military history professor christopher gabel discusses the importance of railroads and steam powered locomotives to the union and confederate armies and explains how railroads made the scale of the civil war possible and describes how and why the confederacy's powerful railroad system broke down as the war progressed. the kansas city public library hosted this hour-long event. >> thank you very much for the kind introduction and for being here. folks, you know when we look back at the onset of the american civil war, we view it through the lens of the war, itself. that shapes what we're looking at. if you view the onset of the civil war a little more objectively instead of being all -- seeing all of the differences between north and south, you'll tend to spot all the similarities. think about it. the two sides in this conflict. it was a war of brother against brother and in some cases literally so. the two sides shared a common language. they had similar cultures and religions. they shared a very similar political philosophy. in the military, the north and south employed virtually identical weapon. they used the same tactics. their top commanders all graduated from the same military academy. wherever the union put an army in this war, the confederacy put an army as well. now, it might not have been as large and well supplied, but an army is there, nonetheless. in other words, folks, this is a surprisingly symetrical war at its outset. in fact, it's hard to think of a more symetrical war. but what about data such as these, that you've all seen? if you've ever read a book on the civil war you've seen figures like this. showing a preponderance of resources that the north had over the south in everything except cotton. well, folks, i put it to you. if these statistics were really that important, the war should have been over in a month, right? consider this one right here. firearms production. 32-1 advantage in the north. i defy anybody to prove to me that the confederacy lost the war because they ran out of guns. that statistic apparently just isn't all that important. and so when we look over here at railroad mileage, 2.4 to 1 advantage for the north, maybe that statistic is not really mportant either. it's whether or not the railroads actually were that significant in the conduct and outcome of the civil war. and if the answer to that question is no, we can save a lot of time here tonight. okay. well, this is the game changer right here. water turns to steam and expands 1600 -- well so what? people have known this for thousands of years. okay? well, in the 1820's somebody figured out how to take that expansion and turn it into forward motion. you collect -- excuse me -- you collect the steam. you send it down to a piston. the piston drives the rod back and forth. the wheels go around and around and it goes forward. all right. so what? well, here is the so what. with a steam powered locomotive lling a train, you can carry more cargo farther on the same amount of fuel than you can by muscle power. a six mule wagon carrying 1 1/2 ns of cargo can go roughly 333 miles on one ton of mule fuel. so you multiply 1.5 tons times 333 miles, and you get about 500 ton miles. that's how logistical output is measured. now, a 15-car train in the civil war could only go oh, maybe 35 miles on a ton of fuel, but it could carry 150 tons. 35 times 150, you got over 5,000 ton miles of logistical work, ten times the logistical effort for the same amount of fuel. that's the game changer right there. incidentally, it goes faster. now, that's not just nice to do, but faster turn around time means you need fewer vehicles. and the train can go back and forth delivering cargoes while that wagon is still plodding along delivering its first cargo. that further enhances the logistical ability of your army. and there are some ancillary advantages. because it's faster and because it's generally carried in covered cars, cargo delivered by rail gets there in better shape, whether it's material or men. there's an old definition that a battle is something that happens at the intersection of four math sheets conducted between two exhausted armies. with the railroad maybe the armies won't be quite so exhausted. some other things you might not have thought of. you want more locomotives? well, you hire more people. you build a bigger shop. you put on extra shifts. you crank out more locomotives. the production of mules operates under some rather severe biological constraints hat cannot be hurried. reliability under stress, mr. kemper mentioned that. locomotives weren't particularly reliable but they were certainly more reliable than mules were most of the time. and here's one i bet you didn't think of. when that locomotive isn't working you don't have to feed it. but when the mule is not working you still have to feed it. so given some of these factors i'm telling you that roughly speaking the advent of steam power and incidentally steam boats were even better than locomotives were, steam power creased the ability of supplying armies by in order of magnitude by about ten times advantage over muscle power. that's why it's important. now, what does this mean in terms of waging war? i will go further than mr. kemper did and i will tell you that as far as i'm concerned, the civil war as we know it, could not have been waged with muscle power. it could not have been done with mules. the distances were simply too great. considering this particular campaign, which was reaching its culmination 150 years ago of t now, the memoirs william tecumseh sherman, he reports that his atlanta campaign was sustained by a railroad 473 miles long, supporting his army of 100,000 men and 35,000 animals for 196 days, doing the work of 36,800 agons and 220,800 mules. 