In truth, the North was never going to lose. The Federal states had two thirds of the guns and benefited from a far more developed economy including most of the financial resources and four fifths of the nation’s manufacturing capacity, since the South’s major product, cotton, was exported to be made into cloth elsewhere. The North’s population was nearly double that of the South and its territory included all the cities with a population of more than 100,000, with the exception of New Orleans. Most importantly, thanks to its more advanced state of economic development, the North was blessed with a far better transport system, including most of the country’s canals and two thirds of its railroads, which, moreover, were much better attuned to the needs of its industry. Whereas in the South the railroads did not feed into ports and other waterways, in the North they were integrated with the wider transport system, though in 1861 it still took twelve hours and several changes of train to travel just over 200 miles between New York and Washington. Inevitably, too, there was a gauge issue and the North was helped by the fact that most of its lines used standard gauge, 4ft 8½ins, although there was some variation. By contrast, in the South, there was a clear division between 5ft gauge, which was used extensively by the states of the Deep South, and standard gauge that predominated elsewhere, hindering transport between the two areas. Moreover, the South was blighted by the sheer number of railroad companies, with its 10,000 miles being divided between 113 different concerns – fewer than ninety miles per company – which were reluctant to allow the trains of their rivals to use their lines.
In October 1859, before full-scale hostilities began, there was a little pre-war skirmish played out on the railway. This was the strange story of John Brown, immortalized in the song ‘John Brown’s Body’.5 With backing from a group of rich ‘free soilers’, as abolitionists were called, Brown, together with a small band of barely twenty supporters, rowed over the Potomac river from Maryland to take over an armoury at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia. While the arsenal quickly fell into their hands, it was a completely ill-thought-out mission with the laudable but fanciful aim of triggering off a widespread rebellion of slaves throughout the South. Ironically, the first casualty of the incident 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 train for several hours to prevent the alert being given but then inexplicably allowed it to proceed, ensuring that by morning the armoury was surrounded by local militia. The armoury was quickly recaptured and Brown hanged a few weeks later, creating a martyr of this eccentric abolitionist and a song remembered today.
The real war began within days of the inauguration of Lincoln as the first Republican president in March 1861. John Brown’s suicidal incursion and increasingly acrimonious divisions among politicians over the issue of slavery had served to inflame passions, but it was the election of Lincoln which made conflict inevitable. Lincoln had, during campaigning, stressed that he would accept the rights of the Southern states to maintain their slaves, and it was not until more than a year after war broke out that Lincoln would make the abolition of slavery a clear war goal. However, the Southerners did not believe him, fearing that the Republicans would incite their slaves to revolt and that their position would be untenable under a Lincoln presidency.
Within five weeks of Lincoln taking office, hostilities broke out. The trigger was an attack by rebel forces on Fort Sumter, a fortified island four miles off the coast, guarding the entrance to Charleston harbour in South Carolina. On 14 April 1861, after a lengthy stand-off, a Confederate militia attacked the fort to prevent it being resupplied, and easily overwhelmed the Federal forces defending it. That victory for the Southern forces marked the beginning of the Civil War, which was to last four years and claim the lives of 620,000 American soldiers,6 more than in any other conflict, and, in fact, remarkably, more than the total lost in all the other wars the country has fought before and since, including the two world wars of the twentieth century and Vietnam. While the high casualty rate was partly due to the fact that the more deadly rifle had largely replaced the musket and medical facilities were primitive in comparison with those in subsequent wars, the ability of the railroads to deliver large numbers of men to battle sites was an important factor.
The crucial nature of the railroads was understood from the outset by military leaders on both sides of the conflict and, indeed, by the population at large. Already a fortnight before the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s government had taken possession of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad, recognizing that it would become the lifeline of the Federal army protecting Washington, and soon afterwards an incident in Baltimore, Maryland, a state in a key position on the North-South border, demonstrated that the railroads would be a key aspect of the war. The failure of the railroad companies to have built a connecting route through Baltimore forced all passengers traversing the town to change trains or to undergo the tedious process of having their coaches horse-hauled through the streets on tramway tracks before continuing their journey. The fall of Fort Sumter had prompted Lincoln to ask for 75,000 volunteers to join the Federal Army, many of whom needed to pass through Baltimore on their way to Washington, which was on a branch off the main line of the Baltimore & Ohio. The first of these troops seeking to pass through the town were 2,000 men principally from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, who had responded quickly to Lincoln’s call and arrived at Baltimore’s President Street station in a train of thirty-five coaches on the morning of 19 April. Although Maryland remained a Union state, many of its people were opposed to the unionist cause and the crowd began to shower the first 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 being attacked by a local mob. They fired back, killing several innocent citizens but the death toll of sixteen included four soldiers.
