Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  The only matters of this success to be settled were ones of payment and credit.

  Long contended that the Tennessee Plan was “patently obvious,” and that it did not need the likes of Carroll to point it out, seeing as how plenty of other people had the same thought. And Carroll, who faced financial troubles for much of her life, subtracted from her legacy, or at least gave ammunition to her detractors, by repeatedly badgering Congress for compensation. In 1881 Congress considered a bill to grant recognition and a military pension to Carroll, but, according to the Maryland State Archives, the bill “mysteriously disappeared” following the assassination of President Garfield. She did eventually win a small military pension, but her cause was taken up by suffragettes who equated a lack of female recognition with a lack of female voting rights. Carroll’s legacy has smoldered ever since. Francis B. Carpenter in 1864 painted Lincoln, surrounded by cabinet members, reading the Emancipation Proclamation. But there’s one empty chair, and propped up against it are maps of the South. To some, this is the smoking paintbrush, the clandestine acknowledgment of Lincoln’s secret cabinet member who drew up the blueprints for the North’s first significant land victories. To others, sometimes an empty chair is just an empty chair. “[I]t can be said with surety,” Long wrote, “That Anna Ella Carroll was not a ‘hidden’ figure of history, maliciously hidden, that is, by chauvinist historians. She was and will remain a minor figure … with slim importance.”

  But in 1874, in a letter to Carroll, Senator Wade’s view was somewhat different:

  “If ever there was a righteous claim on earth, you have one. I have often been sorry that, knowing all this, as I did then, I had not publicly declared you as the author. But we were fully alive to the importance of absolute secrecy … As the expedition advanced Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Stanton, and myself frequently alluded to your extraordinary sagacity and unselfish patriotism, but all agreed that you should be recognized for your most noble services, and properly rewarded for the same.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Racing Locomotives

  As maligned as armies of the North were in the first year of the war, it’s worth noting that Union troops were capturing towns in the Deep South a year after Fort Sumter. Huntsville, Alabama—which supplied eight generals to the fray, four of whom fought for the North—was captured on April 11, 1862.

  Union Maj. Gen. Ormsby “Old Stars” Mitchel was, befitting the nickname, an astronomer at the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, when the war broke out. He’d been a classmate of Robert E. Lee at West Point, and published the nation’s first monthly magazine on astronomy. Owing to his work in his chosen profession, a crater and a mountain range are today named after him on the planet Mars.

  But in the spring of 1862, his division was advancing, more or less, to a Confederate concentration at Corinth in northeastern Mississippi. His primary orders were to protect Nashville, but he had the authority to make trouble wherever trouble in the region might be made. After capturing Huntsville, Mitchel eyed eastern Tennessee, which was rich in resources and people who remained loyal to the Union. Time would tell that Mitchel had a propensity for jumping the gun; he was unable to hold Huntsville, and he had inadequate support to make inroads into eastern Tennessee. But his dreams did not go unshared.

  Ormsby “Old Stars” Mitchel authorized events that led to the Great Locomotive Chase. He briefly quit his day job as an astronomer to fight the Rebels. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

  James Andrews was a Midwestern house painter and singing coach turned Union spy. He fixated on trains early on, figuring that if he could steal one he could go on a mad tear, cutting telegraph wires, burning bridges, pulling up rails, and in general disabling Southern communications and transport. Mitchel liked the idea. He would attack Chattanooga after James had stolen a train in Georgia and obliterated Confederate lines of support that could be called to the defense of the city.

  James and twenty-four men in civilian dress wandered, a few at a time, off into the countryside, the cover story being that they were headed to sign up for service on the Confederate army. It was, the Rev. William Pittenger, then of the 2nd Ohio, later wrote, “a romantic and adventurous plan.” And not without pitfalls. A couple of the men were approached by southern locals and dutifully spelled out their cover story—at which point they were dutifully marched to the closest recruiting station and pressed into service.

  Rain poured down as the rest of the men made their final plans, and with the mud that reliably led to delays came the news (erroneous as it would turn out) that Mitchel’s troops would be stalled an additional day. So the expedition was bumped back from Friday, April 11, to Saturday, April 12. No one at the time could know the cataclysmic difference this small change in plans would make.

  Having arrived in Georgia, each man was given one last chance to back out. None did, even though they found themselves on a wet, rainy morning surrounded by Southern soldiers at every turn. At Kenesaw Mountain they collectively gulped at the sight of a vast Confederate encampment, which provided “a painfully thrilling moment.” At the Kenesaw Station, the train stopped and the crew and many passengers got off to eat breakfast at the cafe. Andrews’s men got to work. They uncoupled the passenger cars as the undercover engineers and firemen darted into the locomotive and the balance of the men tumbled into a boxcar behind the tender. An armed Confederate guard stood a few feet from the train, but his eyes simply couldn’t make his brain adjust to the unfolding events in any way that made sense to him, and by the time he had pulled himself together enough to act, it was too late. Andrews’s engineer threw open the valve, and the General (pre-Civil War locomotives were given names rather than numbers) bolted ahead in front of a stunned audience that had no idea what was happening. What was about to happen were seven hours and eighty-seven of the wildest miles in United States history.

