By early 1865, as the Confederacy neared collapse, Union forces under Major General James H. Wilson moved from north Alabama in late March to destroy the industrial capacity of central Alabama and Georgia with fifteen hundred cavalrymen armed with repeating rifles, while Major General Howell Cobb commanded the Georgia troops opposing them. Cobb, better known as a politician than a soldier, had served in the U.S. House of Representatives, including as Speaker of the House, and as governor of Georgia, and in 1863 took command of militia troops in Florida and Georgia, which placed him in Columbus on Easter Sunday night, April 16, 1865. Wilson's veterans faced Columbus's inexperienced home guard of two thousand to three thousand defenders, mostly old men, boys, and factory workers. Neither side knew that Robert E. Lee had already surrendered to Grant or that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. The defenders established lines west of the river in the Alabama hills and on the Georgia side of the river, destroyed the footbridge at Clapp's Factory, removed the flooring from the lower bridge at Dillingham Street and eventually burned it, and preserved the covered bridge at 14th Street and the upper railroad bridge. After Union forces broke the first Confederate line in Alabama on the evening of Easter Sunday, both sides raced in disorder for the 14th Street Bridge, and after it was crossed a brief fight on the Georgia side of the river preceded the fall of Columbus. Wilson lost twenty-five men, the Federals captured about a thousand Confederates, and nine people were killed. That night Randolph Mott invited Wilson to use his mansion as headquarters. The next day Union troops spared the commercial district and residences but burned every war-related factory and textile mill, including about one hundred fifty thousand bales of cotton, and the torpedo boat Viper and the nearly completed ironclad Jackson were also destroyed after Confederates had scuttled the C.S.S. Chattahoochee the previous night. More than six thousand slaves in Muscogee County were among the last freed under the Emancipation Proclamation, and two and a half years after its effective date in January 1863, Columbus slaves were finally freed. As the factory fires smoldered and the main Union force moved toward Macon, a mob of whites of all classes, former slaves, and some Union soldiers looted stores on Broad Street. Despite the destruction, Columbus quickly rebuilt its industrial base, and by 1880 it led the South in textile production, with the Mighty Eagle and Phenix becoming the South's largest textile mill.