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 three railroad bridges on both the Northern Central Railway and on the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore, thereby cutting off Baltimore from rail communication with the North and preventing any troops from transferring through the city. This isolation could not be allowed to last long. Washington was in a crucial geographic position, a kind of advanced outpost into southern territory from the north but also the seat of government and the centre of Federal war preparations. The railroads were quickly repaired but Lincoln was wise enough to ensure that his troops no longer travelled through volatile Baltimore.
Instead, a route by-passing Baltimore was organized by Thomas Scott, the vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who was charged by Lincoln to sort out the situation and was aided by a young Andrew Carnegie, the Scot who was to become one of the richest men in the United States through his domination of the steel industry. The troops heading towards 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 the Washington branch of the Baltimore & Ohio. Various sections of line were taken over directly by the government and thus these enforced emergency arrangements led to the genesis of the United States Military Railroads, the government railroad organization which, while starting on a very small scale, became a major force in the Federal war effort, building several lines, taking over captured railroads and, crucially, as we shall see, repairing damaged ones. By the end of the war, the organization would control more than 2,000 miles of railroad and have laid nearly 650 miles of track.
The destruction of the railroad bridges also led to legislation passed in January 1862 allowing the Federal government to take possessio
n of a range of important railroad and telegraph lines, including rolling stock, locomotive depots and all essential equipment, and placed all railroad employees under military control. For the most part, the legislation did not have to be used as its mere existence ensured that the Northern railroads fell into line, meeting military needs when asked to do so by the Federal government. It was, however, an important weapon in the legislative armoury, as acknowledged by the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in Congress, who argued: ‘The object is to move large masses of men without the knowledge or consent of anybody, without negotiating with railroad directors as to how many men are to be moved, or where they are to be moved, or what rolling stock is wanted.’7 That was, in fact, rather simplistic. While he was right in emphasizing the importance of the railroads, his statement makes light of the inevitable tensions between railway managers and the military which would blow up in virtually every conflict over the next century. The relationship between the military and railway managers has to be one of co-operation and mutual respect, rather than a crass attempt to enlist railways into the Army’s fold.
According to the official history of the war, there were 10,000 military encounters, of which nearly 400 were deemed serious enough to be called ‘battles’, which precludes a detailed account of the role railroads played in the every campaign. However, since the very principle of supplying an army by railroad was established in the Civil War, the railroads were used in most of these battles by one side or the other, and usually both. Indeed, the railroads proved crucial in the war’s first major battle, which, according to Westwood, ‘was the first battlefield victory achieved through the use of rail power’,8 although this rather diminishes the role played by the railways in the war in Italy mentioned in the previous chapter.
As with many conflicts, the war was expected to be short and the North confidently expected to emerge easy winners. However, while the North was far stronger in almost every way, the Southerners proved more resilient than expected, with the result that the war lasted much longer than had been anticipated. They were helped by their stronger military traditions, which meant that much of the officer class was Southern and, when secession began, took up the rebel cause. In contrast, the early military performance of the North was poor, characterized by dithering and incompetence. More important, though, was the fact that people in the South felt they were fighting for the very survival of their way of life and therefore went to war with a greater readiness to die for the cause. Moreover, since most of the battles took place in the Southern border states, they also had the advantage of fighting on their own territory with the support of a population that was largely hostile to the ‘invaders’.
The first major land battle, at Bull Run9 in July 1861 in Virginia, twenty miles south-west of Washington DC, was a victory for the Confederates which set the pattern for the early months of the war. The battle started as an attempt by the Federal government to put a quick end to the conflict by capturing the Confederate capital, Richmond – barely a hundred miles separated the two capitals – and an army under the command of Brigadier General Irvin McDowell advanced across Bull Run (a small tributary of the Potomac) to engage the rebel forces. The Confederate forces led by Brigadier General Joseph Johnston initially found themselves under pressure and retreated, but the turning point was when reinforcements arrived by rail from the Shenandoah Valley in the west. Although the line they used belonged to the Manassas Gap, which was a small railroad that could barely cope with the sudden load, and the locomotive engineers at one point refused to work the trains, claiming fatigue, enough troops arrived by rail to turn the tide. With the arrival of the fresh troops, the Confederates launched a counter-attack, inspired partly by General Thomas Jackson, who refused to retreat, earning him his famous nickname of ‘Stonewall’, and the Federal troops fled back towards Washington. The Confederate victory gave the South confidence in its ability to win the war and any more talk of a swift end could now be dismissed.
