The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  On the morning of April 12, 1862, the group—two short, as a pair had overslept—boarded a northbound train in the small town of Marietta, Georgia, twenty miles north of Atlanta. At Big Shanty, seven miles up the line, the train conductor, William Fuller, announced a stop of twenty minutes for breakfast, giving the raiders the opportunity to take over the train. Detaching the passenger cars, Andrews commandeered the engine, The General, and headed north, cutting the telegraph wires in order to prevent the pursuers from alerting the stations ahead. Fuller, furious at the hijacking of his train, proved to be just as determined and heroic as Andrews. He chased after the train, first for the initial two miles to the next station on foot, then with a succession of platelayers’ carts (known on US railroads by the wonderful term gandy dancer carts) operated by pushing up and down on a large lever that drives the wheels. This proved to be a versatile method of transportation, as he was able to overcome a gap in the track that Andrews’s gang had torn up, dragging the trolley through the ballast and rerailing it on the other side. Then, after being derailed again, he found a locomotive, The Yonah, which was fortuitously in steam, and when, again, there was a gap in the track, he ran another two miles and stopped a train passing in the other direction to commandeer its locomotive.

  And so the chase went on for a hundred miles, with the locomotives at times reaching speeds of sixty miles per hour until The General ran out of fuel and the raiders dispersed into the local countryside. Because of Fuller’s effort in keeping so close, Andrews’s men never managed to cause any serious damage to the track. Their attempts to burn down bridges were thwarted by damp tinder, and their efforts to tear up the track were confined to small sections, which were later easily repaired. The men were all picked up quickly by the Confederate authorities, and poor Andrews, just twenty-two years old, was soon hanged, along with seven of his gang. However, several other members of the group managed to escape back to the North, some helped by slaves, and most survived the war, with one living until 1923. All the nineteen military participants received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first soldiers ever to receive this newly instituted award. On his side, Fuller, too, was feted for his actions and spent his later years ensuring that the story was told from his point of view, which suggests that there may have been some rewriting of history. Indeed, the raid has been mythologized, inspiring several films, most notably in 1926 The General, in which, interestingly, Buster Keaton portrays the conductor, Fuller, as the hero, whereas the Unionists are depicted as ruthless train wreckers, demonstrating the enduring tacit sympathy to the Confederate cause. According to George Douglas, it was the vagaries of the Southern railroads that wrecked the raid: “Andrews was undone by bad weather, by heavy rail traffic, by a single-track bottleneck, by trains not on schedule, and by other vicissitudes of the Southern railroads, as much as he was by Fuller.”26 Indeed, had he gone ahead with the original plan, which was to launch the raid on the previous day when the weather was better and there were fewer trains coming in the other direction, the story might have had a different ending and the inevitable outcome of the Civil War might have come sooner.

  Most similar attacks on the enemy’s railroads were carried out by cavalry rather than small groups of spies. On the Unionist side, the most remarkable was the raid commanded by Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher, in the spring of 1863. He led a group of seventeen hundred men who rode six hundred miles through hostile territory from southern Tennessee through Mississippi to Baton Rouge, Louisiana— which was held by the Union—tearing up railroads, burning ties, and destroying storehouses, with the ultimate aim of wrecking the key rail junction at Newton’s Station, Mississippi. Not only did Grierson’s raid tie up large numbers of Confederate forces, but remarkably only twelve of his men—three killed and nine missing—were lost in the whole expedition. Again, this tale attracted Hollywood producers, with John Wayne starring in the 1959 film The Horse Soldiers.

