The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  Permitting all those trains to pass unchallenged and untouched was hard on Jackson. Not only was the steam coal they hauled helping the enemy, but he knew the Confederacy was desperate for rolling stock, particularly locomotives. It could use some of those big engines thundering by. But since he was under orders from Richmond to leave the railroad alone for the present, he suffered and endured.6

  By late May, however, he was through doing both. “The noise of your trains is intolerable,” he had complained to B&O President John W. Garrett earlier in the month. “My men find their repose disturbed by them each night. You will have to work out some other method of operating them.”7

  The forty-one-year-old Garrett was not one to complain to lightly, or as a regular thing. Although his intimate letters revealed him as kindly and affectionate, his public persona was brawny, broad-shouldered, ironhanded, blunt-spoken, and given to working the road in rough clothes with his construction gangs.8

  But Jackson, as his West Point classmates knew, conceded nothing to any man for blunt speaking. And he was at that moment in military command of the area through which Garrett’s trains must pass. The president of the line was at the Confederacy’s mercy and prey to Jackson’s will. Jackson’s will was that the B&O confine the nighttime traffic on its main stem to regularly scheduled passenger and express trains only.

  Garrett’s sidewhiskers must have quivered with impatience and displeasure. But he didn’t have much choice. Jackson not only held the whip hand, but Garrett must have suspected that he had the temperament, and very likely the inclination, to shut down his line altogether.

  Garrett no sooner had his nighttime traffic painfully rearranged to suit Jackson’s taste than the infuriating Confederate commander took exception to his daytime schedule as well. He believed it interfered with necessary military routine. So the railroad president had to work out yet another arrangement: The B&O was now to funnel all of its freight traffic, eastbound and westbound, through a daily two-hour window—11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.9

  “We then had, for two hours every day,” said Confederate Captain John D. Imboden, one of Jackson’s officers, “the liveliest railroad in America.”10 It was a train dispatcher’s nightmare.

  Virginians awoke on May 23 to the palpable feel of history in the making. Great events hung like smoke on the morning air; it was the day of the state’s secession referendum. The convention’s decision to leave the Union was before the people for a vote. Virginians were going to the polls, and Jackson that day had scheduled major trouble for the B&O. While the electorate was at the ballot box endorsing secession by three to one, he dramatically ended the hands-off policy toward the railroad. He had never liked it in the first place.

  With the line’s traffic patterns now constricted to his liking, he ordered Captain John Imboden at Point of Rocks on the Maryland side of the Potomac, to permit all westbound trains to pass as usual until 12:00 noon on that day, but let none go east. At noon Imboden was to disrupt the line so that it would take several days to repair. At the same time Colonel Kenton Harper in Martinsburg was to let all trains pass east, but let none go west. At noon Harper was to foul the line on his end. At that moment the B&O’s main stem between Point of Rocks and Martinsburg slammed shut, bottling up fifty-six locomotives and more than three hundred cars in the thirty-one-mile pocket between the two points.

  It was a train robbery to write home about. Jackson’s earlier demands on Garrett for changes in the schedule were now seen for what they really were—a setup.11

  Jackson’s cache of confiscated locomotives and cars was for the benefit of the Confederate quartermasters in Richmond. The loot now collected in the yards at Martinsburg was ready for hijacking south.

  It wouldn’t be easy. There was a set of flimsy flat-bar rails running to Winchester that could handle light locomotives—and Jackson had bagged at least four engines of acceptable size. They could be put on tracks at the Manassas Gap Railway in Strasburg, if they could just get there. But between Winchester and Strasburg lay twenty miles without tracks of any gauge. It was a sizable hitch, one not generally covered in the West Point curriculum.

  The way the war and everything else was moving from Winchester to Strasburg was down the Valley Turnpike, the “Great Wagon Road” that bisected the Shenandoah Valley. Why not the locomotives? Hitched to teams of horses, why couldn’t they go that way too? It might appear bizarre, but the turnpike could handle it. It was one of America’s premier highways, twenty-two feet wide, eighteen feet of its width covered by a foot-thick layer of macadam.