473 miles. that would have been impossible with muscle power. and, incidentally, the corollary to this is that armies got larger. you look back through human history, it's hard to find an army that's bigger than 30,000 men. because that's about the maximum size that you can generally supply with wagon haul and foraging the countryside. a hundred thousand men. hundred thousand men in virginia. and this union army was also made possible by steam power. you want to know why the armies of the potomac spent so much of the war in the same place? that's where the rail heads were. spent a good part of the war here on the orange and alexandria railroad at culpepper and a chunk of the ar here opposite fredericksburg. this particular line of supply was particularly interesting. the baltimore and ohio railroad could deliver a car, a train of 16 cars to alexandria. they could run those cars straight on to barges, put those barges down the potomac, with a steam tug, run those cars right up on the railroad tracks and then haul them by rail to the army. it was possible to get a train of 16 cars from washington, d.c. to falmouth in 12 hours. now, depending on traffic conditions on i-95 that's about how long it would take today >> this makes a huge difference in the war. the size of the army, now this also helps explain why armies maybe didn't always move as much as they should have, because guess what happens if that army steps off and leaves those rail heads? how does it supply itself? it's back to wagon hauling. so it's real tempting to stay right there where the good times are. you got the railroad supplying you. this is what one of those barges look like coming down the potomac river. this is what they delivered. 800 tons of supplies a day to keep the army of the potomac alive and well. this light blue area on the right is food for animals. sitting in camp. they're not even working. that's what you got to feed them when you're sitting in camp. see that little black slice there? that's railroad supplies. now, which means of transport would you rather use? and, once again, if that army marches away from the rail head, it's going to take 400 to 800 wagons every day arriving at the army to keep it supplied. so this does make a considerable difference in the war. clearly, steam powered transportation is going to have a huge impact on the military operation. it is my contention with you folks tonight that for the first two years of the war the railroad war if i can call it that between north and south was symetrical. railroads served the south about as well as they did the north. in fact, some people argue they served the south somewhat better because the south, being on the defensive, could always have a railroad right there. and the railroads in the south did basically everything that was asked of them. but what about that pesky difference in railroad mileage between north and south? north has over two times as many railroad miles as the south does. well, okay. this shows you the union railroads in blue that were really directly involved in the war effort. so that disparity starts to fade out a little bit, doesn't it? moreover, when you look at the south, it wasn't like the south was backwards when it came to railroads. the south was very enthusiastic about railroads. railroad mileage in the south quadrupled in the 1850's. there was a lot of enthusiasm both public and private for building railroads. stockholders, private, city governments, and state governments supported the construction of railroads. and when you look at it in terms of sections, the south, i believe, by 1860, in terms of rate of construction, was out building the northeast. now, the midwest was out building both sections. but the south was not a back water lagard when it came to railroad construction. when you look at comparison to other countries in the world the confederacy when it stood up in 1861 was the third biggest railroad power in the world. and, in fact, when you look at the early years of the war, the most dramatic use of railroads were generally the confederates starting with the very first big battle in the east when joseph johnston put his army on the manassas gap railroad and got them to the battle of bull run in time to help stop mcdowell. but that was just the beginning. in 1862, this is the single biggest rail movement of the war. when you count the number of troops. braxton bragg moved his army from mississippi to chattanooga to kick off his invasion of kentucky. 30,000 troops. that's the biggest one. a little bit later in the year, not quite so efficient a move but stevenson moved his gigantic division back from tennessee to mississippi in time to help defend vicksburg. 9,000 men. and then in 1863 one of the best known rail movements for the confederate evidence, longstreet's corps moved from northern virginia by a number of different routes, all by rail, and half of the army, ,000 of the men arrived at chickamauga in time to help at the battle there. that's a pretty remarkable move. oh, and, incidentally, the union in following weeks paralleled that move. talk about symmetry. both sides are doing basically the same thing here. so the southern rail effort is looking pretty good. and, yet, a year and a half later, the confederate rail system is in virtually complete collapse and the union rail system both civilian and military is booming along like never before. hat caused that asymmetry to occur? well, everybody knows the answer to that one. okay. the northern railroads were standard gauge and the southern railroads were all different gauges so they couldn't interchange traffic. everybody knows that. right? no i'm not going to ask for a show of hands. because it's wrong. if you remember nothing else from this presentation please walk away with this. it was not about the railroad gauges. there was no standard gauge nyplace in the 1860's. gauge simply refers to the distance from the inside of this rail to the inside of this rail. there was no standard gauge anywhere. everybody got that? this is the condition in the north. the only place where you would find a section that was largely operating under the same gauge was in new england. and even there it was not universal. northeast, new england tended to run four feet 8 1/2 inches which is what we call standard gauge today. the pennsylvania railroad opted for 4'9." , which was not so bad because it is just a half inch. a lot of equipment could interchange. but then you go out to ohio and indiana and many but not all of the railroads out there were 4'10." the railroads they have in missouri, the hannibal in st. joe and the union pacific that they're building from st. louis toward kansas city during the war, 5'6." and then the erie railroad and some of its collaborators, a whopping six-foot gauge. when you built a railroad, you picked your own gauge. it was up to you. and in point of fact, some railroads deliberately picked odd