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The Great Locomotive Chase

civilwardailygazette.com

Originally aired on April 18, 1997 - In part 138 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson describes the dramatic events of the 1862 rail raid led by Major General Ormsby Mitchell.

#138 – The Great Locomotive Chase

The affair was so dramatic, exciting, and unusual that Hollywood made not one but two movies about it. One was silent and starred Buster Keaton; the other was sound and featured Fess Parker. One had Confederates being the good guys; the other had Federals wearing the white hats. Whichever side one supported, all would agree that there was nothing in the Civil War quite comparable to what is called “The Great Locomotive Chase”.

It happened in the spring of 1862, when Union General Ormsby Mitchel prepared to lead an offensive from Tennessee to the vital rail center at Huntsville, Alabama. Mitchel could not afford to plunge into the Deep South with his left flank exposed. That flank consisted of the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which extended from Chattanooga to Atlanta. Mitchell therefore ordered a Union spy and contraband merchant named James J. Andrews to take a small band of men, steal a train on the Western and Atlantic, then neutralize the line by blowing up tunnels and burning a dozen key bridges.

 Andrews put together a party of two civilians and nineteen soldier-volunteers from Ohio units. Individually and in pairs, the men made their way to Marietta, Georgia. On a dark and rainy April 12, 1862, they all boarded a northbound train pulled by the locomotive “General”. Seven miles up the track, at Big Shanty (now Kennesaw), passengers and crewmen disembarked for breakfast. The Andrews band quickly seized the locomotive along with three boxcars and started northward to the utter amazement of all witnesses.

An angry conductor, William Fuller, plus two associates, immediately gave chase of foot. They ran two miles, climbed onto a handcar and poled northward until the car wrecked when it struck a section of track disconnected by the Andrews raiders. Fuller got the car back on the rails and resumed the chase.

Meanwhile, the train robbers were stopping periodically to cut telegraph lines. A critical delay came at Kingston. Even though Andrews claimed to be carrying ammunition for a Confederate army in north Georgia, he and his band were forced to wait on a siding in the rain for over an hour while three southbound freights passed.

Five minutes after Andrews departed Kingston, the bulldog Fuller arrived. He dashed up the tracks for a distance, impounded a locomotive and maintained the pursuit. It was at Adairsville that Fuller boarded a better engine, the swift “Texas”. It headed northward in reverse with the “General” now in sight.

After about a 100-mile chase, the Andrews raiders were in trouble. Lack of tools had brought an end to unhooking rails. Andrews set fire to two boxcars and cut them loose from his engine. He also dropped cross ties on the tracks in efforts to gain enough time to burn the rain-soaked bridges north of Adairsville. Fuller and the “Texas” pushed the burning cars into a sidetrack, avoided the other obstacles, and raced toward a showdown at speeds up to 60 miles per hour.

No time existed now for Andrews to make fuel and water stops. Finally, two miles north of Ringgold, the “General”, without steam, wheezed to a stop. The raiders scattered through the countryside but were soon captured. A combination of delays, relentless pursuit, wet weather, and plain bad luck had thwarted every attempt to do major destruction to the railroad.

Since the raiders were in civilian garb, they were indicted on charges of spying. In July, Andrews and seven of his accomplices were hanged in Atlanta. Eight others managed to escape from a local jail. The following March, the six remaining members of the group, all Union soldiers, were exchanged as prisoners of war.

They became the first recipients of a new award: the Congressional Medal of Honor.