  The four light locomotives were soon moving southward, dragged along by teams of horses through the turnpike traffic. It was cumbersome, unnatural, and comment-provoking, but it worked. All four of the engines made the gap to Strasburg and were soon on the rails to Richmond.12

  By mid-June the Union army was seriously crowding the Confederates around Harpers Ferry. Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston, now in overall command of rebel forces in the region, ordered the town evacuated. Jackson pulled out as ordered, leaving behind a chaotic legacy of blown-up and burning railway bridges and buildings. Jackson also put the torch to the captured locomotives and railroad cars at Martinsburg. He obeyed this last command with regret. He was not happy burning the rolling stock he had so cleverly liberated. But orders were orders.

  “It was your husband that did so much mischief at Martinsburg,” he confessed in a letter to Anna. “To destroy so many fine locomotives, cars, and railroad property was a sad work.…”13

  The B&O’s John Garrett doubtless agreed. He emphatically did not agree with what happened next. Iron doesn’t burn all that well, and many of the locomotives were still salvageable. The Confederacy still needed engines. So the hijacking operation came back on line, big time.

  The Confederacy had just the man to handle the job: Pennsylvania-born Captain Thomas R. Sharp, an acting Confederate quartermaster general. At twenty-seven, Sharp was already a seasoned manager of southern rail lines. He was a hard-nosed autocrat with the mind of a martinet, who had learned railroading in the old school. He wouldn’t blink from enforcing discipline with his fists if his tongue wasn’t getting the job done. He lacked nothing in imagination, originality, or brashness. The project required all three attributes. The locomotives to be sent south this time were far larger and heavier than the little rattletrap branch line to Winchester could handle. So the distance without tracks would be eighteen miles longer. But never mind. Richmond would send up Hugh Longust, another veteran railroader, to help out. Together Sharp and Longust organized a crew of thirty-five men headed by a twenty-one-year-old engineer named John O’Brien.14

  Forty strong horses were requisitioned from farmers in the Valley. With this horsepower standing by, Longust pointed to a begrimed fifty-ton wood-burner sitting on a side track near the gutted Martinsburg roundhouse.

  “That’s the fellow we’ve got to begin on,” he announced. “Go in, boys!”15

  The boys—six machinists to deal with the engine, ten teamsters to drive the horses, and a dozen laborers to do the dirty work—went in. They swarmed over the big engine, an army of Lilliputians binding Gulliver. They uncoupled and drew away the tender. They jacked up the engine and stripped off everything that was detachable—side rods, piston rods, valves, levers, pumps, lamps, bell, whistle, and sand box—to lighten the load and lessen the chance of damage. They removed every wheel but the flanged drivers at the very rear. And they propped the front of the locomotive on a crudely built emergency truck fitted with thick wooden wheels. An iron bolt attached to the engine’s bumper served as a linchpin.

  A chain connected the beast to single, double, and “fou’ble” whiffletrees. They in turn were connected to the forty horses. The ten teamsters, at Longust’s signal, cracked their whips. The horses, four abreast and ten deep and stretching a hundred feet ahead of their load, strained at the traces. The chain straightened and creaked. The iron horse lurched toward the Manassas Gap Railway thirty-eight miles to the s
outh—three days away on the turnpike road.

  The operation incorporated none of the stealth generally associated with big-time corporate theft. This making off with the goods was to the high-decibel, air-polluting accompaniment of cracking whips, groaning iron, jangling harnesses, stamping hooves, and snorts and whinnies and shouts and curses of horses and humans in unholy league. It was an operation calling for collective body English and mouths held just right.

