Of all the strange incidents in the Civil War, the Great Locomotive Chase was one of the oddest.
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During the 1840’s, the US was still a nation of small farmers with barely any manufacturing. That situation changed, however, with the Civil War in 1861. The huge armies involved in the war required a massive amount of weapons, clothing, supplies and other manufactured goods, and spurred a rapid growth in American industrial capacity. And one industry that grew spectacularly and played a major part in the war was the railroads.
The Union had a huge advantage in this area: the industrial North had four-fifths of all manufacturing capacity in the United States and two-thirds of its railroad miles, while the agricultural South only had one factory capable of making or repairing railroad tracks. Despite this material disadvantage, it was the Confederates who first realized the utility of railroads in rapidly moving large armies. When a Union Army under General Irvin McDowell advanced towards the town of Manassas, the Confederates used trains to move their troops quickly into the railroad station there and defeated the Federals.
One of the primary arteries in the South was the Western and Atlantic Railroad line, which led from the storehouses and mills of Atlanta to the logistics center at Chattanooga. It was a major route for men and supplies heading from the Confederate heartland to the battlefields.
By the spring of 1862, the Union General Ormsby Mitchel was camped in central Tennessee, and was looking for a way to attack the Confederates at Chattanooga. In the first week of April he was approached by James Andrews, a civilian agent of the Federal intelligence service who was serving as a spy and scout, with a plan to cripple the railroad line.
The plan presented by Andrews was audacious. First, he and his raiding party, dressed as civilians, would infiltrate into Marietta GA (near Atlanta) and all board a particular train there, the express locomotive known as “The General”, and ride it as far as the station in Big Shanty (today known as Kennesaw). There, they would seize control of the train and drive it north, stopping along the way to pry up tracks, cut telegraph lines, and burn railroad bridges. By the time they reached Chattanooga, if all went well, the entire length would be unusable for weeks. This, Ormsby hoped, might give his own army enough time to move on Chattanooga and take it before the Confederates were able to repair the track and rush up reinforcements. And if nothing else, it would cripple the South’s logistics network for a time.
Ormsby approved the plan, and Andrews selected almost two dozen volunteers from the Ohio regiments to go with him, including three who had worked as railroad engineers. Disguised as civilians, they all made their way in ones and twos to Marietta, arriving by the evening of April 11. Two of the volunteers didn’t make the rendezvous, and two more overslept that night and didn’t show up on the train the next morning as planned. So on the morning of April 12, Andrews and 18 men boarded “The General” at the Marietta station.
A short while later, the train pulled in to the platform at Big Shanty and made its regularly-scheduled half-hour stop to allow the passengers to go get breakfast and the engineers to resupply the locomotive’s steam engine with wood and water. As soon as the train was empty, the Federal raiders went into action: they swiftly disconnected the passenger cars to leave them behind, then started up “The General” and pulled out. At the platform, conductor William Fuller stared in bewilderment as his locomotive left the station without him. “Someone is stealing our train,” he was heard to say.
It now became apparent why Andrews had chosen this particular station to make his move: Big Shanty had no telegraph office, and there was no way for anybody to send word ahead that someone (at this time most of the officials at the station assumed it was Confederate deserters trying to get away from nearby Camp McDonald) had stolen a train. But Fuller now went into immediate action and took charge. First, he sent someone to make the eight-mile horse ride into Marietta to alert the telegraph station there to send out the alert. Then, grabbing two nearby rail workers to take along with him, Fuller climbed aboard a hand-operated pump-car and began to follow after the train.
Andrews, meanwhile, had stopped “The General” a few miles away to cut the telegraph lines, then continued north. To avoid suspicion, he kept to the train’s regularly scheduled timetable, informing each station as he arrived that he was on a special mission to deliver ammunition to Chattanooga—without any information from the telegraph, the station masters had no reason to suspect otherwise.
Andrews’ intention had been to sabotage the tracks as much as possible. But now he began to encounter unexpected problems. At the Etowah Station, the Federals came upon another locomotive stopped on a side track and discussed whether they should halt long enough to capture that train and burn it. After a short debate, Andrews decided that there were too many railroad workers around and, even though the raiders were armed, it would take too long to overpower them and destroy the train. They passed it by.
When they did stop to try and burn one of the railroad bridges, however, they found that the previous night’s rain had soaked all the wooden timbers and they were unable to set fire to them. Further, the crowbars they had were not large enough to allow them to easily pry up the rails and disable the track, and although at various places they were able to remove a rail or two and some ties (and cut the telegraph line), it was taking too long. Their sabotage mission was already a failure.
Fuller, meanwhile, had by now made his way by handcar to Etowah, where a mail train was sitting there. Commandeering it, he set off in pursuit of the hijacked “General”. It would become known to the newspapers as “The Great Locomotive Chase”. Twice over the next seven hours, as he ran into the sections of missing rails that had been pried up by the Federals, Fuller would run ahead on foot and requisition another locomotive to continue his hunt, ending up in an engine named “Texas”—which he was driving backwards because it happened to be sitting on the track facing the wrong way.
At the Kingston station, the Federals, still unsuspected, were delayed for an hour by traffic ahead of them. When they finally left, Fuller pulled in just a short time behind them in the “Texas”. Andrews heard the train whistle behind him and, aware that there were no scheduled trains from that direction, he now knew that he was being followed.
In desperation, as the “Texas” caught up to him, Andrews first tried to block his pursuers by setting one of his own boxcars on fire and disconnecting it on a bridge, then pushed a pile of timber railroad ties out onto the track. But at Ringgold Depot, 87 miles from where they had stolen “The General”, the Union raiders ran out of luck—and water for the steam engine. With their locomotive now immobile, they all ran off into the woods and scattered. Within two weeks nearly all of them had been captured.
Since Andrews was a civilian and all of the Ohio troopers were dressed in civilian clothing, none of them had any rights as POWs, and all were tried as spies. Andrews and six others were hanged. Eight more were sentenced to death but were then released in a prisoner exchange. The rest of the condemned troopers escaped their captors and made their way back to Federal lines.
Although the Great Locomotive Chase was a military failure, the raiders were recognized for their courage and determination, and some of them became the first recipients of the newly-created Medal of Honor—except for Andrews, who, as a civilian, was not eligible.
Today, the original “General” locomotive is on display at the Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw GA, where displays and interpretive signs tell the story of the raid. The locomotive “Texas” is on exhibit in Grant Park in Atlanta, and a historical marker downtown commemorates the spot where Andrews was hanged.
Some photos from a visit to the Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History.