ball gauges, specifically so they could not interchange traffic with other railroads. this is true in both north and south. and incidentally, the gauge is not a show stopper. it is possible to change the gauge of a railroad. fast forward a little bit here. after the civil war, the northern railroads converged on 48 1/2 inches as their southern gauge but the southern railroads kept building a five-foot gauge until finally in the 1880's the southern railroad got together and said, look. we're going to have to go along with the north on this. so let's convert to the 4 8 1/2 gauge. by that time they had 13,000 miles of track to deal with. would anybody care to guess how long it takes to physically move the rails to change from five-foot gauge to 4 8 1/2? give it a shot. anybody. years? how many years? >> two years. >> two years? ten years? five years? i shouldn't have done that. this was cruel. two days. [ laughter] two days. there's a lot of preparatory work and it is very expensive because you have to rebuild to replace all your rolling stock. but it is not impossible to change gauges. the big problem was railroads didn't want to interchange traffic. this is richmond, the beginning of the war. six railroads, not a single one connects with another railroad. why? well, the stockholders of these railroads, a lot of them were businessmen down here in richmond. they subsidized those railroads so that the railroads would carry stuff in from the countryside to their warehouses. they did not view the railroad, itself, as a way to make money. they viewed it as a way to supplement and aid their merchandise business. they had absolutely no interest in watching freight roll through richmond. that did nothing for them at all. okay. this is in richmond. same situation applied in hiladelphia. in both cities under the pressures of war they did build physical connections between the rail lines but that was over the objections of the people that owned those railroads. they did not want to interchange traffic. so we still have symmetry here. both sides are laboring under the problems of different gauges. both sides are laboring under difficulties of interchanging traffic. so where did the difference between north and south come? well, i think it started here. in january of 1861, congress passed a remarkable law that authorized abraham lincoln to seize control of railroads and telegraph for military necessity. now, the lincoln administration did not exercise that very often but they did it often enough so everybody remembered that law was there. they also immediately set out to establish a military railroad service. part of the army to assure supply directly to the front line troops and, most specifically, to operate rare lines that the government had seized. most of them captured railroads in the south as the union armies advanced. and there's one other curious thing they did. they paid well for their rail service. that doesn't sound like much of an advantage. just hold on to that thought for a minute. let's see what the confederacy did. well, in 1863, and again in 1865, the confederate congress passed laws that authorized jefferson davis to seize railroads but he never really exercised it in any methodical manner. the confederates never set up a military railroad agency within their war department, that is that actually operated railroads, and the confederate war department consistently tried to negotiate the lowest possible rates for their rail traffic. you all think that's a good thing? okay. folks, when you pay bargain basement rates, what kind of service do you get? throughout the war, confederate military traffic had to compete against civilian traffic that usually paid better. and if you're a southern railroad and you know the government's not going to take you over, you are going to charge the military whatever you want. so this is where some problems began. there is also a big difference between north and south in the people that the governments brought in to supervise and administer their respective rail efforts. early in the war, thomas scott, the vice president of the pennsylvania railroad, got invited to come to washington, d.c. and get the railroad situation in order. this guy knows how to run a railroad. trust me. he has the expertise. and he has the authority. assistant secretary of war. now, he didn't stay there too long. but he did some very important things. he got some stuff up and running that his successors prospered from, and he is the one who negotiated the rates with those civilian railroads. he went out to the guys he knew in civilian life and said, listen, jack. here's the way it is. if you cooperate with the war department whenever we want you to do something, you can make a fair amount of coin. if you don't cooperate, we're going to take you over. your call. and because he was one of them, they believed him and they listened to him. and for the rest the of the war the cooperation between the civilian railroads and the union war effort was really quite remarkable. now you need somebody to run this new u.s. military railroad thing that you stood up to operate trains behind the lines. the government went out and got the superintendent of the erie railroad. this guy knows how to run a ailroad. he is the first person to pioneer the use of telegraph to control rail traffic. he knows what he's doing. they brought him in and gave him a direct commission to colonel. he has the expertise and he has the authority. and oh, by the way he reported directly to the secretary of war. now, incidentally, when i came to work for the army in 1983, my father who had been an enlisted man in world war ii advised me that if the army ever offered me a direct commission to hold out for berg colonel. it's a great entry level rank, he said. the u.s. military railroad snagged this guy, herman howe back in the 1850's had been the chief engineer of the pennsylvania railroad. by chief engineer i mean civil engineer not locomotive driver. this guy happens to be the nation's leading expert in the design and construction of bridges. you think he might come in handy from time to time? incidentally, like myself, he is a resident of the great commonwealth of pennsylvania. some people say there is a resemblance. but he, too, commissioned as a colonel, he had the expertise and the authority. john garret, bno