Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat

Preface

Preface James M. McPherson, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Battle Cry of Freedom , describes in two sentences the rail movement of the Union’s 11th and 12th Corps from Virginia to Tennessee in the Fall of 1863. Both his citations were more than forty years old: George Edgar Turner’s Victory Rode the Rails (1953) devotes seven pages to the subject; Thomas Weber’s The Northern Railroads in the Civil War (1952) covers it in five pages. Both relied almost exclusively on telegrams found in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. They provided the first clues that I had a subject worth exploring. The 11th and 12th Corps movement, although well known, has escaped in-depth study. As my research developed, I found myself increasingly admiring the confidence and expert skill with which John W. Garrett, Daniel C. McCallum, Thomas A. Scott, and William Prescott Smith so quickly organized and directed this massive undertaking. I decided to compare it with the movement of Confederate General xii Preface James Longstreet’s corps to Chickamauga, which concluded as the 11th and 12th Corps commenced, partly in response to it. The Longstreet movement has also received little detailed attention. In researching the Confederate war economy as background for the Longstreet movement, I became increasingly disturbed by flawed Confederate organization and management decisions that frequently brought to mind the old saw, ‘‘It’s a heck of a way to run a railroad.’’ A heck of a way to fight a war, too, but the Confederate leadership never recognized or understood this truth. It never mobilized southern railroads for war, and its failure to do so limited its prospects for victory. My focus thus evolved from my initial interest in a single rail movement to a comparison of Union and Confederate war management as revealed in each side’s use of railroads. The Longstreet and 11th and 12th Corps movements provide case studies to illustrate the consequences of the differences in management. Logistics as a modern discipline began its rise to prominence in the Civil War. Its transportation, or distribution, element, as demonstrated by each side’s use of railroads, clearly emerged as a critical factor in each side’s ability to wage war. Logistics occupies a central role in today ’s military planning. It now takes twelve support troops to sustain one combat soldier in the United States Army. In spite of the critical role of logistics in waging war, support functions remain largely unseen . Many Americans’ memories of the Persian Gulf War, for example, include swept-wing F-14 Tomcat fighters blasting off carrier decks and M1A1 Abrams tanks racing across the desert trailing plumes of dust. They do not recall the lowly oilers and supply ships or water, fuel, and ammunition carriers without which the planes and tanks could neither blast nor plume. An out-of-ammunition Abrams with an empty fuel tank projects the technological sophistication of a sixty-ton club. This book describes the approaches taken by the Union and Confederate governments to mobilize their railroads for war. It then tells the stories of the two rail movements as case studies that illustrate the success and failure of each side’s war management. It provides a new perspective on the elements that determined victory and defeat in the Civil War. It does not attempt to study all aspects of Union and Confederate war management. I refer interested readers to Paul A. C. Kois- Preface xiii tinen’s scholarly Beating Plowshares into Swords: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1606–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas , 1996). I commend Koistinen’s book, including its excellent footnotes and bibliography, as an essential resource to anyone studying Civil War logistics. Another book that bears mentioning is Roger Pickenpaugh ’s Rescue by Rail: Troop Transfer and the Civil War in the West, 1863, recently published by the University of Nebraska Press. Readers will find some similarities in the descriptions of the troop movements, to which Mr. Pickenpaugh limits his study. The present study considers some aspects of the larger issues of war management to the extent they affected northern and southern railroads . It does not attempt to assess, much less rank, all the components of victory and defeat in the Civil War. Other historians have studied this subject; readers will find many of them in the bibliography. The quality of railroad management, however, certainly contributed to Union...