Civil War Battle Series, The Great Locomotive Chase, The Race to Stop Raiders from Buring the Rails

By early April 1862, the Civil War was already closing in on the South, but the trains still ran on time. When the Western & Atlantic Railroad’s Saturday morning run from Atlanta pulled into Big Shanty, Georgia, at 5:20 am, passengers had just 20 minutes for breakfast at Mr. and Mrs. George Lacy’s trackside hotel. Conductor William Fuller and engineer E. Jefferson Cain, however, had barely paid their two bits and sat down to their grits and eggs when their locomotive, The General, let out a chuff of steam and began to move. Their guest at the table, W&A foreman Anthony Murphy, shouted, “Someone is running off with your train!” Everyone bolted out of the door, too late to stop the unscheduled departure.

Fuller’s first thought was that Confederate deserters from a militia camp just across the tracks were making an escape and would likely abandon his train as soon as it ran out of steam. A train conductor, though, is the captain of his ship. A deserted, powerless locomotive blocking the way and causing tie-ups up and down the only rail line north to Chattanooga would be on Fuller’s head. “I must follow as fast as possible,” he recalled thinking, “and try to get it back before I get very badly out of time.”

Fuller was only partly wrong. It was not a handful of deserters who had stolen his train, but rather a team of 20 Federal soldiers led by a Northern spy, James Andrews. And the raiders did not plan to abandon the locomotive before they cut Tennessee off from Georgia by burning every railroad bridge between Atlanta and Chattanooga. Fuller was correct, however, in knowing that The General would quickly run out of steam—as the raiders soon learned to their distress when, a short distance out of the station, the locomotive abruptly lost power, slowed, and stopped dead on the tracks. Corporal William Pittenger, one of the raiders riding in the three boxcars stolen along with the engine, recalled the moment. “We were to have serious trouble at the outset,” he wrote later. “There had been just one burst of speed, and then this sickening and alarming failure of power.” They could only sit there, in the heart of the Confederacy, and wait for their would-be engineers to figure out the trouble.

The Andrews raiders were not train experts—they were barely soldiers. A week earlier their leader had been a mere smuggler, taking black market goods south and information north. His volunteers were ordinary infantrymen chosen almost at random from Brig. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel’s 3rd Division of the Army of the Ohio. Only four had ever worked on a railroad; few had any experience of subterfuge, sabotage, or combat.