Rails across a battleground

Military historians regard America's Civil War as the first modern war. Its battles and campaigns are still studied by military strategists. Railroaders remember it as the first war in which railroads played a major strategic and tactical role. But for the railroads that endured it, the Civil War was a trial by fire that shaped the pattern of railroading in the South for generations.

Railroads that were later to become part of Southern were spreading throughout the South as the nineteenth century reached and passed its midpoint.

In Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Virginia, iron rails were reaching out to open new territory to commerce and industry. But a difficult test lay ahead.

In the struggle that bitterly divided the American nation, much of the South became a battlefield. And the South's railroads were in the thick of the fighting.

Crumbling masonry and the ruins of a locomotive at a Richmond, Va., railroad station in April, 1865, are symbolic of the fate of much of the South's railway network as the result of four years of war.

Leaders on both sides soon recognized the vital military importance of railroads. Some of the first military action was directed against this highly useful form of transportation.

The first federal troop unit to cross the Potomac into Virginia seized the Orange and Alexandria's station, shops, yards, warehouses and whatever rolling stock was available. But hours earlier, the O&A's president had sent all serviceable equipment south toward Manassas and beyond. A trainload of Confederate troops steamed away minutes ahead of the invading Union forces.

The Confederates struck back. Thomas J. Stonewall" Jackson, then a colonel, later a general, led a raid from Harpers Ferry into Union-held West Virginia and Maryland. He captured all the Baltimore and Ohio trains between Martinsburg, W. Va., and Point of Rocks, Md., and got them safely away to Winchester, Va.

From there the locomotives and cars were dragged by 40-horse teams over 20 miles of dirt road to the rails of the Manassas Gap Railroad in Strasburg, Va., - a herculean feat. It crippled the Baltimore and Ohio for a time and greatly aided the equipment-short railroads in the South. Later in 1861 a similar raid on the rail shops at Martinsburg brought more captured equipment to southern rails-some as far away as the Carolinas.

The first major military engagement of the war-First Manassas or Bull Run-was fought over a railroad junction (where the Orange and Alexandria and the Manassas Gap railroads connected). When the Confederacy's General Beauregard was struck at Manassas Junction by federal troops aiming to seize the railroad and move on south toward Richmond, Jackson's troops were rushed from Piedmont Station to his rescue by train. Arriving swiftly and fresh on the battlefield, the Confederate reinforcements turned the tide and helped rout the Union Army.

Possession and use a railroad may temporarily have saved the Confederacy at First Manassas. But the loss of a railroad a few months later gave the South a blow from which its military effort never recovered.

After Union and Confederate forces dueled to a bloody draw at Shiloh in West Tennessee, the withdrawal of the Confederate forces left the federals able to take command of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, part of the vital Richmond-Memphis trunk line of the Confederacy.

This stereoscopic view of the railroad depot at Chattanooga was taken during the Civil War. An important Southern rail center, Chattanooga was located on two of the five through rail routes in the South in 1860. One of these routes, the line from Memphis to Charleston, included Southern predecessor lines, the Memphis and Charleston Railroad and the South Carolina Railroad.

General Grant took Corinth, Miss. Another Union force struck southward to Huntsville, Ala., and much of the vital rail artery was in Union hands. For the next three years the railroad was virtually a picket line for the two armies, and it seemed to be a contest to see who could cause the most damage.

In beleaguered Virginia, the president of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad -John Barbour-seldom knew from one day to the next how much railroad he was president of-or how many of its wooden bridge, trestles and stations remained unburned. The tides of battle raged back and forth across the O&A, the Manassas Gap, the Richmond and York River Railroad, and eventually the Richmond and Danville.

Throughout the war and throughout the South, the strategy of generals and the fortunes of war centered around the high iron. The second battle of Manassas was another struggle for possession of a railroad junction.

For a year or more Chattanooga was fought over largely because it was the crossing point of the trunk rail lines from Richmond to Memphis and from Nashville to Atlanta. During the campaign there. were two remarkable rail movements, one by each army.

In September, 1863, General James Longstreet's First Corps of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was moved from the Rapidan River on the Orange and Alexandria to Catoosa and Ringgold, Ga., near the Chickamauga battlefield.

The two divisions of infantry and battalion of artillery traveled for two weeks over ten railroads-including three others now part of Southern (the North Carolina Railroad from Raleigh to charlotte; The Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad from Charlotte to Columbia; and the South Carolina Railroad from Columbia to Augusta, Ga.).

Shortly before this Confederate troop movement, General Joseph Hooker's 15,000 - man Union Army, with artillery and equipment, was moved 1,168 miles in seven days.

The move began at a point on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad and traversed Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky to reach Bridgeport, Tenn., 30 miles west of Chattanooga.

In spirited attack and defense, the Union and Confederate armies fought their way south along the railroads to Atlanta. Leaving the city in flames,

Rail-carried mortars like this one were employed in the Virginia campaigns. This was a new development in the history of warfare.

General Sherman's army struck eastward in a march to the sea to cut the Confederacy in two.

Central of Georgia and other rail lines across the army's path were systematically wrecked. Crossties were stacked in piles and set alight-"Sherman's bonfires." Rails heated in the flames were twisted around telegraph poles and tree trunks-"Sherman's hairpins." Bridges, trestles, shops and stations were put to the torch.

This pattern of destruction continued as Sherman moved north from Savannah through the G4rolinas. The South Carolina Railroad, The Greenville and Columbia, The Charlotte and South Carolina and The Spartanburg and Union Railroad all felt the invader's torch. North Carolina railroads, however, were largely spared this kind of attention as the long struggle wound to its close.

Just as the opening act of the Civil War took place in a railroad setting, so did the final curtain. As Union troops converged on Richmond in early April, 1865, President Jefferson Davis called on Colonel Lewis Harvie, president of the Richmond and Danville Railroad, to get the Confederate government to safety.

It was the one rail route out of the city still in Confederate hands, but no one knew for how long.

Special trains rolled out of Richmond carrying people, records and property including eight wagon loads of gold belonging to Richmond banks and the Confederate government or left with them for safe keeping.

President Davis's train carried government officials, department heads, and the people and records necessary to carry on government after a fashion. It also carried a guard of 200 picked men and horses for escape in case the train was captured.

For 18 hours that train was the seat of the Confederate government until it roIled safely into Danville on April 3. And just in time. Within 24 hours, Sheridan's cavalry had cut the R&D line at Burkeville and Jetersville.

For four years the South's railroads had been fought over, run into the ground, wrecked, rebuilt and wrecked again. Some were destroyed outright. Others were torn up so that the rail as weIl as the locomotives and cars would be used to greater military advantage elsewhere. (Rail taken from several lines, for example, was used by the Confederate government to have the Piedmont Railroad built between DanviIle, Va., and GreenviIle, N.C., in 1863 and 1864. This is now part of Southern's main line.)

At war's end, most of the South's railroads were in the possession of the Union forces, and getting them back from the: federal government to their owners afterward proved quite a problem. Most of the vanished roIling stock was gone forever.

But like a Phoenix, the South's railroads rose from their own ashes. Railroad men recovered and rebuilt the battered lines. Often they combined them into larger and stronger systems to help bring to life again a region that lay in ruins.

But it was aIl the South could do to rebuild the railroads it had and construct the new rail links that were absolutely necessary to the region's development. Neither the means nor the incentive existed for the kind of orgy of railroad building that took place in the victorious North.

So the South emerged at the turn of the century with a lean, strong railway system without the excess trackage that was later to plague the railroads of the Northeast and Midwest. (How that postwar network of rails was shaped is the theme of our next installment.) .