On Thursday, November 17, 1864, some 12,000 Federal soldiers of Major General Oliver O. Howard's Right Wing marched through Jackson, the seat of Butts County, transforming a place that Union Major Thomas W. Osborn had first regarded as beautiful and prosperous into what he later called a sadder community with little left besides its people and their houses. As the soldiers approached, many of Jackson's approximately 300 residents fled, while a few convalescent Confederates and local citizens mounted only a brief defense before withdrawing into nearby woods and swamps. Because farms and plantations near Jackson had not been heavily foraged earlier in the campaign, the Federals found abundant food and property, and they looted and burned almost all of the stores and businesses around the town square. The courthouse was destroyed by fire, though some said departing Confederate cavalry had set it to keep stored corn and cotton from enemy hands; before it burned, Wiley Goodman, ordinary of Butts County, loaded the county records into a wagon, crossed the Ocmulgee River, and hid them, so that only one deed book was lost. One store was repeatedly set on fire but was extinguished by young boys after the Federals moved on. Among the few exceptions to the destruction were the old St. John's Masonic Hall, said to have been spared by General Sherman's explicit order, and Prices Mill a few miles south of Jackson, reportedly left standing for possible Federal use if a crossing of the Ocmulgee River were delayed. What remained included charred mercantile buildings, flour mills, gin houses, barns, and corn cribs, while much of the area's livestock was slaughtered and other animals were taken for army use, though most residents' homes survived. Howard and his subordinate commanders, Major Generals Peter J. Osterhaus and Francis P. Blair, Jr., spent the night at Jackson, with Blair at Sylvan Grove Plantation, as separate march routes through Butts County aided foraging. At the same time, Brigadier General H. Judson Kilpatrick's cavalry division rode south to make Confederates think the army was heading for Macon by way of Forsyth, masking the Right Wing's actual objective of reaching Planter's Factory on the Ocmulgee River and crossing safely at Seven Islands.