This ability to transfer troops so rapidly gave the North a distinct advantage over the rebels. During this huge operation, the Unionist railroads were under military control, with the remit to prioritize the movement of troops, whereas for the most part the Southern military was never allowed to co-ordinate the railroads in that way: ‘Only at times of obvious crisis were the Southern military authorities able to run through trains.’16 One such exception was the operation to reinforce Chattanooga before the battle of Chickamauga, which involved six railroads and a distance of 750 miles with 25,000 men being transported from the north-eastern corner of Mississippi to Atlanta in a period of ten days. Similarly, the rebels employed the railroads for several troop transfers, and although they did not cover the vast distances of the major Unionist movements, several involved huge numbers of men such as the 40,000 mobilized in Mississippi in the early stages of the war travelling on a variety of railroads. However, for the most part the rebels found it harder to make efficient use of the local railroads because of the military’s inability to impose itself on the railroads’ management in the way that McCallum could in the North. Without that strong government control, there was continued animosity between railroad administrators and local army officers, and no arbiter to sort out disputes. Nor were the lessons pushed so hard by Haupt ever learnt in the South: ‘Army officers… were all too frequently ignorant of how delicately interlocked railroad operations were and consequently brought trains to a standstill amid chaos which might take days to sort out.’17
Money, private enterprise and weak government were at the root of the problem: ‘Southern railroad managements regarded themselves as true patriots, but claimed that their first duty was to their share-holders. ’18 Therefore, they were eager to squeeze as much money out of the Confederate government as possible, which meant charging high tariffs rather than the low ones promised at the outbreak of war, exploiting their monopoly position and keeping hold of precious locomotives that could be better used by other railroads. For example, one of the railroads involved in the build-up to the Chickamauga battle, the Richmond & St Petersburg, immediately raised its charges when it saw that the line was an essential part of the military build-up. Overall, the Southern railroads promised much but delivered far less.
Moreover, there was a perennial labour shortage. As men left to join the Army, they were replaced by unskilled workers and sometimes hired slaves, but at times companies were so desperate that they poached each other’s employees, bidding up the prices they were paying to the slave owners. The Confederate government failed to understand the importance of keeping experienced railwaymen in their jobs to ensure the smooth operation of the railroads.
There was also a fundamental ideological reason why the determination of the North to ensure the railroads served the needs of the war was not matched in the South, and that was because the very essence of the secession ethos militated against strong central government. As Westwood succinctly sums it up: ‘In the South, nothing could be strictly imposed, and every compromise failed accordingly. Because the Confederates’ quarrel with the North centred around their demand for freedom from interference from Washington, they were psychologically incapable of accepting that their railroads should be subject to interference from their own government.’19 Even though, in the early years of the war, the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, appointed an assistant quartermaster to take charge of all rail transport in Virginia, he was not given the power to force the railroads to co-ordinate their workings or acquiesce to military demands. Over the course of the war, various efforts were made to try to bring the railroads to heel, but each time the politicians were too concerned about their local interests and angering the railroads to force through legislation. It was only in February 1865, just three months before the end of the fighting, that a Railroad Bureau with substantial powers was eventually created.
The Confederates’ military effort was also hampered by their failure to maintain their key rail supply routes as, towards the end of the war, a lack of experienced repair gangs and the difficulties of obtaining equipment (not only did the South have little industrial capacity but the Union naval blockade effectively cut off the Confederacy from the rest of the world) meant that by then the railroads were barely able to support any significant troop movement. The condition of the Southern railroads declined markedly in the later stages of the war: ‘By the final year of the war, a passenger train which averaged more than 10 miles per hour was exceptional.’20 Troops were taking three days to travel a hundred miles, infuriating the military leadership.
Not surprisingly, when these generals began to write their memoirs after the war, it was the Southern railroads which were often blamed for the South’s military failures. While this is somewhat unfair because the Southern railroads still contributed massively to the war effort, even though they were undoubtedly inferior to their northern counterparts, there is no doubt that the lack of control of the railroads by the military was a major handicap.
Moreover, the South ultimately proved less adept at destroying railroads, which became a key aspect of warfare in the conflict. It was impossible to make a railroad irreparable since, with sufficient labour and ingenuity, the most devastated line could, in time, be restored. However, the Unionists proved far better at causing widespread destruction that required far more work to bring the lines back into use: ‘Confederate raiders never acquired the pure destructive skill of the more mechanically-minded northern soldiers,’21 John F. Stover, a railway historian, wrote dismissively.