Incidentally, the outcome of the battle also led to the first example of railway construction of the war. The Confederates remained in the area, digging in for the winter in entrenchments at Centreville, six miles from the crucial Manassas junction which linked the Orange & Alexandra Railroad with the Manassas Gap. The road from Manassas Gap to Centreville was fine in the summer but the wet weather of the autumn turned the red clay road into a quagmire of muck and mud, and the six horse and mule teams bringing supplies from the railroad to the encampment with 40,000 men was proving inadequate to the task. Work on the six-mile line, which was mainly carried out by slave labour, started in December 1861 and was completed by early February 1862. For a brief few weeks, despite difficulties obtaining rolling stock, the short railroad proved invaluable to supply the men at Centreville but on 11 March the line’s brief existence came to an end as the troops were ordered to retreat from Centreville and they destroyed the line as they withdrew.10
The major battles of the American Civil War are generally grouped into two sections, the Eastern and Western Theaters. While the Eastern received more coverage and is known for the most famous and bloody battles of the war, such as Gettysburg and Antietam, the Western was in many ways more important. There, the South was on the defensive throughout and with the odd exception, such as the battle of Chickamauga, the war in the west was a series of Confederate losses which ensured their overall defeat.
In the east, the brilliant generalship of Robert E. Lee kept the initiative with the South for the first couple of years, thanks to his clever tactics against generally superior forces. Cheekily, to keep the enemy on the defence, he even launched a couple of invasions of the North by marching into Maryland, but with hindsight that was hubris and he overreached himself, a mistake he repeated when he lost at Gettysburg in July 1863, the turning point of the war. However, time and again, it was the use of the railroads that enabled the North to keep Lee at bay and that was thanks to the superior organization of the rail network in the North.
The North did not have a general of Lee’s genius, but it did have a railwayman whose contribution to the outcome of the war was arguably decisive. Once the legislation giving government oversight of the railroads was passed in January 1862, Daniel McCallum, a Scottish immigrant with much railroad experience, was appointed as military director and superintendent of the railroads, with virtually total power over them. Under McCallum, though very much a law unto himself, was a difficult but brilliant engineer, Herman Haupt, whose work for the United States Military Railroads in preparation for several battles, culminating at Gettysburg, would confirm the strategic role of the railways in warfare.
Haupt, who became known as ‘the war’s wizard of railroading’,11 came to the fore in the Peninsular Campaign, which was an attempt, launched in March 1862, to capture Richmond by circumventing the Confederate army in Northern Virginia, the first major offensive by the Union Army in the Eastern Theater. Haupt’s background made him ideal for the task of harnessing railways for the purposes of war. He had passed through West Point, the main US military college, but resigned his commission soon after graduating to become a professor of mathematics and engineering, writing the definitive textbook on bridge building, and later he was appointed superintendent of the very important Pennsylvania Railroad. He was an extremely capable and hardworking engineer, but also a cussed, stubborn fellow – ‘pigheaded’ was a frequent contemporary description – who would not allow anyone to stand in his way, which proved to be an excellent qualification for ensuring that the military realized the importance of railways in the pursuit of war at a time when this was still not widely understood. Haupt, according to a historian of the Northern railroads in the Civil War, ‘was responsible for developing not only the general principles of railroad supply operation, but also detailed methods of construction and destruction of railroad equipment’,12 which would crucially later inform General Sherman’s victorious march through the South in 1864-5 that finally would bring the war to an end. Haupt’s tw
o main principles were that the military should not interfere in the operation of the train service, and that freight cars should be emptied and returned promptly, so that they were not used as warehouses (or even, as happened, as offices). This second issue might sound prosaic, trivial even, but proved time and again in the Civil War and subsequent conflicts to be an absolutely vital requirement in ensuring the efficient use of the railroads in meeting military needs.
Haupt’s initial task was to repair the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad, a strategically located line which connected the two capitals, Richmond, Virginia, and Washington DC, as well as providing a link between the main Union Army of the Potomac and the smaller Army of the Rappahannock. Appreciating the importance of this railroad, the Confederate command had launched a fierce attack on the line in April 1862, wrecking it for several miles. Intent on destroying even more of the line than previous attacks had achieved, and seeing that the process of heating up rails and twisting them to make them malleable was too cumbersome and slow, the rebels devised an iron claw tool which could quickly tear up both the rails and their supporting sleepers. Half a dozen men could rip up and bend rails at such a speed that it only took a force of 500 to destroy comprehensively a mile of track in a few hours. As for putting locomotives out of commission, the simple expedient of firing a cannonball through the boiler was found to be far more quick and effective than dragging engines off the rails and hurling them down the nearest embankment. Bridges, too, could now be destroyed far more effectively than in previous raids, in which brushwood had simply been piled underneath the timbers and ignited. Now, on the Fredericksburg railroad, the Confederates blew them up by drilling holes in the main supports and inserting gunpowder ‘torpedoes’ with a fuse. In this way, it took three men just ten minutes to bring down even the largest span bridges.
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