  Andrews had carefully studied the road’s timetable, and knew he would meet two southbound freight trains. But they would be expecting the northbound General as well, and so long as everyone kept to schedule and availed themselves of the proper sidings there should be no problem. Once the second freight had passed, it was full steam ahead to the key bridges leading into Tennessee. They were to be burned, at which point—any possible pursuit being cut off—Andrews anticipated a leisurely chug to Chattanooga. Everything was falling perfectly into place.

  The rogue band of rail men was in good spirits and good order as they began their mission. They cut telegraph wires and took on some cross ties to be used as kindling for future bridge fires. Cool as cucumbers, they filled up with wood and water at Southern stations, calmly stating that they were on a special mission carrying powder for General Beauregard.

  But the raiders didn’t bargain on the outrage and determination felt by two men back at the Kenesaw Station named William Fuller and Anthony Murphy, who were members of the legitimate crew of the General and very much wanted their train back. They had taken off after the vanishing train on foot and then on a co-opted handcar, which proceeded slowly but surely until it spilled gracelessly into a ditch thanks to a rail that had been dislodged by the departing thieves.

  Meanwhile, this job of rail springing took longer than it should because the raisers did not have the proper tools. But the suspense “possessed just enough of the spice of danger in this part of the run to render it thoroughly enjoyable,” Pittenger recalled. As they chugged into Etowah Station, they noticed an old beater of an engine on a siding, the Yonah, which was serving out its golden years in the employ of an iron mine. The Yonah’s steam was up, but the threat seemed minor, and disabling it would have attracted too much unwanted attention. Had this been Friday instead of Saturday, the logic would have been sound.

  The crew waited out the second southbound freight, but as it came into sight the men were dismayed to see that it was displaying a red flag, which indicated another train still to come. And that train had a red flag of its own, which would lead to more downtime that the men of the General couldn’t
afford. Andrews stepped in and asked station masters the reason for all these freights running south. After all, Beauregard was an impatient man and needed his powder. The answer, Pittenger noted, “was interesting, but not reassuring.”

  Word had spread that Mitchel’s army was (as originally scheduled) approaching Chattanooga, and the Confederates were evacuating as many supplies from the town as possible prior to the attack. The wait continued. They didn’t know who might be after them by now. They didn’t know who in the gathering crowd of their enemies knew what. The men in the boxcar, who had no clue what the problem was, grew anxious. Andrews had only been able to give them a brief word: Be ready to fight. “So intolerable was our suspense that the order for a deadly conflict would have been felt as a relief,” wrote Pittenger. At last, the final freight pulled in, and with unspeakable relief the crew of the General was off again, leaving the increasingly inquisitive and suspicious crowd behind.

  Back at Etowah Station, two excited and exhausted men ran panting up to the platform, with a wild story to tell and some sharp shouted orders. The Yonah, whose career as an industrial workhorse was winding to a well-earned retirement, was about to become a pursuit vehicle for a band of Confederate commandos.

  At a less intense pace now, the General was stopped on the road north as the men set about cutting telegraph wires and pulling up rails. Again, it was a time-consuming process performed as it was, without proper tools. At this crucial juncture, the men were startled by the scream of a locomotive whistle to the south, where no train should have been. This increased the amount of interest the crew had in popping the rail, and with one superhuman effort it was dislodged, the equal and opposite reaction sending the men tumbling down a bank.

  The pair of intrepid men who were the rightful bearers of the General slammed on the brakes of the Yonah in time to avoid disaster, but there was no time to try to patch up the Yankee’s vandalism. They abandoned their locomotive and once again set off at a sprint, leaving their team of commandeered soldiers behind. Even at the trot, they would soon be making better time than the General, which became snarled in southbound traffic, her crew peppered with questions that were getting harder and harder to answer with any degree of believability. Finally the traffic cleared. The next station was nine miles distant, but an express was due from that direction at any time. Word was that it was running a bit late. It was a gamble Andrews had to take.

  The General gave it everything she had. Engines in those days had to sweat to break twenty mph, but Pittenger believed they covered the nine miles in nine minutes, arriving just as the conductor of the express was pulling out. Hearing the shriek of the whistle, the conductor of the express stopped and backed up on the siding far enough for the Federals to get mostly, but not entirely, past. Enough strange things were happening that Saturday morning that Southern antennae were up and functioning with full force. It took Andrews’s best performance to date. General Beauregard needed his powder, dammit! The express allowed them to pass.

  Fuller and Murphy had not counted on the Yankees’ ability to slip past the express. Instead, the General had gotten away, with nothing but open road between it and the safety of Mitchel’s troops. One more stop was needed—to burn the Oostanaula Bridge—and the rest of the journey, Pittenger reckoned, would be “simple manual labor, with the enemy absolutely powerless.”

  That harmonious dream was again shattered by a screaming whistle and a train bearing down on them “at frightening speed.” Backward. What the … ?