Inevitably, the railroads were to play a key role in the final assault that ended the war. The successful supply of Sherman’s army during his campaign from Chattanooga to Atlanta which finally led to outright victory in this bloody and prolonged war was the most outstanding achievement of the military railroads in the Civil War. Sherman recognized this. In his memoirs, he confirms, with military precision, the point made in Chapter One, that without the railroads it would have been impossible to have conducted a campaign on the scale of his final assault on the South. The Western & Atlantic, which together with the Nashville & Chattanooga and the Louisville & Nashville created a near 500-mile-long supply line from Louisville to Atlanta, proved absolutely essential to his campaign and in particular for feeding the horses: ‘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.’22 A cat-and-mouse struggle over the line was fought throughout this period with Confederate forces, led by General John Hood, one of the South’s best commanders, mounting frequent attacks on the railroad. The Construction Corps of the United States Military Railroads was kept permanently busy, at times starting to reconstruct sections of line while the destruction was still being carried out a few miles away. The speed with which they conducted their work was remarkable, especially as the destruction techniques had become increasingly thorough. When, in October 1864, Hood destroyed thirty-five miles of track and 450 feet of bridges, the line was restored within a week by a workforce of 2,000 led by E. C. Smeed, who had been one of Haupt’s most able deputies in Virginia, and was fully operational within two. McCallum, in his memoirs, pays particular credit to the railroad workers in these gangs on whom the entire success of the military operation was dependent: ‘All [the railway workers] were thoroughly imbued with the fact, that upon the success of railroad operations, in forwarding supplies to the front, depended… the success of our armies… that should failure have taken place either in keeping lines in repair, or in operating them, General Sherman’s campaign… would have resulted in disaster and defeat.’23 McCallum stressed that the dangers and hardships endured by the railway workers was greater than for any other class of civilian employees and that they showed courage equal to that of the soldiers, at times working on the restora
tion of lines continually for up to ten days with barely any sleep and little food.
Sherman’s reliance on the railroad in fact led him to become ‘the greatest railroad wrecker of all’.24 Precisely because he had made such intensive use of the railroads, he realized their importance and consequently made sure that he targeted those in the enemy’s control or which risked being used by them. Indeed, his most thorough act of destruction was on the very railroad which he had used to supply his army. In the final part of his attack after the fall of Atlanta, which was abandoned by the Confederates once the last rail line had been taken over by the Unionists, Sherman then decided to march on through the South without relying on the railroads, fearing that, deep inside hostile territory, his rail supply line would be ever vulnerable to attack or, worse, takeover by the enemy, who would then be able to chase his men by rail. Instead, during the final weeks, he built up supplies using the Western & Atlantic and then uprooted it behind him, preventing the Confederates from pursuing him. His troops ripped up eighty miles of track, heating and twisting the rails, dismantled a bridge and destroyed the surviving railroad installations at Atlanta. The destruction continued as he marched 300 miles east to Savannah in Georgia, his troops ripping up a similar length of railroad, much of it vital to the Confederate war effort. Sherman may have eschewed the iron road for the last part of his march, but his success was only made possible thanks to the supplies he amassed by rail in preparation for the final assault.
It was not only railroads which suffered under his scorched-earth policy. This was an all-out assault on his enemies’ resources, and farms, factories and warehouses all went up in smoke. Shops, crops and whole plantations were devastated as he cut a sixty-mile swathe through the country, and when Sherman headed back north after reaching the coast, he undertook the most decisive piece of railroad destruction. Instead of making a direct attack on Charleston, Sherman ordered the destruction of sixty miles of track around Branchville, a small junction town on the South Carolina Railroad. Thus, with ease, Sherman severed Charleston from all its sources of supply and according to Edwin Pratt, ‘left the garrison with no alternative but to surrender’.25 It was the last straw for General Lee, who, bereft of supplies and desperate to ensure that the divisions created by the war could ultimately be healed, surrendered in April 1865, thus ending the first railway war.
