The Great Railroad Revolution (21 page)

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 carry 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.

On the morning of April 12, 1862, the group—two short, as a pair had overslept—boarded a northbound train in the small town of Marietta, Georgia, twenty miles north of Atlanta. At Big Shanty, seven miles up the line, the train conductor, William Fuller, announced a stop of twenty
minutes for breakfast, giving the raiders the opportunity to take over the train. Detaching the passenger cars, Andrews commandeered the engine, The General, and headed north, cutting the telegraph wires in order to prevent the pursuers from alerting the stations ahead. Fuller, furious at the hijacking of his train, proved to be just as determined and heroic as Andrews. He chased after the train, first for the initial two miles to the next station on foot, then with a succession of platelayers' carts (known on US railroads by the wonderful term
gandy dancer carts
) operated by pushing up and down on a large lever that drives the wheels. This proved to be a versatile method of transportation, as he was able to overcome a gap in the track that Andrews's gang had torn up, dragging the trolley through the ballast and rerailing it on the other side. Then, after being derailed again, he found a locomotive, The Yonah, which was fortuitously in steam, and when, again, there was a gap in the track, he ran another two miles and stopped a train passing in the other direction to commandeer its locomotive.

And so the chase went on for a hundred miles, with the locomotives at times reaching speeds of sixty miles per hour until The General ran out of fuel and the raiders dispersed into the local countryside. Because of Fuller's effort in keeping so close, Andrews's men never managed to cause any serious damage to the track. Their attempts to burn down bridges were thwarted by damp tinder, and their efforts to tear up the track were confined to small sections, which were later easily repaired. The men were all picked up quickly by the Confederate authorities, and poor Andrews, just twenty-two years old, was soon hanged, along with seven of his gang. However, several other members of the group managed to escape back to the North, some helped by slaves, and most survived the war, with one living until 1923. All the nineteen military participants received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first soldiers ever to receive this newly instituted award. On his side, Fuller, too, was feted for his actions and spent his later years ensuring that the story was told from his point of view, which suggests that there may have been some rewriting of history. Indeed, the raid has been mythologized, inspiring several films, most notably in 1926
The General
, in which, interestingly, Buster Keaton portrays the conductor, Fuller, as the hero, whereas the Unionists are depicted as
ruthless train wreckers, demonstrating the enduring tacit sympathy to the Confederate cause. According to George Douglas, it was the vagaries of the Southern railroads that wrecked the raid: “Andrews was undone by bad weather, by heavy rail traffic, by a single-track bottleneck, by trains not on schedule, and by other vicissitudes of the Southern railroads, as much as he was by Fuller.”
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Indeed, had he gone ahead with the original plan, which was to launch the raid on the previous day when the weather was better and there were fewer trains coming in the other direction, the story might have had a different ending and the inevitable outcome of the Civil War might have come sooner.