The Great Railroad Revolution (20 page)

Lincoln was far more successful in quickly galvanizing his forces than were the Confederates, who were constrained not only by the deficiencies of their railroads but also by the reluctance of the various states to accede to the requirements of their government, even if that now represented only the eleven seceded states. The inadequacy of the Southern railroads, built principally to further local interests, greatly hindered early Confederate mobilization. The lack of connections between the various short lines meant that transporting troops and matériel across long distances was a more time-consuming and onerous business than it should have been. Logistics would be a perennial headache for the Confederates throughout the conflict.

Jefferson Davis, the president of the seceded states, who had vehemently opposed Lincoln over the bridge built across the Mississippi, now found that the parochial view he had taken on railroad development rebounded against him. Even with a major conflict looming, the Southern towns and cities were reluctant to allow the connections that they had long resisted. Davis was trapped by the contradictions of his own politics. The very essence of the secessionist ethos dictated against the imposition of unilateral demands from the center: “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.” Moreover, although the Southern railroads were in theory eager to help, somehow their good intentions rarely materialized in practice. They seemed torn between patriotism and profit: “Southern railway managements regarded themselves as true patriots, but claimed that their first duty was to their shareholders.”
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Some wanted to offer their services to the
government for free, but it became rapidly apparent that this was financially unworkable, and soon the railroad companies, desperately short of funds, were charging premium rates to transport troops. The very philosophy that had led the South to secede—its emphasis on states' rights and its reluctance to encourage strong central government—militated against bringing the railroads under the military yoke.

The North faced no such limitation. Lincoln had, right from the start of the war, proclaimed that the railroads must obey government orders. Now, with the war raging, he realized that it was essential to enshrine this in law. A series of congressional acts in early 1862 allowed the federal government to take possession of a range of important railroad and telegraph lines, including rolling stock, locomotive depots, and all essential equipment, and placed railroad employees under strict military control. The United States Military Railroads was formally created to operate lines under direct government control. In the event, very few Northern railroads were taken over, because the very existence of the legislation ensured that they fell into line, meeting military needs when asked to do so by the federal government.
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But, as the conflict wore on, the US Military Railroads became a major force in the federal war effort: it assumed operational control of railroads in captured territory, built 650 miles of line, and reinstated routes damaged by sabotage—a tactic that had come into its own during the war. By the war's end, the US Military Railroads controlled more than 2,000 lines of track.

South of the Mason-Dixon line, which separated the two combatants, the Confederate government struggled to impose itself on the railroads. It established a special government section as part of its Quartermaster Bureau to deal with railroad matters and act as a liaison between the railroads, Jefferson Davis's government, and the individual states. However, the Railroad Bureau was not given the power to force the railroads to coordinate their workings or even to make them acquiesce to military demands: “Throughout the war, Confederate government policies encouraged railroads to handle civilian traffic in preference to military traffic. There was little real co-operation between railroads and senior military officers, and there was resistance to creating interchange points.”
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Over the course of the war, successive leaders of the bureau tried to push forward changes that
would have improved the efficiency of the Southern rail network, but they failed. The states' distrust of a powerful center blocked any such move until the dying days of the war, when at last, in February 1865, an equivalent bill to the railroad legislation north of the border was passed by the Confederate Congress, far too late to have any impact on the outcome of the war.

Nevertheless, as soon as the conflict began, the South, like the North, was quick to realize the potential of the railroad. The railroads were to play a decisive role in the first major land battle at Bull Run,
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in July 1861, turning an almost certain defeat into victory for the Confederates. The battle started as an attempt by the Unionists to put a quick end to the war by capturing the secessionists' capital, Richmond, which was barely a hundred miles from Washington. An army led by Brigadier General Irvin McDowell advanced across Bull Run, a small tributary of the Potomac twenty miles southwest of Washington, to engage rebel forces. The Confederates, led by General P. G. T. Beauregard, initially found themselves under pressure and retreated, until General Joseph Johnston, stationed in the Shenandoah Valley, sent reinforcements east by railroad over the Blue Ridge Mountains to support the retreating army. Although the line they used belonged to a small railroad, the Manassas Gap, that could scarcely cope with the sudden load, and the engineers at one point refused to work the trains, claiming fatigue, enough troops reached the battlefield by rail to turn the tide. With further troops arriving on the line over the next couple of days, the Confederates launched a counterattack—inspired partly by General Thomas Jackson, whose refusal to retreat during this battle earned him his famous nickname of “Stonewall”—and the Federal troops fled back toward Washington. The Confederate victory changed the course of the war over the next few months. The idea, which had been current among Unionists, that the war would be quickly over now dissipated: “The result stunned the North, emboldened the South and presaged the long and bloody conflict to come.”
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Nowhere symbolized the importance of railroads in the war more than the small railroad town of Manassas, close to the Bull Run battlefield. It was the site of a junction linking the short Manassas Gap Railroad with the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, which would change hands numerous times during the war. Consequently, the town became a supply depot for
whichever force occupied it, and both sides fought hard to seize and retain the town. After Bull Run the Confederates remained in the area and dug in for the winter in entrenchments at Centreville, six miles from Manassas. The two towns were connected by a road that was fine in the summer, but in the wet weather of the autumn turned into a muddy morass under the weight of military traffic. The six horse and mule teams that used the road to bring supplies from the railroad to the encampment of forty thousand men at Centreville proved inadequate to the task. Between December 1861 and February 1862, a six-mile line was built—mainly by slave labor—to bypass the road and ensure that supplies could be brought right up to the camp. For a couple of months, despite difficulties obtaining rolling stock, the short railroad proved a vital lifeline for the men at Centreville. On March 11 the line's brief existence came to an end as the troops were ordered to retreat, and they pulled up the tracks behind them as they withdrew. It was the first of hundreds of miles built for military purposes by both sides during the conflict.

