Great Locomotive Chase
Great Locomotive Chase | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Part of the Western Theater of the American Civil War | |||||||
The Andrews Raiders set a train car on fire to try to ignite a covered railway bridge and thwart Confederate pursuit. | |||||||
| |||||||
Belligerents | |||||||
United States (Union) |
Confederacy ) | ||||||
Commanders and leaders | |||||||
James J. Andrews (POW) |
William Fuller Danville Leadbetter | ||||||
Units involved | |||||||
33rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment
| |||||||
Strength | |||||||
24 | 3 (At start) | ||||||
Casualties and losses | |||||||
23 (POW) (8 executed later) | None | ||||||
The Great Locomotive Chase (also known as Andrews' Raid or the Mitchel Raid) was a military raid that occurred April 12, 1862, in northern Georgia during the American Civil War. Volunteers from the Union Army, led by civilian scout James J. Andrews, commandeered a train, The General, and took it northward toward Chattanooga, Tennessee, doing as much damage as possible to the vital Western and Atlantic Railroad (W&A) line from Atlanta to Chattanooga as they went. They were pursued by Confederate forces at first on foot, and later on a succession of locomotives, including The Texas, for 87 miles (140 km).
Because the Union men had cut the telegraph wires, the Confederates could not send warnings ahead to forces along the railway. Confederates eventually captured the raiders and quickly executed some as spies, including Andrews; some others were able to flee. The surviving raiders were the first to be awarded the newly created Medal of Honor by the US Congress for their actions. As a civilian, Andrews was not eligible.
Military background
After the Union capture of
The first raid: March
Background
At the time, the standard means of capturing a city was by encirclement to cut it off from supplies and reinforcements, then would follow artillery bombardment and direct assault by massed infantry. However, Chattanooga's natural water and mountain barriers to its east and south made this nearly impossible with the forces that Mitchel had available. When the Union Army threatened Chattanooga, the Confederate States Army would (from its naturally protected rear) first reinforce Chattanooga's garrison from Atlanta. When sufficient forces had been deployed to Chattanooga to stabilize the situation and hold the line, the Confederates would then launch a counterattack from Chattanooga with the advantage of a local superiority of men and materiel. It was this process that the Andrews raid sought to disrupt. If he could somehow block railroad reinforcement of the city from Atlanta to the southeast, Mitchel could take Chattanooga. The Union Army would then have rail reinforcement and supply lines to its rear, leading west to the Union-held stronghold and supply depot of Nashville, Tennessee.
Planning
The plan was to steal a train on its run north towards Chattanooga, stopping to damage or destroy track, bridges, telegraph wires, and track switches behind them, so as to prevent the Confederate Army from being able to move troops and supplies from Atlanta to Chattanooga. The raiders planned to cross through the Federal siege lines on the outskirts of Chattanooga and rejoin Mitchel's army.
Because railway dining cars were not yet in common use, railroad timetables included water, rest, and meal stops. They planned to steal a train just north of Atlanta at Big Shanty, Georgia (now Kennesaw). They chose Big Shanty because they thought Big Shanty did not have a telegraph office[14] and the stop would also be used to refuel and take on water for the steep grade further north.
The chase
Big Shanty to Kingston
The raid began on April 12, 1862, when the regular morning passenger train from Atlanta, with the locomotive General, stopped for breakfast at the Lacy Hotel. They took the General and the train's three boxcars, which were behind the tender in front of the passenger cars. The passenger cars were left behind. Andrews had previously obtained from the work crew a crowbar for tearing up track.
The train's
At Etowah, the raiders passed the older and smaller locomotive Yonah which was on a siding that led to the nearby Cooper Iron Works. Andrews considered stopping to attack and destroy that locomotive so it could not be used by pursuers, but given the size of its work party (even though unarmed) relative to the size of the raiding party, he judged that any firefight would be too long and too involved, and would alert nearby troops and civilians.
