "We had them within our grasp. I am distressed immeasurably because of it."
If Gettysburg had been the High Water Mark of the Confederacy, it was certainly at ebb tide now. And to make matters worse for the South, Vicksburg fell the next day, July 4, 1863.
And, across the river, at Jacksonville, July, 1863, other sad tidings were brought to the homes of the kin of the McLeans, Ashleys, Mannings, Friers, Boyds, and Smiths - Colonel William Manning, son of Laurence and Martha Manning, had been forced to resign as commander of the 50th Georgia Regiment due to chronic hepatitis. In and out of one hospital and another, his body could no longer take the strain and ravages of the battlefield. He was alive but barely so. He held on for eight more years but suffered bodily and economically. He died eight years later in 1871 and is buried with his wife in Sunset Cemetery in Valdosta, Georgia. He was an outstanding citizen of Jacksonville, Georgia, and Telfair County and later was a prominent personality in the new county of Coffee, created in 1854. He sold his river plantation and moved to Valdosta in 1861. 1863 was not a good year for him either.