As the Battle of Bull Run demonstrated, in the early days of the war the Confederate generals had a better understanding of how to use the railroads than their Unionist rivals. This made it all the more problematic that the Confederacy was unable to take control of its railroads because of the reluctance of the states to countenance centralized direction of the network by Davis's government in Richmond. The Confederate generals, who are generally regarded as having been far more imaginative and effective leaders than their Unionist counterparts in the initial stages of the conflict, followed a simple strategy. Knowing the Confederacy had fewer resources, they adopted a defensive strategy that relied—as weaker armies must—on fighting “smart,” and the mobility afforded by the railroads was crucial to that plan. To overcome the difficulty of defending a large territory with a small army, it was essential to shift troops around its perimeter with speed and skill: “The South's leaders decided they didn't need to ‘win' against a superior enemy—they simply needed not to lose. Only by effectively using its 9,500 miles of railroad could the South prevail.”
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Unfortunately for the Confederacy, the theory could not be put into practice. A lack of coordination among the railroads, and the absence of an integrated command structure, would prove damaging to the Southern
cause. Even railroads owned by individual states sometimes refused to accede to requests from the central government. Early in the war, William A. Ashe, who headed the Railroad Bureau, demanded that the Western & Atlantic, which was owned by the State of Georgia, supply six locomotives and seventy wagons to move freight out to eastern Tennessee. However, not only did Georgia's governor, Joseph E. Brown, turn down the request, but he threatened to send troops to fight any Confederate officials who tried to commandeer the rolling stock. Farther south, the head of the Florida Railroad, David L. Yulee, was no more helpful. Although his railroad was unable to operate because it had suffered damage, he refused to allow its rails to be lifted and redeployed to create a connecting line between Florida and Georgia, which was essential to keep the Confederate army supplied with beef. In yet another failure of wartime cooperation, promises made by railroads to provide transportation for free soon proved to be empty. The Richmond & Petersburg, for example, immediately raised its charges when the company realized the line was a vital part of the military buildup for the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863.

At times it almost seemed that the Confederacy was deliberately setting out to reduce the effectiveness of its own railroads. Before the war, the South had neglected its limited industrial base by continuing to import most of its railroad equipment from the North, rather than trying to expand existing factories such as those in Savannah, Georgia, and Richmond, Virginia. Instead of being allowed to continue to produce material for the railroads, these facilities were quickly turned over to the production of ordnance, a shortsighted decision that further hampered the railroads' ability to maintain services. Moreover, even though few of the Southern railroads had the capability of repairing their own rails, many were forced to give up any spare ones to be melted down to provide armor plating for ships. The extent of the South's plight was highlighted by the fact that, in the later years of the war, the Confederacy resorted to tearing up the tracks on branch lines, the cannibalization that had so angered the Florida Railroad, in order to keep key services operating. According to railroad historian John Stover, “As early as the spring of 1862, southern railroad officials were predicting the complete breakdown of their service because of shortages of rolling stock and motive power.”
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The canny way in which the Confederacy exploited the railroad at the start of the war was illustrated by a particularly destructive raid on the Baltimore & Ohio, whose line out to Wheeling on the Ohio River effectively formed the boundary between the warring parties. The Unionists fell victim to a clever ruse by Stonewall Jackson, who demonstrated all the ruthlessness and cunning necessary to maintain the upper hand against stronger forces in a scheme known as the Martinsburg Raid. Although the Confederates occupied the territory around a section of line seized by Jackson, Unionist freight trains were allowed to continue running along the railroad. This seemingly magnanimous gesture, though, was a trap. Recognizing that locomotive power would be crucial to the war, Jackson devised a scheme to capture as many engines as he could manage and simultaneously wreck the railroad. Jackson informed the Unionists that they could use the Confederate zone of the line only between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., so that the passage of trains would not wake his troops. Remarkably, the Unionists accepted this flimsy argument, enabling Jackson to lay a perfect trap. On June 14, 1861, he allowed all the trains into a fifty-four-mile section of track, but then trapped them in Confederate territory by tearing up the rails. Before the Union forces grasped what was happening, Jackson's men destroyed 42 locomotives and 386 freight cars and ripped up miles of rail for use in the South. They also wrecked the machine shops and warehouses at Martinsburg, Virginia,
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and made off with 14 locomotives, which had to be taken into Southern territory by road in the absence of a rail connection. The raid forced the closure of the western part of the Baltimore & Ohio for nine months, greatly hampering the North's logistics.

The attack was, however, a self-inflicted wound. The destruction wreaked by Jackson on the Baltimore & Ohio angered Marylanders—who saw it as
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railroad—and turned their sympathies against the Confederacy. The company's president, John Garrett, already a strong Unionist, was therefore able to rally the local people around the railroad, keeping the rest of the line operating throughout the conflict. That was crucial, since the Baltimore & Ohio would later play a key role in the biggest troop transfer of the war, the relief of the beleaguered defenders of Chattanooga.

Despite their decision to subject the railroads to central government control, the Unionists were slower to understand how best to exploit the
railroads in this new form of warfare. In the words of George H. Douglas, “Union generals took a more desultory attitude toward [the railroad's] various uses, and the leaden-footed bureaucracy of the U.S. government took a long time deciding how, whether, and for what purpose it should use the many miles of railroad in its territory.”
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