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Transportation & Communication

Jackson Commandeers the Railroad The taking of railroad trains overland by Stonewall Jackson from Martinsburg to Strasburg, more than 38 miles, was one of the most difficult and daring events of the Civil War. Here, on the morning of June 20th, 1861, in Martinsburg, Virginia, Stonewall Jackson views the path the 40-horse team will take.

Transportation

Transportation during the Civil War was often a quartermaster's nightmare. Armies fought through swamp, forest, coastal marshes, mountains, and tangled, second-growth underbrush. They expended enormous quantities of food and ammunition, speedily wore out clothing, and called constantly for medical supplies. Quartermasters learned early to develop and exploit every known means of transportation.

Railroads were vital. The Confederacy had 9,000 miles of railroad but lacked steel and factory facilities to replace rolling stock and rails. The Union was fortunate. It controlled 22,000 miles of track, had a great industrial potential, and a transportation genius in Brigadier General Herman Haupt, head of the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps. Before Haupt there had been chaos. Under him, trains met schedules while repair and new construction went on constantly.

Men of both the Railroad Corps and Engineer Corps became expert at bridge reconstruction. Lincoln, on one of his field trips, paused in open-mouthed astonishment before a rebuilt railroad bridge and reported: "I have just seen the most remarkable structure that human eyes eyes rested upon. That man, Haupt, has built a bridge across Potomac Creek, about four hundred feet long and nearly a hundred feet high, over which loaded trains are running every hour, and, upon my word . . . there is nothing in it but bean-poles and corn-stalks."

Ingenuity marked the efforts of railway men throughout the four years of conflict. To protect construction gangs repairing bridges on the Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Union engineers put together an armored railroad battery carrying riflemen and a pivot-mounted cannon. Western troops were no less inventive. At Vicksburg, soldiers operating under an officer of General McPherson's staff built five locomotives for the United States Military Railroad.

Operating on exterior lines of communication, Union soldiers traveled long distances and found military-run rail lines essential to efficient operation. In 1863, Colonel C. C. McCallum, who took over after Haupt's resignation, saw his trains move two corps, about 22,000 men, over 1,200 miles in 11 1/2 days. General Sherman reported that a single-track railroad 473 miles long supplied his army of 100,000 men and 35,000 animals for 196 days during the drive on Atlanta, and that the campaign would have been impossible without rail facilities.

Waterways offered great opportunities for troop movement during the Civil War. The eastern seaboard was laced with rivers running into the Atlantic. In the west, rivers such as the Ohio, Tennessee, or Cumberland were used by armies in transit. The ocean and the Gulf of Mexico also served as sea roads to battle and more than once played a part in large-scale amphibious operations.

Most neglected heroes Most neglected among the many heroes of the Civil War are the horses and mules which served by the hundreds of thousands in many ways, large numbers of which suffered painfully and died in service. Total U.S. horse population in 1860 was put by the census at 6,115,458, of which only 1,698,328 were in the seceding states. On the other hand, the South was much ahead in mule power, with 800,663 against the North's 328,890 for a total of 1,129,553. Working oxen were still important and the country had some 2,240,075, of which 856,645 were in the South. Not only were horses vital for the cavalry of both armies and for the use of officers, but horses and mules were the main motive power for hauling supplies, ammunition, food, and guns. "Trains" were horse-drawn wagon trains, whereas "the cares" generally meant railroads. The demand of the war for livestock greatly increased breeding. In the North the government furnished the cavalry mounts and remounts, whereas in the south the soldier was expected to furnish his own. This policy further strained the Confederate economy as the horses were needed at home as well as in the Army. Replacement of killed, wounded, or diseased horses became a vexing problem to the South and contributed to the decline of their once magnificent cavalry. For example, on July 3, 1863, the Confederate Army had over 6,000 convalescent horses in the Army of Northern Virginia. In the middle of the war it required about 500 new horses a day to replenish the Federal services. At the start of the war a good horse cost about $125; by the end the price was up to $185. The service of the average cavalry horse at the North lasted only four months. Obtaining huge amounts of hay and other feed for the immense numbers of horses both for cavalry and trains was a never-ending logistical challenge. Despite the ascendancy of the railroads, the horse remained the backbone of short-haul operations, a necessity for cavalry and the artillery essential to army supply, and, in short, an indispensable soldier in the war.

The serious shipping shortage that plagued both sides when war began limited water transport. Ship construction was carried on at fever pitch in the South wherever possible, but, except for a few ironclads, most vessels produced were small ones. Ships purchased abroad were used as commerce raiders and blockade runners, so that Confederate soldiers seldom knew the dubious comforts of troop transports.

The two-part program of construction and purchase soon gave the North a variety of surface craft. Gingerbread-laden river boats from the Hudson and Mississippi, New York ferries, Great Lakes cargo carriers, and various tugs, barges, and trawlers were pressed into service.

Assorted armadas carried regiments, brigades, divisions, and corps up and down river and along the shelving slopes of the Atlantic coast and the Gulf. Transatlantic packets, ignominiously reduced to coastal runs, accommodated Yankee soldiers, in gilded salons. The gambling rooms of the fabulous river boats were turned into bivouac areas and hospitals for the men aboard.

Probably the greatest water-borne troop movement of the War was the one that inaugurated General McClellan's Peninsular Campaign in 1862. The forces embarked in the Washington-Alexandria area, then dropped down the Potomac and through Chesapeake Bay to land on the peninsula formed by the York and James rivers. In the course of this operation, some 300 ships carried over 100,000 men, more than 14,000 horses and mules, 343 guns, 1,150 wagons, and tons of auxiliary equipment more than 200 miles in two to three weeks without the loss of a man.