As the raiders had stolen a regularly scheduled train on a railroad with only one track, they needed to keep to that train's timetable. If they reached a siding ahead of schedule, they had to wait there until scheduled southbound trains passed them before they could continue north. Andrews claimed to the station masters he encountered that his train was a special northbound ammunition movement ordered by General Beauregard in support of his operations against the Union forces threatening Chattanooga. This story was sufficient for the isolated station masters Andrews encountered (as he had cut the telegraph wires to the south), but it had no impact upon the train dispatchers and station masters north of him, whose telegraph lines to Chattanooga were working. These dispatchers were following their orders to dispatch and control the special train movements southward at the highest priority.
Thus delayed at the junction town of Kingston, as the first of the southbound freight evacuation trains approached, Andrews inquired of that train's conductor why his train was carrying a red marker flag on its rear car. Andrews was told that Confederate Railway officials in Chattanooga had been notified by Confederate Army officials that Mitchel was approaching Chattanooga from Stevenson, Alabama, intending to either capture or lay siege to the city, and as a result of this warning, the Confederate Military Railways had ordered the Special Freight movements. The red train marker flag on the southbound train meant that there was at least one additional train behind the one which Andrews had just encountered, and that Andrews had no "authority for movement" until the last train of that sectional movement had passed him. The raiders being delayed at Kingston for over an hour, this gave Fuller all the time he needed to close the distance.
Kingston to Adairsville
The raiders finally pulled out of Kingston only moments before Fuller's arrival. They still managed north of Kingston again to cut the telegraph wire and break a rail. Meanwhile, moving north on the handcar,[15] Fuller had spotted the locomotive Yonah at Etowah and commandeered it, chasing the raiders north all the way to Kingston. There, Fuller switched to the locomotive William R. Smith, which was on a sidetrack leading west to the town of Rome, Georgia, and continued north towards Adairsville.
Two miles south of Adairsville, however, the pursuers were stopped by the broken track, forcing Fuller and his party to continue the pursuit on foot. Beyond the damaged section, he took command of the southbound locomotive Texas south of Calhoun, where Andrews had passed it, running it backwards. The Texas train crew had been bluffed by Andrews at Calhoun into taking the station siding, thereby allowing the General to continue northward along the single-track main line. Fuller, when he met the Texas, took command of her, picked up eleven Confederate troops at Calhoun, and continued his pursuit, tender-first, northward.[16]
Adairsville to Ringgold
The raiders now never got far ahead of Fuller and never had enough time to stop and take up a rail to halt the Texas. Destroying the railway behind the hijacked train was a slow process. The raiders were too few in number and were too poorly equipped with the proper railway track tools and demolition equipment, and the rain that day made it difficult to burn the bridges. As well, railway officials in Chattanooga had sufficient time to evacuate engines and rolling stock to the south, hauling critical railroad supplies away from the Union threat, so as to prevent their either being captured by General Mitchel or trapped uselessly inside Chattanooga during a Union siege of the city.
With the Texas still chasing the General tender-first, the two trains steamed through Dalton and Tunnel Hill. The raiders continued to sever the telegraph wires, but they were unable to burn bridges or damage Tunnel Hill. The wood they had hoped to burn was soaked by rain. Just before the raiders cut the telegraph wire north of Dalton, Fuller managed to send off a message from there alerting the authorities in Chattanooga of the approaching stolen engine.
Finally, at
Aftermath
Trials and executions
Confederate forces charged all the raiders with "acts of unlawful belligerency"; the civilians were charged as unlawful combatants and spies. All the prisoners were tried in military courts, or courts-martial. Tried in Chattanooga, Andrews was found guilty. He was executed by hanging on June 7 in Atlanta. On June 18, seven others who had been transported to Knoxville and convicted as spies were returned to Atlanta and also hanged; their bodies were buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave. They were later reburied in Chattanooga National Cemetery.