  On the Confederate side, the most effective attack on railroads behind the lines was the raid at Christmas 1862 led by General John Morgan with a force of four thousand men. Their target was the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, which, like the Baltimore & Ohio, had the misfortune of being situated on the border between the two sides. As Stewart H. Holbrook aptly describes, it was “destined to be wrecked and wrecked again by both contending armies.” The Louisville & Nashville was a crucial line, as it led into the South and was initially used to smuggle supplies to the Confederates until much of it fell into the hands of the Unionists. Morgan and his men swept through Kentucky, capturing the station in the small town of Upton, where he used the telegraph system to fool the Unionists farther up the line into giving him information on the position of their forces. The Confederates then wreaked havoc on the line, demolishing bridges and warehouses in a week of destruction, before withdrawing with two thousand prisoners. They destroyed the Louisville & Nashville so thoroughly that even Haupt could not weave his magic quickly. Hampered by floods, it took him the better part of six months to restore the line. Ultimately, however, Morgan’s wrecking was to no avail. Despite the constant attacks—the bridge on the line at Bridgeport, Alabama, was blown up four times during the war—the Louisville & Nashville proved to be immensely useful to the Unionists and “could be rated as a major factor in winning the war, so far as transportation was concerned.”27

  Destroying railroads became a strategic aim precisely because they were proving so useful as a way of moving supplies and, particularly, troops. Although troops had been deployed by rail in various European wars in the previous couple of decades, the scale and extent of troop movement in the American Civil War were unprecedented. Indeed, the extent and range over which battles were fought were so large that accounts of the war refer to two theaters, eastern, broadly the Atlantic Seaboard and its immediate interior, and western, generally defined as the area east of the Mississippi River and west of the Appalachian Mountains.

  That first major battle at Manassas (Bull Run) had demonstrated irrevocably the benefit of rapid troop movements by rail, and ever more ambitious transfers ensued. Chattanooga, Tennessee, some five hundred miles west of the main theaters of war, saw several major troop movements by both sides. In June 1862, anticipating a Unionist attack in eastern Tennessee, the Confederates’ General Braxton Bragg, commander of the Army of the Mississippi, decided to rush his troops to try to secure Chattanooga. Although the route was circuitous, and Bragg was uncertain about the reliability of the railroads, his first batch of three thousand men arrived within six days of leaving their base at Tupelo, Mississippi. The rest of his army and equipment quickly followed, and ultimately the operation that involved twenty-five thousand men being sent nearly eight hundred miles by rail passed smoothly, despite the journey’s requiring them to travel on six different lines.

  A year later, in September 1863, another such mass transfer of Southern troops, involving a variety of routes and coordinated, at last, by the Rail road Bureau, enabled the Confederates to reinforce the Army of Tennessee just south of Chattanooga, which had just been captured by Union forces from northern Virginia. Despite traveling nine hundred miles on single-track railroads never intended for such heavy use, and which were not connected with one another at the termini, more than twelve thousand men led by General James Longstreet arrived in time to ensure victory over General William Rosecrans at the Battle of Chickamauga. Longstreet’s aide- de-camp, Gilbert Moxley Sorrel, later summed up the move in Churchillian terms, with an emphasis on the inadequacy of the Southern railroads: “Never before were so many troops moved over such worn-out railways, none first-class from the beginning. Never before were such crazy cars— passenger, baggage, mail, coal, box, platform, all and every sort wobbling on the jumping strap-iron—used for hauling good soldiers.”28