  Not infrequently a giant engine became simply too much for the turnpike’s thick macadam crust. Then the locomotive sank axle-deep into the soft underdirt and had to be pried out with jacks and timbers. At times the thirty to forty horses were not enough; manpower had to be added. On the steeper uphill grades as many as two hundred men manned draglines in collusion with the horses, filling the air with shouts, curses, neighings, and wild singing. “On to Strasburg!” was the cry.16

  Since this was war, the engines and their attendants were obliged now and again to stop and defend themselves or their cause. In such cases the locomotive’s escort unhitched the horses, left the load wherever it happened to rest at the moment, and went off to answer the more urgent summons. The hulks waited there by the side of the road, silhouetted and solitary against the night sky. In at least two cases the escorts and the horses never returned and the engines, like beached whales, languished in abandoned solitude by the turnpike until the war’s end.

  Jackson’s hijackers were still ransacking the B&O as winter turned to spring in 1862. In truth, Sharp was preparing his masterpiece. The candidate for heisting this time was Engine 199, a monster Ross Winans camelback cursed with a peculiar high-shrieking whistle and an engine house that looked like a sun porch. It was one of the biggest locomotives that Jackson’s trainmen ever elected to send to the Confederacy. It awaited them on a side track at Mount Jackson south of Strasburg.

  By this time the Union army had closed off the Manassas Gap Railway. If this behemoth was to make the tracks to Richmond it had to be dragged all the way to Staunton, seventy miles on the high and trackless road. And the Yankees by now were in a better position to dispute such highway robbery.

  Engine 199 was stripped in the usual manner, hitched to its horses, and hauled the first few hundred yards to a sharp dropoff just south of Mount Jackson. The locomotive lurched down the decline and shuddered to a stop at the bottom, still headed south. Plunging on to Rude’s Hill, it halted at the foot of yet another problem. Only with the help of a small augmenting army of soldiers and civilians did the balky leviathan make the hill.

  The engine and its retinue toiled southward for four frenetic days, carpenters going out ahead of the caravan to shore up the bridges. As the load groaned on through the Valley, children ran out to point and holler, dogs to protest, and old-timers to nod sagely and agree that it was a hell of a way to run a railroad.

  At the end of the four days, early in the morning, Old 199 is said to have lumbered into Staunton for a theatrical curtain call. As most of the town looked on, it is reputed—although the story may have been artistically exaggerated over the years—to have broken loose two blocks from its destination, careened down German Street, and toppled over in a thundering climax. If true, it was a showy denouement to what was the longest and most hectic journey of any of Jackson’s appropriated locomotives.

  The mastodon’s indulgent escort soon had it up again and on the tracks to Richmond. From there it went to the repair shops of the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad in North Carolina, where all the other locomotives had gone to be refitted. Leaving the roundhouse in Raleigh with a new persona, Engine 199 went on to enjoy a distinguished high-shrieking career in the Confederate service throughout the rest of the war.17

  The pageantry of the B&O’s rolling stock swaying trackless down the Valley Pike had become a common sight by the spring of 1862, and it never lost its power to evoke wonder, comment, and alarm.

  In Southern eyes the looting of the Yankee railroad was both justified and romantic. But to John Garrett it was simple grand larceny. Jackson, Sharp, and associates had not limited their practice to locomotives and cars. They had also helped themselves to assorted machinery, engine parts, rails, and even a roundhouse turntable. W. P. Smith, Garrett’s master of transportation, viewed these depredations, together with the other affronts to Garrett’s line in 1861 and 1862, with mingled disbelief, amazement, and disgust. “Remarkable events of a political and military character,” he called them, events that “had a very peculiar influence upon … operations, deranging them to an extraordinary degree.”18

  Although he was indignant, Garrett couldn’t help in hindsight but appreciate the inventiveness and know-how it took to heist his company’s property. He was never able to accord Jackson a grudging acknowledgment personally. But he was able much later to pay his compliments to Sharp. When the war was over, Garrett tracked Sharp down in the defeated South and summoned him to Baltimore.