Railways may be alternately destroyed and overstretched at times of war, but they also tend to make handsome profits as a result of conflict. The Civil War was no exception. The railroad companies prospered thanks to increasing their business both directly by transporting troops and supplies and indirectly from private manufacturers with government contracts. Of course, there was damage to be repaired, not only from the direct attacks in the war but also because of the failure of the soldiers to understand that the railroads needed to be treated with care and respect. As a minor but not uncommon example, on the way to the battle of Chickamauga the Confederate troops ripped off the side walls of the boxcars in which they were travelling to improve their view and ventilation. More amusingly but still with serious consequences, Haupt found that unless told not to do so, soldiers were wont to bath and wash their clothes in water needed for the supply of engines, with the spectacular result that ‘many engines were stopped on the road by foaming boilers caused by soapy water’.26
Overall the war secured the railroads’ position as a vital part of the nation’s infrastructure, with a proven record of being able to cope in extraordinary circumstances and with exceptional loads. The nation’s system expanded by 5,000 miles during the conflict, reaching 35,000 miles of track by 1865, and each year gross income increased, with profits rising almost as fast. The first edition of the American Railroad Journal in 1864 called 1863 ‘the most prosperous ever known to the American Railways’.27
In addition to Haupt’s strictures on how best to operate railways in wartime, there was no shortage of lessons to be learnt from the conflict. The most obvious was that the railroads were a major weapon of war, and maintaining them in a workable condition was, at times, more important than battlefield military strategies. Constructing and rebuilding railways, too, became crucial aspects of military planning. The second lesson, deriving logically from the recognition of the vital nature of rail transport, was that the destruction of the enemy’s railroads became a key military aim. In the absence of aeroplanes, this necessitated raids into enemy territory. Consequently, the Civil War was the first one in which the destruction of the other side’s industrial capability, as illustrated by Sherman’s final march, was a clear strategic aim that marked a new type of ‘total war’ made possible only through the ability of the railroads to move troops and supplies rapidly. As Sherman’s last cruel advance showed, railroad destruction became, as one historian puts it, a new weapon of war. Indeed, Pratt is in no doubt as to the importance of targeting the enemy’s railways: ‘It was the American Civil War that was to elevate railway destruction and restoration into a science.’28 While in the early stages of the war it was the Southern rebels who attacked the railroads which could be used to invade their territory, later on it was the Unionists who wreaked havoc by targeting the Confederates’ railroads on a much larger scale.
Another enduring lesson was that the relationship between the railroads and the military had to be settled from the outset, as had happened in the North. The Southern railroads remained a law unto themselves for most of the war, sometimes accepting non-essential civilian traffic when troops or ammunition were desperately needed at the front. Rail transport became much sought after and forwarding agents were not averse to bribing railroadmen to expedite their shipments. While the military needed overall control, it also had to be alive to the complexities involved in railroad operation. The process had to be through negotiation rather than military commands, as it was ‘no use for generals to threaten to shoot stationmasters who would not provide the trains they demanded’.29
The fact that railroads were bi-directional was another obvious but not always understood fact. The military men tended at first to think only of getting to the battlefield, but the railroads had a vital role in both evacuating it quickly, especially after a defeat, and removing the wounded from the site. Initially, the example of special ambulance trains which had begun to be used in Europe was ignored, greatly contributing to the death toll, but soon the importance of providing good transport for the wounded was accepted. After the first major battle, Bull Run, the railroads were unprepared for the task of removing the injured from battlefields and provided nothing more than freight cars with straw on the floors. The agonies endured by the suffering men prompted several railroads to consider fitting out ambulance coaches but the process proved slow. The first railroad to adopt the idea was the Wilmington & Weldon, in the South, which produced an ambulance train capable of carrying twenty patients within a week of the first battle of Bull Run, and in the North hospital cars were running in the spring of 1862 between Boston, Massachusetts, and Albany in New York State with a hair mattress, pillows and blanket for each berth. However, most railroads – and indeed the two armies – failed to understand the huge demand for trains with medical facilities likely to be placed on them in a major theatre of war. Weber, the historian of the Northern railroads, says that during the Peninsular Campaign of 1862 the wounded had to lie on the bare floors of the wagons and, according to a contemporary source: ‘The worst cases are put inside the covered cars – close, windowless boxes – sometimes with a little straw or a blanket to lie on, oftener without. They arrive a festering mass of dead and living together.’30
The situation improved, thanks to the efforts of a government agency, the Sanitary Commission, which commissioned special ‘ward’ cars, each holding twenty-four removable stretchers suspended from uprights with heavy rubber bands, that enabled patients to be brought directly from the battlefield. They were used on various lines but were never available in sufficient numbers to ensure that all the wounded could use them. Soon whole hospit
al trains were in use, led by the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, and when General Sherman attacked Atlanta, he had three such trains, each capable of carrying up to 200 men, operating between Louisville and Atlanta. These trains had special markings and, with one exception in April 1863 when rebel raiders burned a hospital train after allowing the wounded to leave the cars, were not attacked even when passing through enemy territory.
Armoured trains were another innovation that made their first significant appearance in the American Civil War. The idea of armoured trains was almost as old as the railways and the earliest were probably the improvised trains used by the Austrians to help quell the revolts mentioned in the previous chapter. The first American armoured trains were built to patrol the railroads north of Baltimore against Confederate saboteurs, which was, according to the standard work on the subject, ‘the earliest example of armored trains performing their classic role of antipartisan warfare’.31
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