  The defeat at Chickamauga prompted the Unionists, in turn, to trump all those moves with the biggest troop transfer of the war. Again, Chattanooga was the destination. The town was held by the Unionists unde
r the illustrious general and later president Ulysses S. Grant, but it was under threat from the Confederates and needed reinforcements. The federal government decided to send twenty-five thousand men,29 but there was much debate in Washington on how this could be achieved and Lincoln needed much reassurance that such an epic journey was possible by rail. Lincoln finally consented, and the logistics were quickly worked out. Railroad presidents were summoned and orders given to assemble dozens of trains. The chosen railroads were effectively taken under military control, and within a couple of days the first troops rolled out of Culpeper, Virginia, for a twelve-hundred-mile trip through Union-held territory over the Appalachians and across the unbridged Ohio River. The detail of the journey illustrates the discontinuity of the American railroad system at the time. At Culpeper, on the Rappahannock River, the troops took the Orange & Alexandria to Washington and then the Baltimore & Ohio to the Ohio River just below Wheeling. A ferry ride over the river to Bellaire in Ohio connected them with the Central Ohio Railroad to Columbus, then the Indiana Central to Indianapolis, and then the Jeffersonville, Madison & Indianapolis Railroad to Jeffersonville on the Ohio, opposite Louisville. Having recrossed the river using a pontoon, a combination of the Louis ville & Nashville and the Nashville & Chattanooga took them to their destination. It was not just the trains that had to be organized. Food depots had to be established at fifty-mile intervals, and all other traffic on the lines was canceled. The whole move had been expected to take more than two weeks but in practice was completed in just eleven days. It was, according to a history of the Civil War, “the longest and fastest movement of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.”30

  These huge troop transfers across what was most of the entire territory of the United States at the time demonstrate how the railroads extended the scope and duration of the war. The West was sparsely populated, and, with troops unable to obtain food from the surrounding countryside, such mass battles as Chickamauga would not have been possible without the supply line afforded by the railroads. It was inevitable, therefore, that the final and decisive push of the war, led by General William Sherman, should be entirely dependent on the railroads. Union tactics by then had become well established. Union armies could penetrate Southern territory only as far as supply lines allowed, and these were entirely dependent on railroads. As they headed into Confederate territory, they would destroy the railroads to eliminate their use by the enemy and then call on Haupt or his successors to reconstruct them once the territory was established. In some instances, the gauge of railroads was changed by the conquering army in order to facilitate connections with existing lines.

  After Chattanooga was secured, the town became the base for the move across the South led by General William Sherman that began in the spring of 1864. Sherman’s route took him along the Western & Atlantic Railroad, which, with the Nashville & Chattanooga and the Louisville & Nashville, created a five-hundred-mile supply line linking Atlanta with Louisville. As he progressed, units of the United States Military Railroads were almost constantly employed in repairing the railroads after Confederate raids, at times reconstructing tracks while further destruction of the line was taking place simultaneously just a few miles away. When the Confederates, under the notoriously reckless General John Hood, destroyed thirty-five miles of track and 450 feet of bridges, a team of two thousand men restored the line within a week and ensured the railroad was fully operational in two.

  Once Atlanta was taken in September 1864, the way was open for Sherman’s March to the Sea to seal the victory along with Grant’s forces, who had fought their way south through Virginia. At this stage, though, Sherman was more worried about being chased by regrouping Confederate forces in the hostile territory he was crossing and therefore destroyed the railroad behind him. He became “the greatest railroad wrecker of all” and devised the “Sherman hairpin,” a sophisticated way of ensuring rails could not be repaired, involving heating and then twisting the rails around trees.31

  After using the Western & Atlantic to bring in supplies, his men ripped up no fewer than eighty miles of the line and then continued the destruction as Sherman progressed through Georgia, leaving the Southern railroad network in utter disarray at the conclusion of the war. It was precisely because Sherman understood the importance of the railroad that his destruction was so thorough. In his memoirs he stressed, with military precision, the essential nature of the railroad supply line during his move south: “That single stem of railroad supplied an army of 100,000 men and 32,000 horses for the period of 196 days, from May 1 to November 19, 1864. To have delivered that amount of forage and food by ordinary wagons would have required 36,800 wagons, of six mules each . . . a simple impossibility in such roads as existed in that region.”32 Grant, who led the other part of the pincer movement taking over the South, also understood the importance of the railroads. Before Richmond could be taken, he had to build two new military lines, totaling twenty-two miles, to supply his armies as they advanced to the town.