Escape and exchange
Writing about the exploit, Corporal
Medal of Honor
On March 20, the recently released raiders arrived in Washington DC, and the following day Pittenger wrote a letter to
Citation:
One of the 19 of 22 men (including 2 civilians) who, by direction of Gen. Mitchell (or Buell) penetrated nearly 200 miles south into enemy territory and captured a railroad train at Big Shanty, Ga., in an attempt to destroy the bridges and tracks between Chattanooga and Atlanta.[22]
Legacy
Both The General and The Texas survived the war and have been preserved in museums. The General is located at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, in Kennesaw, Georgia, close to where the chase began. The Texas is at the Atlanta History Center.
The first account of the chase was published a year after the event in 1863 by William Pittenger, one of the Andrews Raiders, under the title of Daring and Suffering.[23] It would be republished in 1881 as Capturing a Locomotive and 1889 as The Great Locomotive Chase.[24] The book was a major success and was widely praised. Two decades later, one newspaper would claim it “was in half the old soldier households in the country.”[6]
Buster Keaton's silent film comedy The General is loosely based on Pittenger's memoirs.[25]
In 1956,
Since at least 1979, the city of Adairsville has held The Great Locomotive Chase Festival, a three-day festival in October which commemorates the event.[28][29]
In 2000, composer Robert W. Smith wrote a concert piece named for and inspired by the incident.[30]
In 2019, the raid was featured on Comedy Central show Drunk History in the episode "Behind Enemy Lines", narrated by Jon Gabrus, with John Francis Daley portraying Andrews and Martin Starr as Fuller.[31]
Monument and markers
The Ohio monument dedicated to the Andrews Raiders is located at the Chattanooga National Cemetery. There is a scale model of the General on top of the monument, and a brief history of the Great Locomotive Chase. The General is now in the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, Kennesaw, Georgia, while the Texas is on display at the Atlanta History Center.
One marker indicates where the chase began, near the Big Shanty Museum (now known as Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History) in Kennesaw, while another shows where the chase ended at Milepost 116.3, north of Ringgold – not far from the recently restored depot at Milepost 114.5.
Historic sites along the 1862 chase route include the following:
- marker near Big Shanty Museum
- Big Shanty Village Historic District
- Camp McDonald
- Acworth Downtown Historic District
- Tarleton Moore House
- Grand Theater (Cartersville, Georgia)
- Old Bartow County Courthouse, now the Bartow History Museum, built so close to the railroad that court was interrupted when any train passed, not built until 1869
- Adairsville Historic District
- the Calhoun Depot, built in 1852–53, at Calhoun, 10 miles north of Adairsville.[32]
- Calhoun Downtown Historic District
- William Taylor House (Resaca, Georgia), associated with northern Georgia soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War, though house not built until 1913
- Masonic Lodge No. 238, not built until 1915
- Dalton Commercial Historic District
- Western and Atlantic Depot, Dalton, Georgia
- Crown Mill Historic District
- Western and Atlantic Railroad Tunnel at Tunnel Hill
- Ringgold Gap Battlefield, gap between White Oak Mountain and Taylor Ridge through which railway runs, site of November 1863 battle protecting Confederate retreat after Battle of Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga
- Ringgold Depot
- Ringgold Commercial Historic District
- marker at milepost 116.3
Kennesaw House, 21 Depot St. (c. 1845), a hotel on the L&N railway in Marietta, Georgia, is a contributing building in the Northwest Marietta Historic District. In 1862 this was the Fletcher House hotel where the Andrews Raiders stayed the night before commandeering The General.[33]
There is a historical marker in downtown Atlanta, at the corner of 3rd and Juniper streets, at the site where Andrews was hanged.
See also
Notes
Citations
- ^ Bowery Jr, Charles R. (2014). The Civil War in the Western Theater 1862 (PDF). Center of Military History. p. 17.
- ^ Nevin (1983), p. 96.
- ^ Gott (2003), pp. 266–267.
- ^ Esposito (1959), maps 30–31.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, p. 15.
- ^ a b Bonds 2006.
- ^ a b Pittenger 1885, p. 16.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, p. 471.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, p. 14.
- ^ a b Pittenger 1885, p. 442.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, pp. 444–445.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, p. 445.