  Fuller and Murphy had had their own problems with congestion, until they grabbed a southbound locomotive named the Texas and ran her to the north as fast as she would go. Sure enough, the General was stopped ahead, and just coming into rifle range. Two more minutes were all the Yankees needed to spring the rail. They didn’t have it. All piled back into the train and the race was on. Andrews still hoped to stop and burn a bridge, and to buy the time he uncoupled a car from the General to block the way—and watched incredulously as his pursuers barely slowed but slammed into the car and pushed it back the way it had come.

  The Confederates couldn’t pass, but they could press the General until it ran out of fuel and water. Or so they thought. But Andrews still had some tricks up his sleeve. Every so often he’d toss some cross ties onto the tracks, compelling Fuller and Murphy to stop and clear the rails. These measures delayed Fuller and Murphy enough that the crew of the General was able to twice take on wood and water and cut the wires after passing each station. The two most effective measures would have been to pop a rail or burn a bridge, but there wasn’t time for the former, and the day was too wet for the latter. Pittenger recalled:

  Thus we sped on, mile after mile, in this fearful chase, around curves and past stations in seemingly endless perspective. Whenever we lost sight of the enemy beyond a curve we hoped that some of our obstructions had been effective in throwing him from the track and that we would see him no more; but at each long reach backward the smoke was again seen, and the shrill whistle was like the scream of a bird of prey.

  Trains of that day were not intended for such breakneck speeds, especially if there might be something in the way. On a particularly sharp curve, Andrews’s men threw down a tie, knowing that there was no way for their pursuers to see it and stop in time. Sure enough, they hit it square. Sometime after the fact, Fuller admitted that it caused quite a jolt, and swore that the train popped up in the air and settled, roughly, back on the rails. At this point, several of the Confederate soldiers who were along for the ride said they believed they would like to stop and get off, but “their wishes were not gratified.”

  In the end, the raiders were doomed for want of the railroad equivalent of a simple claw hammer, which would have allowed them to quickly and easily pull up spikes and sabotage the road. In one last, desperate effort, the men tore up half of the last wooden boxcar and threw it in the tender for fuel, setting the rest on fire and releasing it from the train under a covered, wooden bridge. They rooted hard as they could for the bridge to catch before their pursuers caught up, but it didn’t happen. The Texas pushed the flaming car out of the bridge and onto the next siding. Without time to stop for wood and water, the General’s miles were numbered. The raiders milked nearly all the steam they could out of the General before throwing her in reverse toward the oncoming pursuit and scrambling from the scene. In one last fillip of bad luck for Andrews, there wasn’t enough energy left in the General’s boiler to crash the Texas.

  The manhunt for the raiders was, Pittenger said, “prompt, energetic and successful.” All were captured and tried as spies. Andrews and seven others were hanged, while the rest were exchanged or escaped. Many were among the first recipients of the newly created Medal of Honor.

  The Great Locomotive Chase has twice been retold in film, as a silent-film comedy in 1926 called The General, and thirty years later in a Disney movie starring Fess Parker. The silent film was a Buster Keaton production that was a box office disaster roundly panned by the critics. That was then. Today, like the Great Locomotive Chase itself, The General is considered to be a classic.

  CHAPTER 9

  Civil War Ammunition—A Blast from the Past

  Every fight gained a reputation for something or other, and the September 17 Battle of Antietam was specifically known as an “artillery hell.” In an infantry fight, men die one bullet at a time. In an artillery fight, men die in bulk. A Maryland newspaper reporter, who liked to keep track of who killed whom, finally gave up. Watching an advancing line of men, he would see a segment of it simply disappear like a missing tooth in a grisly grin. But there were so many batteries on so many hillocks firing so many rounds that it became impossible to figure out which company should get credit for the successful shot.1

  People believed the terrible losses at Shiloh that past April were as bad as it could get. Antietam counted the same number of casualties, 23,000, as Shiloh, but it took place in one day instead of two. It was a record that would not be topped.

/>   Artillery was the one of the reasons; the rolling hills bristled with five-hundred big guns. But the technology of guns, large and small, was fast outstripping commanders’ ability to keep their ranks safe from wholesale slaughter.

  Major League catcher and wit Bob Uecker once remarked that the best way to catch a knuckleball was to “wait until it stopped rolling, and then walk over and pick it up.” A well-thrown knuckleball does not spin as do more traditional pitches, making its course impossible to predict for pitcher and batter alike. Such was the case with most pre–Civil War weapons, which had smooth barrels that spat out round balls to be buffeted unpredictably on the air currents.

  The old flintlock muskets that were prevalent in the South at the outbreak of the war were colorful relics. Their erratic behavior is best illustrated by the prodigious amount of slang spawned by the weapon: Go off half-cocked; shoot your wad; flash in the pan; lock, stock, and barrel. The Union had some bad guns of their own; one Pennsylvania regiment reported getting some cases of Belgian rifles packed in grease that could only be shot once before requiring “repairs to one or the other, the gun or the man.”