  It is said that as Sharp entered the great man’s office, Garrett growled: “Well, Colonel, your name is pretty familiar to us. A man who can steal a section of railroad, not to mention several million dollars worth of rolling stock, move the plunder across the country on a dirt road and place it on another fellow’s line ought to be pretty well up in the transportation business.”

  If that had to be, Garrett this time wanted him on his side. “We have a vacancy in that department,” he told Sharp, “and I have sent for you to offer you the position of master of transportation, not doubting your ability to fill it after the demonstration you gave at Martinsburg.”19

  So Sharp, Jackson’s chief accomplice, became the right-hand man to the president of the line he had so skillfully plundered.

  The

  Shirttail

  Skedaddle

  By 2:00 in the morning on July 22, 1861, heavy clouds were rolling in over Washington, “forming a most fantastic mass of shapes in the sky.” The full moon, which had so brilliantly lit the roads to the city earlier in the evening, had disappeared.1

  At that moment an operator in the telegraph office on the war department’s mezzanine floor tapped out an urgent twenty-one-word message to a member of the West Point class of 1846.

  “Circumstances make your presence here necessary,” the message said. “Charge Rosecrans or some other general with your present department and come hither without delay.”2

  By 6:00 in the morning the rain was falling in torrents and the “circumstances” were depressingly visible in the streets. The day before, Washington had seen the Civil War firsthand for the first time on the banks of Bull Run, a little stream near the plains of Manassas. Now despite the early hour the city was wide awake, staring in stunned disbelief at the straggling, rain-soaked remnants of a disaster.

  The day before had been a Sunday, and Washington had greeted it with more than prayer and humble supplication. Politicians and prominent citizens and their ladies packed picnic lunches and rode gaily out the twenty-six miles to Bull Run to watch the battle that was expected to end the rebellion. Instead, a green Union army had thrown itself against a green Confederate army on the other side of the stream and been hurled back. The reeling, battered, and beaten army stumbled into Washington all through the evening and night, carrying with it the panicked spectators. Hundreds of picnics had been ruined.

  The disaster confirmed Brigadier General Irvin McDowell’s worst fears. For weeks the country had clamored for him to strike a blow. “On to Richmond!” had become the national mantra.

  McDowell, the Union army’s teetotalling commander, was as short on combat experience as most of his troops. He had never commanded so much as a company in battle. But he was one of the best military scholars and theoretical soldiers in the service. The members of the class of 1846 remembered him well. He had been the adjutant at West Point during most of their four years there.3

  He knew his army wasn’t ready. He also knew that his own classmate, Confederate Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard, fresh from reducing Fort Sumter, was out near Manas
sas Junction massing an opposing force of uncertain size.

  McDowell had very little other hard information. William Howard Russell of the London Times ran into him repeatedly in the days before the battle. Russell reported that the general “did not hesitate to speak with great openness of the difficulties he had to contend with, and the imperfection of all the arrangements of the Army.” Russell found that McDowell knew little or nothing of the country before him, more than the general direction of the main roads, which were bad at best. Nor could he get any information, with the enemy confronting him in full force all along his front. He lacked a decent map of Virginia and had not a cavalry officer capable of conducting a reconnaissance.4

  McDowell had done the best he could with his lack of information, but he had been unlucky. By late Sunday afternoon his bid for laurels lay with the dead at Bull Run. So the telegram went out at 2:00 in the morning from the war department mezzanine to the benighted hamlet of Beverly in western Virginia. For out there in the dark was hope. Out there in the mountains was George Brinton McClellan, the star of the West Point class of 1846. The war department and the nation at that desperate hour so early in the morning and so early in the war believed that he was the one man who could now save the Union.

  They believed this because of what had just happened in those laurel-knotted mountains two hundred miles from Washington. It was an improbable place to find an aristocratic Philadelphia physician’s son in mid 1861. But it now appeared as if it had been written in the stars.