- ^ Bonds 2006, p. 34.
- ^ McCollum, Ben F. (February–March 1962). "The Second Battle of Big Shanty". Georgia Magazine. pp. 31–33.
- ^ 'Rails Across America', Association of American Railroads, School and College Service, Washington D.C., 1960 8
- ^ "On this Date in Civil War History: The Great Locomotive Chase – April 12, 1862". This Week in the Civil War.[dead link]
- ^ Pittenger 1885, pp. 407, 410.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, pp. 410–411.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, p. 413.
- ^ Pittenger 1885, pp. 412–413.
- ^ Decorations and Awards at Congress.gov
- ^ "Parrott, Jacob". Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Retrieved May 28, 2020.
- ^ "Monument to honor William Pittenger". Herald-Star. Steubenville, Ohio. 28 July 2014. Retrieved 11 May 2020.
- ^ The great locomotive chase; a history of the Andrews railroad raid into Georgia in 1862 – via Library of Congress.
- ISBN 0-306-80802-1.
- ^ a b Crawford, Michael (3 October 2011). "Making The Great Locomotive Chase". The Walt Disney Family Museum Blog. Walt Disney Family Museum. Retrieved 11 May 2020.
- ^ MacLennan Roberts (1956). "The Great Locomotive Chase".
- ^ "Adairsville, Georgia". Cartersville-Bartow County, GA. Archived from the original on August 6, 2012.
- ^ "Great Locomotive Chase Festival Collection, 1979–2017". Kennesaw State University Archives. Kennesaw State University. 2018.
- ^ "The Great Locomotive Chase". Rundel.
- ^ Welk, Brian (22 July 2019). "'Drunk History' Stages Mini 'Freaks and Geeks' Reunion With John Francis Daley and Martin Starr". TheWrap. Los Angeles, CA. Retrieved 11 May 2020.
- ^ Kenneth H. Thomas Jr. (June 22, 1982). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: Calhoun Depot". National Park Service. Retrieved August 10, 2016. with nine photos from 1981
- ^ David T. Agnew and Elizabeth Z. Macgregor (April 7, 1975). "National Register of Historic Places Registration: Northwest Marietta Historic District". National Park Service. Retrieved September 11, 2016. with 18 photos from 1974–75; #16 shows Kennesaw House
Bibliography
- Bonds, Russell S. (2006). Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor. Westholme Publishing. ISBN 1-59416-033-3.
- Esposito, Vincent J. (1959). West Point Atlas of American Wars. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. OCLC 5890637. The collection of maps (without explanatory text) is available online at the West Point website.
- Gott, Kendall D (2003). Where the South Lost the War: An Analysis of the Fort Henry – Fort Donelson Campaign, February 1862. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books. ISBN 0-8117-0049-6.
- Gross, Parlee C. (1963). The Case of Private Smith and the Remaining Mysteries of the Andrews Raid. General Publishing Company.
- Nevin, David (1983). The Road to Shiloh: Early Battles in the West. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books. ISBN 0-8094-4716-9.
- O'Neill, Charles (1959). Wild Train: The Story of the Andrews Raiders. New York: Random House.
- Pittenger, William (1885). The great locomotive chase; a history of the Andrews railroad raid into Georgia in 1862,. New York: J.B. Alden.
- Pittenger, William (1881). Capturing a Locomotive: A History of Secret Service in the Late War. Washington DC: The National Tribune.
- Pittenger, Lieut. William (1863). Daring and Suffering: A History of the Great Railroad Adventure. J. W. Daughaday.
- Rottman, Gordon L. (2009). The Great Locomotive Chase – The Andrews Raid 1862. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84603-400-8.
External links
- Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw, GA. Home of The General.
- Atlanta History Museum. Home of The Texas.
- About North Georgia: The Great Locomotive Chase Archived 2008-12-06 at the Wayback Machine
- Railfanning.org: The Andrews Raid
- New Georgia Encyclopedia: Andrews Raid
- The Tale of the Texas – Our American Stories