The Great Railroad Revolution

by Christian Wolmar

  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.”16

  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.”17

  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,18 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 their 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.”19

  Lincoln himself, however, needed no persuading of the vital nature of the railroads. After all, he had not only, as we have seen, done so much to ensure the railroads could cross the Mississippi, but he had also pioneered the concept of politicians’ whistle-stop tours during his election campaign. With the power of legislation behind him, he set about creating the appropriate organizational framework to allow him to best harness the railroads to the war effort. Lincoln was blessed by good fortune in his choice of the men to carr
y out the task. Once the legislation granting the federal government oversight was passed in January 1862, Daniel McCallum, the general superintendent of the Erie, was appointed military director and superintendent of the railroads. McCallum would later share his responsibilities with Herman Haupt, who can lay claim to being the world’s first military railroad strategist. Both men were given honorary ranks in the army, which was important in ensuring that their decisions on railroad matters could not be challenged by the military. Haupt was notionally McCallum’s deputy, but was very much a law unto himself. While McCallum coordinated activities in Washington, Haupt was out in the field overseeing the work. McCallum, a Scottish immigrant, was a brilliant organizer who combined both administrative and engineering talent—a rarity among railroad managers. His military demeanor and reputation for strict discipline would stand him in good stead. Haupt, who became known as the “war’s wizard of railroading,” was an equally brilliant but famously difficult character who had precisely the right qualifications for the job.20 He had passed through West Point, the main US military academy, where he had been its youngest cadet ever, but resigned his commission to become a professor of mathematics and engineering, writing the definitive textbook on bridge building and later becoming superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, where, as we saw in Chapter 3, he helped design the Horseshoe Curve. As a result of the two men’s efforts, the Unionists became adept at the twin tasks needed to win the war: building railroads and destroying them. Haupt’s first job for the military was to repair the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, a strategically important line that connected the two capitals, Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, DC, as well as providing the principal supply route between the main Union Army of the Potomac and the smaller Army of the Rappahannock. In response to the Peninsula Campaign launched in April 1862 by General George McClellan as an attempt to end the war quickly by capturing Richmond, the rebels’ capital, the Confederates had wrecked several miles of the railroad in a fierce attack aimed at disrupting the Unionist supply lines. They had been particularly thorough and had learned from previous attempts to wreck railroads that had been all too easy to remedy. Heating up rails and twisting them was too arduous and not that effective, since the rails could be straightened. Instead, the rebels devised an iron claw that could quickly tear up both the rails and their supporting ties. Bridges were blown up and locomotives destroyed with cannonballs.

  In response, Haupt had to call upon all his skills to restore the line. Despite being hampered by the lack of skilled workers, he reconstructed three miles of line in the first three days and restored the bridges at an astonishing rate. Within two weeks, up to twenty trains per day were running on the fifteen-mile stretch previously wrecked by the Confederates. Lincoln himself came to view the work, notably the perilous-looking four-hundred-foot trestle bridge over the Potomac that had been erected in just nine days using unweathered wood and a largely unskilled workforce. He was suitably impressed: “That man Haupt has built a bridge across Potomac Creek . . . and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.” The bridge gave rise to the greatest testimony to Haupt’s work, this oft-used but anonymous quote: “The Yankees can build bridges quicker than the Rebs can burn them down.”21

  Despite the failure of the Peninsula Campaign, which ended in the bloody Battle of Antietam in September 1862, the importance of Haupt’s efforts was recognized. The reconstruction of the line would be the first of many such projects undertaken by Haupt and the growing team of railroad engineers under him. With the backing of Lincoln, McCallum and Haupt set about making field commanders understand how best to use— and not abuse—the railroads. The generals needed to learn—and fast. Officers were wont to make outrageous demands on the railroads without realizing that unscheduled or unexpected changes could cause massive delays and inconvenience. On one occasion, when he investigated the nonarrival of four trains at the terminus in Piedmont, North Carolina, Haupt discovered that a general had held a train on the main track so that his wife could enjoy a night’s rest in a nearby farmhouse. Going to the scene, he ordered the conductor to restart the train and then came face-to-face with the woman who had inadvertently caused the delay. Writing in his autobiography, Haupt recalled his reaction when the elegantly dressed lady came tripping across the field. He was nothing if not restrained, but was clearly in retrospect embarrassed by his lack of manners: “I did not display extra gallantry on the occasion, nor even offer the lady assistance. She had detained four trains in three hours in a period of urgency, and I was not in an amiable mood.”22 He told her to get back on the train and rapidly got services moving again.