  The railroads were adapted for all kinds of purposes during the Civil War. Ambulance trains, which had previously seen only limited service in European wars, became widely used on both sides as the war progressed. As early as October 1861, the Virginia Central built two ambulance cars designed to hold forty-four casualties each, and in the North hospital cars were running between Boston, Massachusetts, and Albany, New York, as early as the spring of 1862 with basic facilities of hair mattresses, pillows, and blankets for each berth. However, neither the military nor the railroad companies anticipated the extent of the demand for proper medical facilities to which the conflict would give rise. Not only did the fierce battles result in huge numbers of wounded, but the insalubrious conditions and poor diet triggered outbreaks of disease that exacted a more lethal toll than bullets and risked overwhelming frontline medical facilities. Despite the early experiments with hospital trains, suitable medical care was rarely provided. In the Peninsula Campaign of 1862, for example, there was virtually no special provision for the wounded, with the result that injured men were simply dumped on the floors of freight cars. According to a contemporary witness, “The worst cases are put inside the covered—close, windowless boxes—sometimes with a little straw or a blanket to lie on, oftener without.”33

  On the Unionist side, the situation improved thanks to the creation of a government agency, the Sanitary Commission, which ordered a series of special “ward” cars, each holding twenty-four removable stretchers suspended from uprights with heavy rubber bands. Unfortunately, the swinging motion of the trains sometimes resulted in the injured men being tipped out of their litters, and, ironically, the rather cruder arrangement used in the South, involving the placing of large quantities of straw on the bottom of the cars, was probably a safer option for the wounded.

  By the end of the war, hospital trains had become part of the paraphernalia of war. When Sherman attacked Atlanta, he had three whole trains, each capable of carrying two hundred men, operating between Louisville and Atlanta. The Confederates developed a system of mobile hospitals that transported equipment and patients by train as the battle lines moved and could be unloaded and repacked rapidly. In 1864, for example, one such unit, the Flewellen Hospital, spent five months in Barnesville, Georgia; six weeks in Opelika, Alabama; nine days in Mobile, Alabama; and two in Corinth, Mississippi.

  Armored trains and railroad-mounted guns were another railroad innovation of the Civil War. The first recorded use of an armored train was by the Unionists in the early days of the war, to protect the railroad lines around Baltimore against Confederate saboteurs. On the secessionist side, it was the ever-innovative general Robert E. Lee who developed the concept. He ordered his artillery commander to build a railroad gun wagon by placing a thirty-two-pounder on a railcar protected by a wall of steel rails, and this armored battery was deployed in the Seven Days’ Battle in Virginia in June 1862. A bigger gun, a thirteen-inch mortar, was fitted to a railcar by the Unionists during the siege
of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in the spring of 1863, but, in truth, this was an experimental technology that was used only to a limited extent in this conflict.

  Unorthodox uses of railroad equipment, however, occasionally played havoc with the trains. Haupt noted that the guards posted to protect railroad facilities were wont, especially in the summer, to take baths and wash their clothes in the water meant for locomotives. The result, comic to see but disastrous for the engine, was that hot soapy water foamed out of the boiler, disabling the locomotive. Haupt had to issue a specific instruction to ban bathing in water tanks.

  The asymmetry of the two sides meant that the result of the war should never have been in doubt. The North had two-thirds of the guns, a far more developed economy, most of the industrial capacity, better railroads, and far greater financial resources. Its territory included all the cities above one hundred thousand people with the exception of New Orleans. Given the North’s overall strength and all its other advantages, the fact that the conflict lasted for four years was a remarkable testimony to the South’s ability to fight. The South, though, had the better generals, especially in the early stages, and was fighting for what its citizens perceived as their very survival, which was a strong motivating force. Moreover, the South’s generals seemed to have an instinctive understanding of how to use the railroads in the early part of the war, but the failure of Davis’s government to assume control over the railroads greatly hampered the war effort. As John F. Stover suggests, “Had the government of Jefferson Davis earlier faced up to its transportation problem and established as vigorous a policy of railroad control as it did in the field of ordnance, Southern railroads might well have provided a more adequate support for the Confederate military effort.”34