Search a topic in recent Roanoke history

history@roanoke.com

NED HARRISON specializes in military history. He writes about the Civil War and the involvement of Virginia and Roanoke people in it. If you know the stories of ancestors who were part of the war years, either as soldiers or on the home front, you can write Harrison in care of The News & Record, P. O. Box 20848, Greensboro, N.C. 27420, or or e-mail him at: n-b-h@mindspring.com

The Harrison Archive

The end of 'Stonewall' Jackson

Lee proves himself with Seven Days' Battle

Railroads were a major part of military strategy

By NED HARRISON

Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott was out-foxed by a train ride.

The Industrial Revolution replaced human labor with machine labor and transformed life during the 19th century. In the Civil War, these changes initiated a new form of warfare and were sharply evident in two areas. One was the transportation of people and goods by rail. The other was telegraphic communication.

Railroads developed in Great Britain early in the 1800s and arrived in the United States during the 1830s. Major cities along the Atlantic seaboard became rail hubs. In the decade just before the Civil War, Northern railroads extended into many small towns, forming an enormous rail system. By 1860, four Northern lines extended from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River.

In the South, rail transport was used mainly as an adjunct to seaports, a means of getting Southern cotton and lumber from the interior to ports for transport to Northern or foreign industrial centers. Southern railroads generally were individually owned, had differing track widths and did not connect with one another to provide an easy and dependable system of transport.

Rail lines did link Chattanooga and Atlanta and continued on to Savannah and Charleston, but there was no direct rail connection between the rail hub at Atlanta and key Southern cities such as Mobile, New Orleans and Memphis. This lack of an integrated rail system plagued the Confederacy the entire war.

In 1860, the United States had 31,000 miles of railroads, more than any other nation. The North had 22,000 of those miles; the South had 9,000.

When the war began, nobody on either side had thought of how to use railroads as part of military strategy. The first real task given to railroads, apart from transporting recently mobilized soldiers to army camps, came during the Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861.

The North demanded an end to the war by capturing Richmond, the Confederate capital. By July 1861, Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott had an army of 35,000 Union soldiers in Washington under the command of Gen. Irvin McDowell.

Scott knew that there were two Southern armies just a few miles away. A force of 11,000 men was based in Winchester and the main Southern army, 22,000 men commanded by Gen. P.T.G. Beauregard, was based about 25 miles away in Manassas Junction, Va.

Scott told Gen. Robert Patterson to keep the 11,000 men in the Shenandoah too occupied to reinforce the 22,000 men in Manassas Junction. He ordered McDowell to march his men to Manassas, where they were to attack and defeat Beauregard. The odds were good that the larger Union army could end the war three months after it began.

It didn't work out as planned. The Shenandoah Confederate units gave the slip to Patterson and rode trains to Manassas Junction, arriving in time to turn defeat into victory literally at the last moment.

Manassas was the first large-scale movement of soldiers by rail in the history of warfare. Generals could now move large numbers of men, along with their supplies and horses, over long distances. They would arrive at their destination quickly and at a predictable time, rested and ready to fight.

Further, it made control of rail lines and rail bridges a military necessity. The pre-war development of rail transport that made rail hubs out of Atlanta and Vicksburg also made them cities of strategic military importance and thus targets for Union attack.

Vicksburg was in Gen. Ulysses Grant's sights because he knew that when he captured it, as he did on July 4, 1863, he severed the single Confederate rail link to the trans-Mississippi region. Similarly, Gen. William Sherman's goal in capturing Atlanta (occupied Sept. 2, 1864) was to destroy the city as a Confederate rail hub. And Sherman's march to the sea cut rail lines from Atlanta to Savannah, severing rail connections to all Confederate areas north of his path.

Net losses

Lawrence R. Gaber takes issue with two of the Web sites I recommended in an April Roanoke Times account for helping to find a relative who may have fought in the war. In an e-mail, he wrote that "the http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/site has only general information for each census and is NOT searchable by individual names." He also commented that the National Park Service site at "itd.nps.gov/cwss site is a 'work in progress' and that should have been so-indicated as well." Both I and the editors of Hallowed Ground, source of the sites, stand corrected and apologize to readers.

In a second e-mail, Gaber reminded that anyone can "establish a Web site and can ... have his personal opinions taken as 'gospel' just because it is on the Internet. ... In libraries, users can be guided to authoritative and proven sources of information, but no such guidance exists for students doing their own research on the Net."/div>