  This was not the only occasion that Haupt had to throw his weight around, but crucially he had the backing of the top brass. They issued instructions that were simple in expression but not always followed in practice: “No officer . . . shall have the right to detain a train, or order it to run in advance of schedule.” Enforcing that rule in the field was not always easy. Railroad war historian George Edgar Turner notes that “constant bickering went on between field officers and railroad men who would order them to move a train without reference to formal plans” and that officers were wont to disobey Haupt’s other rule, on the rapid emptying of wagons, too.23

  Slowly but surely, Haupt and McCallum managed to impose railroad discipline on the military. Haupt established a series of rules and priorities for railroad traffic: the carriage of subsistence stores was given first priority, then, in order, forage for the horses, ammunition, hospital supplies, and only then the carriage of troops—on the basis that they could travel on foot, if necessary. There was a system of priorities for the men, too, with veteran infantry regiments given precedence, followed by raw recruits, whereas artillery and cavalry troops were to be kept off the railroads entirely. Haupt decreed that the train timetable had to be determined by railroad personnel rather than the military, who had no understanding of railroad operations and constraints, and that both freight and passenger cars should be emptied and returned promptly, rather than being used as warehouses, or even offices. Indeed, Haupt once personally ejected a colonel who had set up his office in a boxcar in a siding, dumping the hapless fellow’s papers, chest, and furniture on the side of the tracks so that the wagon could be used for railroad operations. The rapid return of empty stock might seem like the sort of technical issue that is of interest only to trainspotters, but it was essential in maintaining the smooth running of the railroads. Haupt took steps to ensure that the railroads did not become clogged up with static stock or run out of spare cars by insisting that trains had to be unloaded quickly and the wagons returned straightaway. Simple enough, but so often ignored in the heat of war. He reckoned that provided his principles were adhered to, a single-track line could supply an army of two hundred thousand men, a far greater number than could ever be maintained on the inadequate roads of the day by means of horses, mules, and carts.

  The importance of sticking to his rules was demonstrated by Haupt’s crucial role in the supply operations for the Battle of Gettysburg, a Unionist victory in July 1863 that is widely accepted as the turning point of the war. The battle, in the Northern state of Pennsylvania, was the result of General Lee’s brave but ultimately foolhardy attempt—his second—to invade the North. The Southern forces were in an optimistic mood after a series of victories, and the Unionists decided to try to hold them at Gettysburg. As soon as it was realized that this was to be a key battle, Haupt went to Baltimore to organize the operation of the Western Maryland Railroad, a line running northwest from Baltimore to Westminster, thirty miles away, where it eventually connected through to the Gettysburg front. The Western Maryland was an inadequate single-track line with scrap-iron rails on poor-quality ties and no adequate sidings or even a telegraph system. Haupt quickly drafted four hundred men to improve the line, and consequently it was used to send a series of huge convoys to the front and, crucially, bring back the wounded from what proved to be the
bloodiest battle of the war. Rather than allowing a higgledy-piggledy timetable to be run by the military, Haupt established a service of three convoys of trains per day, each consisting of five ten-car sets carrying fifteen hundred tons of supplies, and once the battle commenced, they were used to return to Baltimore with up to four thousand wounded soldiers each.

  The other side of the coin was the destruction of lines that were of use to the enemy. This was a learning process, given the novelty of using railroads in warfare, and, as we have seen from the wrecking of the Fredericksburg Railroad, the Confederates had honed their destructive skills quickly, though later in the conflict the Unionists would eventually show themselves to be the most adept at this new but vital task: “Confederate raiders never acquired the pure destructive skill of the more mechanically minded northern soldiers.”24 Inevitably, it was Haupt who became an expert at destroying railroads as well as building them. He devised a particularly effective method of bringing down bridges that could be undertaken by just one trooper carrying all the required equipment in his pockets. The demolition man would simply drill holes into the wooden support beams and insert “torpedoes,” eight-inch cylinders filled with gunpowder and detonated with a two-foot fuse, which gave the wrecker enough time to get away and watch his handiwork. In this way, three men could bring down even the largest-span bridges in just ten minutes. Once the main beams had been destroyed, the rest of the structure invariably collapsed.

  Whereas most of the early destruction of the railroads was by the South, principally in preemptive moves to stop the federal armies from building up forces to launch attacks, the North had been actively wrecking railroads, too. There were a few early attacks by Northern forces such as one on the tracks around Harpers Ferry in February 1862, but the most famous of these early raids, recounted faithfully among others by the British thriller writer John Buchan, was the attempt by a young civilian scout, James Andrews, to destroy the crucial Confederate-controlled Western & Atlantic Railroad, which ran between Chattanooga and Atlanta.25 The raid two hundred miles into enemy territory was prompted by General Ormsby Mitchel, the commander in middle Tennessee, whose target was Chattanooga, a key hub for both rail and river transport. Wrecking the Western & Atlantic would have weakened the ability of the Confederates to defend the town, and Andrews was sent in with a group of twenty-one soldiers to capture a train and sabotage the line as they headed back north.