Wild Train: The Story of the Andrews Raiders (review)

212CIVIL WAR HISTOHY on the continent." Certainly Halleck was on much firmer ground in his dealings with the department commanders than was the volatile Stanton. The fact that Grant and Sherman liked and respected HaUeck cannot be overlooked, and if BueU and Rosecrans fueded with the General in Chief, the record shows that they were by no means always in the rights. The author presents an accurate and justportrait ofa much unappreciated officer. Asnoted,thecontinuityofthisvolumeiserratic; thisisnotentirelythe author's fault, of course, but one could wish that he had covered one theater a bit longer and more thoroughly before jumping temporarily to another scene of action. Interjected and not too relevant paragraphs on Indian troubles, military government problems, and the like are occasionally distracting. Detailed and sometimes elaborate notes are presented in a section of 128 pages at the back of the volume. Where the notes contain exposition they are highlyworthreading, andmanyofthemost interesting anecdotes and discussions might weU have beenmade part ofthe text proper. In a further effort to streamline the text, the author has added a thirty-page appendix, almost half of which is devoted to refuting several incidents related by Sylvanus CadwaUader in his manuscript recently published as Three Years With Grant. It appears that Mr. Wilh'ams succeeds in provinghis points, but his reasoning is so involved and requires such close attention that the general reader wiU not challenge his conclusions . No one who has read the first three volumes of Lincoln Finds a General is likely to pass up Volume IV. At the very least, it is a fine curtain raiser for the next projected volume, which wiU take Rosecrans into Bloody Chickamauga and watchthe organization and earlyoperations ofthatmost formidable organization, the Military Division of the Mississippi. Arthur P. Wade Fort Riley, Kansas. Wild Train: The Story of the Andrews Raiders. By Charles OTCeiU. (New York: Random House. 195T. Pp. xviii, 482. $6.00. ) onapril 12, 1862, a group oftwenty-one Union infantrymen, dressed in civilian clothes and operating under the command of a spy who called himself J. J. Andrews , stole the locomotive and first three cars of a train of the Western & Atlantic railroad in Big Shanty, Georgia. They headed north, toward Chattanooga, with a loosely-conceived plan for destroying telegraph lines, tracks, and bridges. If they had been successful, they would have damaged severely communications within the Confederacy at a critical time. They were not successful. Close pursuit by another engine with an improvised crew permitted them time for only superficial destruction—chiefly cutting telegraph lines—and the commandeered locomotive ran out of fuel andwater after about a hundred miles. The twenty-two then took to the woods. AU were captured within a short time. Eight, including Andrews, were hanged. Eight escaped in a jail break; the other six eventuaUy were exchanged. These survivors became the first men to receive the newlycreated Congressional Medal ofHonor. Their fame, immediately great, grew even Book Reviews213 greater after the war as books and pamphlets and magazines re-told the story (the re-telling goes on; Walt Disney produced a version shortly before the pubUcation of this book) . As the raiders became middle-aged men, and then old ones, a bitter quarrel developed among them. It turned chiefly about the question of whether one of them had turned informer, in effect, to save himseU and thus condemned the ones who were hanged, but it also was a quarrel witii shabby overtones ofwounded vanity, small poUtics, and bickering over money. What began as a wild romantic gesture ended, about a half-century later, in a sputter of senile dispute. Charles 0"Nefll, who produced Wild Train, uses a complex technique to teU tiiis story. He lets the participants and contemporary observers teU it; he puts together bits and pieces drawn from the writings of dozens of people, ranging from J. J. Andrews himseU through Whitelaw Reid and U. S. Grant to an unnamed secretary in the War Department in 1905. Most of the raiders published personal accounts of the action, or at least wrote letters about it, and the bulk of material is drawn from these sources. It is drawn, for the most part, a paragraph or two at...