Once McClellan reached the peninsula, he remained dependent on shipping for food, ammunition, and forage. A swarming flotilla transfered troops, livestock, and supplies to the site chosen by McClellan as a new base for offensive operations.

River boats, transports, and railroad trains were comparative luxuries to the average Yankee or Rebel soldier. Most of the time, he reached his objective on foot. The speed of marching infantry was controlled by the nature of the ground it crossed. On hard-topped Pennsylvania highways, troops could make 30 miles per day. In swamp and forest, 10 miles was good. Traveling under his own power, the infantry soldier was expected to average 16 to 20 miles per day under normal conditions, and be ready for battle when he got to his destination.

In crucial periods, troops hit the roads day after day with no protracted rest. During the Shenandoah Valley Campaign in 1862, Stonewall Jackson's "foot cavalry" marched the length of the valley five times in three months. In November, 1863, Sherman's men made 400 miles on foot and went into action the day after reaching their goal. Completely at the mercy of weather, Southern roads were often in miserable condition. Spring rains made rivers overflow their banks, flooding the already muddy highways.

Marching troops were accompanied by wagon trains carrying rations, ammunition, clothing, medical supplies, and forage for the draft animals. The usual Army wagon was about 120 inches long inside, 43 wide, and 22 high. It could carry 2,500 pounds, or 1,500 rations of bread, coffee, sugar, and salt. Under ideal conditions, it was drawn by four horses or six mules.

By rule of thumb, commanders counted on 25 wagons for each 1,000 men. Sherman, one of the Union's logistics experts, felt that 600 wagons should accompany a corps, 300 for food and 300 for ammunition, clothing, and other essentials. In mountain operations, trains of sure-footed pack mules were occasionally employed in place of the cumbersome wagons. A few hundred yards of open water could halt an army and its supply train. Bridging operations, of the utmost importance, were the responsibility of engineers in Northern and Southern armies.

The Signal Corps The U.S. Army Signal Corps, which began with the appointment of Major Albert J. Myer as its first signal officer just before the war and remains an entity to this day. The Confederate States Army Signal Corps was a much smaller group of officers and men, using similar organizations and techniques as their Union opponents. Both accomplished tactical and strategic communications for the warring armies, including electromagnetic telegraphy and aerial telegraphy ("wig-wag" signaling). Although both services had an implicit mission of battlefield observation, intelligence gathering, and artillery fire direction from their elevated signal stations, the Confederate Signal Corps also included an explicit espionage function. The Union Signal Corps, although effective on the battlefield, suffered from political disputes in Washington, D.C., particularly in its rivalry with the civilian-led U.S. Military Telegraph Service. Myer was relieved of his duties as chief signal officer by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton for his attempts to control all electromagnetic telegraphy within the Signal Corps. He was not restored to his role as chief signal officer until after the war.

Communication

The line of communication is also important to an army. Orders, information, and intelligence information travel along these lines to allow the commander to make timely and effective decisions. In the Civil War, lines of communication were either telegraph lines or individual riders on horseback, known as couriers, carrying dispatches. Information also traveled with supply trains or boats. Commanders without the necessary information are blind; they can only guess where the enemy is and can be led to make disastrous mistakes. So just like the line of supply, the line of communication keeps the army effective. A threat to the line of communication represents a serious danger and must be eliminated.

Large-scale use of the telegraph for military communication began with the Civil War in America. Transmission of information was the responsibility of Signal Corps troops, who sent messages by means of flags or lights. Codes based on numerals were used. Where troops were to be in position for any length of time, high signal towers were constructed.

Far surpassing these primitive visual methods was the "electromagnetic telegraph," used from the first days of war. Alert generals were quick to seize upon this method of message transmission but operation of the telegraph system in the Union army was hindered by red tape from the start.

The telegraph had burst into American life in 1844, when Samuel Morse first transmitted, from the Supreme Court chamber in the capitol to Alfred Vail in Baltimore, his famous words "What hath God wrought!" The advent of this fresh form of communication greatly facilitated the operation of the railroad lines. Telegraph lines ran along the tracks, connecting one station to the next and aiding the scheduling of the trains.

The South, unimpressed by this new modern technology and not having the money to experiment, chose not to delve very deeply into its development. Pity, they would learn to regret it. By 1860, the North had laid over 90 percent of the nation's some 50,000 miles of telegraph wire. The North, as with all telegraph lines, embraced its relatively low cost and ease of construction.

The telegraph service was a civilian bureau attached semiofficially to the Army. Operators, many of them young boys, remained civilians, while top officers received commissions. Telegraphers accompanied troops in the field but there was constant friction between them and army commanders. The disputes were jurisdictional ones, operators feeling they were responsible only to the War Department, and field officers attempting to keep the civilian personnel under direct control.

Despite such difficulties, telegraph men laid more than 15,000 miles of wire and sent 6,000,000 military telegrams. The Southern troops lacked the organization of Northern telegraphers, but used commercial lines wherever possible. Operators on both sides became adept at tapping enemy wires and taking off confidential messages.

Both sides began encrypting high-level messages to be transmitted on the telegraph. More importantly, for the first time it became possible to collect such messages from the enemy in volume and in near real-time. Further, both sides established cipher bureaus in their respective capitals to work on enemy encrypted messages, one of the early examples of a centralized intelligence activity in the United States.

John S. Blay. Communications. The Civil War; A Pictorial Profile. Bonanza Books, New York, 1958.

The Bridge Burners A True Adventure of East Tennessee's Underground Civil War. Cameron Judd. On a cold night, November 8, 1861, Unionists in East Tennessee proceeded with plans to burn the key railroad bridges of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railway. From the "Prelude to Conspiracy" and a bold plan approved by President Lincoln, through the tragedy described in the "Aftermath," all of the people involved and all of the events are covered here in detail. Included traveler's tips.

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