The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  Many of these key railroad personnel went back to the North once war was declared. Labor shortage was a perennial problem for the South’s railroads, compounded by regular call-ups of railroad men to join the military. Wisely, the Confederate government prevented many railroad workers from being called up through exemptions to the draft, which, curiously, were not so freely issued in the North. As the war wore on, however, the railroads in the South found it increasingly difficult to find labor, and many of the gaps were filled by slaves, either owned directly or “rented” from plantations, who were employed in a variety of roles.

  The Civil War was the world’s first railroad war, and it was inevitable that neither side exploited the new technology as fully as it might. But it would be the South’s failings in this regard that would prove the most damaging. The railroads supplied all the major battles of the war, many of which took place at junctions or near key sections of line. Even the skirmish that was the prelude to the conflict, fought eighteen months before the official hostilities broke out—which gave us the famous song “John Brown’s Body”—was played out on the railroad.

  John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (then in Virginia) in October 1859 was a bizarre, almost suicidal raid backed by a group of affluent “free soilers,” as the abolitionists were known. With a group of twenty fellow raiders, including five blacks, Brown rowed across the Potomac River from Maryland to occupy the federal armory at Harpers Ferry. They encountered little resistance and soon took over the arsenal. It was, however, an ill-thought-out venture, and the raiders’ fanciful ambition of using the weapons to help foment a wider rebellion among the local slaves would quickly founder. Ironically, the first casualty of the raid was a free black baggage master at the railroad station, who was killed in error by one of Brown’s sentries. Brown held up the midnight service at Harpers Ferry for several hours and cut the telegraph cables to prevent the alert from being given, but then, inexplicably, allowed the train to proceed, ensuring that by morning the armory was surrounded by local militia. Thereafter, the arsenal was quickly retaken by a force of US Marines commanded by Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee, who rushed to the scene using the Baltimore & Ohio. Brown, along with several of his colleagues, was hanged a few weeks later, creating a martyr of this eccentric abolitionist and a song remembered today.

  The raid was one of the more violent illustrations of the growing tension that was rapidly making war inevitable. Slavery was at the root of the conflict, but the two parts of the United States were diverging in every significant way. Whereas the North was basing its economy on industrialization and urbanization, the South wanted to remain a land of plantations based on slave labor. The South, too, was insistent that its government, led by Jefferson Davis, should remain weak, while states’ rights would remain paramount. The only exception to this general doctrine of state autonomy was the fugitive slave laws passed by Congress in 1793 and 1850, which provided for the return to their owners of slaves who had escaped across state boundaries. In other words, each state was almost an independent nation in itself. These fundamental differences explain why the conflict was much more than a localized civil war—it pitted two contrasting ways of life against each other. Its scale and breadth were more in keeping with a major international war than an internal conflict, as the military operations during the Civil War were conducted over an area equal to the whole of Europe, a scale made possible by the extensive use of the railroads. The Northern railroads themselves exacerbated the antipathy between the two sides, as the South was deeply suspicious of the big companies’ expansionist tendencies. In the 1850s, the idea of a transcontinental railroad had been discussed several times in Congress (see next chapter), but each time the legislation was blocked by the southern delegates, who were insisting on a southern route. There was, though, more to the dispute than simply the location of the line. The southern leaders perceived the transcontinental as the means of extending their plantation economy westward, replicating the same kind of small-town America characteristic of the antebellum South and, crucially, retaining the slave labor that was integral to their way of life: “The South saw land in a traditional light, as home and heritage, not as a natural resource to benefit capital and state.”8

  Northern business interests, led by the big railroad companies that were the largest corporations of the time, had very different ideas. To them, the railroads were the means of colonizing the interior and exploiting its resources. The railroad was the instrument through which they were able to control any amount of land under a single government. Gleefully, they considered the possibilities offered by the railroads infinite. Not for them a limited vision of small-town America: “The railroad gave them the confidence to expand and take in land far in excess of what any European nation or ancient civilization had been able successfully to control. They also saw in the railroad the ability to expand civilization beyond its historical boundaries, for the railroad seemed to promise that towns, cities, and industries could be put down anywhere as long as they were tied to the rest of the Union by rail.”9

  Steam power, and the rails along which it could run, meant that factories could be built anywhere. English novelist Anthony Trollope, who happened to be in America at the outbreak of the war and who was a fervent supporter of the antislavery policies of the North, was troubled by this expansionist policy, as he felt that Canada, a British colony, might be included in these ambitious plans and come under the Northern yoke. This nakedly commercial view, which saw the vast lands of the West as a capitalist enterprise controlled by business interests in the Northern cities, troubled the Southerners as much as the attempt to abolish slavery. Consequently, the South was opposed to the very idea of offering land grants to railroad companies to help fund their construction, as would eventually become the norm for funding railroad construction in the West. Thanks to energetic lobbying by the vested interests of southern congressmen, legislation for the building of a transcontinental railroad was repeatedly blocked in Congress during the 1850s.

  The election of Abraham Lincoln, as the first Republican president, in November 1860 made war inevitable. The Confederate States of America was created by six seceded Southern states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina) in February 1861, with Jefferson Davis as its provisional president. Five states—Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—would secede from the Union by the end of May. Hostilities broke out barely a month after Lincoln’s inauguration in early March 1861. The trigger was an attack by rebel forces on Fort Sumter, a fortified island four miles off the coast, guarding the entrance to Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. On April 14, after a lengthy standoff, a Confederate militia attacked the fort to prevent it from being resupplied and easily overwhelmed the defending Federal forces. This victory for the Southern forces marked the beginning of the Civil War.

  Attention on both sides quickly turned to the railroads. The immediate task for the combatants was to call up large numbers of men in order to build up their respective armies. Lincoln decided to centralize his resources in Washington, which had been earmarked for early attack by the Confederates, and called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to protect the capital. His decision would lead to an incident in Baltimore, Maryland, that resulted in the first bloodshed on the mainland and demonstrated that the railroads would be a key aspect of the conflict. The failure of the railroad companies to build a connecting line between any of the termini in Baltimore—a city through which the troops arriving from the North had to pass to reach Washington—forced all passengers traversing the town to change trains or to endure the tedious process of having their coaches hauled by horses along the main streets on streetcar tracks. The first of Lincoln’s volunteers, two thousand men principally from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, who had responded quickly to their president’s call, arrived at Baltimore’s President Street Station on the morning of April 19. Although Maryland remained a Union state, many of its people were opposed to the Northern
cause, and a crowd of protesters began to shower the coaches carrying the troops through the town with bricks and stones. When a second group of men was told to march the mile across town from the President Street Station of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad to the Camden Station of the Baltimore & Ohio, they were provided with live ammunition, but that did not prevent them from being attacked by a local secessionist mob, and they fired back. The ultimate toll in the “Baltimore Riot of 1861” was four soldiers and twelve civilians killed, along with numerous injuries. The response of the authorities was a rather clumsy overreaction. In order to protect the area from mob violence or even from a full-scale battle between secessionist residents and Unionist troops, they decided to destroy railroad bridges on both the Northern Central Railway and on the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore, thereby cutting off Baltimore’s rail connections with the North and preventing any troops from transferring through the city. This isolation could not be allowed to last. The railroads were swiftly repaired, but Lincoln was wise enough to ensure that his troops no longer traveled through volatile Baltimore. At Lincoln’s instigation, a route bypassing Baltimore was created by Thomas Scott, the vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The troops heading toward Washington from the North took the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore to the Susquehanna River, where they boarded a steamer to Annapolis to connect with the Annapolis & Elk Ridge Railroad and then with the Washington branch of the Baltimore & Ohio. Various sections of the line were taken over by the government, and these enforced emergency arrangements led to the genesis of the United States Military Railroads, which was to play a key part in the conflict. Scott, with the assistance of a young Andrew Carnegie, who was later to become one of the richest men in the United States through his domination of the steel industry, was given the task of supervising the railroads on behalf of the government until the government’s control over them was enshrined in legislation early in 1862.

  This immediate imposition of federal power over the railroads was to be in marked contrast to the situation in the South, where government control of the railroads was never properly established. Lincoln had long realized that such control was essential to the war effort. Anticipating war, two weeks before the fall of Fort Sumter Lincoln’s government had already taken possession of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, recognizing that it would become the lifeline of the federal army protecting Washington. As the nerve center of the Unionist campaign and the seat of government, Washington was in a somewhat vulnerable location, effectively an outpost in Southern territory and uncomfortably close to enemy lines. So close, indeed, that it was not uncommon for the Unionist leaders in Washington to see, on a clear day, a rebel line in full operation over the Potomac in Virginia where Arlington National Cemetery, the military cemetery established after the Civil War, now lies. In calling up the volunteers to Washington, Lincoln told the railroad companies that trains on government business must have priority over civilian passenger and freight services. The North’s railroads, despite the problem of Baltimore, were far more efficient than those of the South. As Sarah H. Gordon puts it, “The speed with which Northern mobilization took place and the numbers of men that were drawn together were both directly attributable to the availability of railroads.”10

  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.”11 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.12 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.”13 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,14 in July 1861, turning an almost certain defeat into victory for the Confederates. The battle started as an a
ttempt 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.”15