railroad. he never held a government position but i assure you if he wanted to talk to the secretary of war he did not need an appointment. because he owned the only rail line into washington, d.c. now, garret is a real interesting guy. some historians claim that his sympathies were actually southern. that he favored, personally favored the confederacy. but he clearly recognized that the well being of the railroad that he was president of required a union victory in this war. and so he bent every effort to support the union war effort completely setting aside his personal preferences. he had the expertise, too. now, i showed you this before as an example of symmetry. well, folks, when you start peeling back the onion a little bit, it looks a little bit less symetrical. first of all, the union managed to move twice as many men half again as far in the same length of time. and here's how that movement actually transpired. on the 23rd of september, 1863, president lincoln, secretary of war stanton, general and chief hallic and the director of military railroads colonel mccallum met to discuss the feesability of moving 20,000 reinforcements from virginia to tennessee. one day later the planning began. the planning did not take place in the war department. garrett's baltimore and ohio railroad transportation division did the planning. one day after that, the first soldiers got on the train in virginia. daniel mccallum, the head of u.s. military railroad, got the troops on the train. garrett and the baltimore and ohio railroad moved the troops over their own railroad and coordinated the movement over three other railroads as far as louisville and then thomas scott who had returned to civilian life came back down from pennsylvania and he administered the move as far as bridgeport, alabama. the most remarkable thing about this is that the movement began two days after it was first suggested. ask some of our military colleagues in the room here how long it would take to plan the movement of 12,000 troops today. it's a little longer than two days. this is clearly people who have the authority and the expertise to make things happen. the situation on the confederate side was significantly different. there was a man in charge of railroads kind of sort of in the quarter master office of the confederate war department. william ash had been the president of a railroad but he was more of a businessman than a railroad operator, so his expertise, okay, he held the rank of major, which is not going to carry a lot of clout in the war department. and he had no staff. so he really wasn't able to do a great deal. his successor, william wadly, this was the best shot the confederacy ever had, this guy right here. all right? he was born in new hampshire. he was a georgian by choice. he had railroaded all over the country. when the war began he was the president of a railroad down in louisiana. they brought him in, offered him the rank of colonel, and this guy has the expertise and he could have had the authority. but the confederate congress refused to ratify his commission as colonel. probably because he was a northerner by birth. and so he picked up and left. his successor wasn't a railroad man at all. but oddly enough, he was very possibly the most effective of the three. frederick sims held the rank of lieutenant colonel. he acquired a staff so he actually had a railroad bureau. he was a wheeler dealer and he could go out and schmooze. he was one of these guys who could just get things done. the problem is by 1863, there are some other things starting to go wrong with the confederate rail system. but he is the guy that orchestrated the move of longstreet's corps from virginia down to chickamau. the biggest problem these guys had to deal with was the confederate rail system really wasn't a system at all. it was a connection of short railroads. you see the pattern here on the east coast? railroads are converging at seaports. most of the confederate railroads were actually feeder lines to water transportation. it was really the water transport system that was the southern national transport system. -- 9,000 miles of railroad. there were over 100 different railroad companies. my trigger brain snaps the answer. the average southern railroad was less than 90 miles long. now, there was some construction in the 1850's. they were building some longer railroads that were kind of regional railroads. the problem is they're in the wrong place and they run in the wrong direction. what the confederacy really needs is rail lines that link the theatres of the war, spanning the appalachian mountains. at the time of the war, the north had four railroads that spanned the appalachian mountains. well, you're looking at one here, aren't you? look at that. how's that? looks pretty good. well, it wasn't one railroad. the so-called memphis and charleston railroad actually ran from memphis to stevenson, alabama. and then you needed three other railroads just to get to virginia and then at least one other railroad to get anyplace in virginia. why is this named the memphis and charles tob railroad? there is a long standing american tradition of naming railroads after places they don't go. back here in this period of time if you're building the hooterville and podunk railroad and you're trying to attract investors, you're going to name it the hooterville, podunk, and pacific railroad. okay? now, my favorite one is right here. you see that little nub? that is the vicksburg, shreveport, and texas railroad. that does not touch vicksburg, shreveport, or texas. so what we got here is not a system. it's a collection of small railroads. and that's going to be a challenge for any significant rail movement, civil or military. during the war the north added 5,000 miles to its rail system. this is all the south was able to do. and some of this they accomplished by cannibalizing rail from other railroads. so it does not improve as we go along. which brings us to the problem of rail. rail at the time of the civil war came in three varieties. t-rail is generally the system used today. well, it is the system used today. but there was also some older u-rail out there. ancient nxious th -- strap rail. it's actually a rail that is wood with a strip of iron on top. anybody want to run a train along that? there was still some strap rail in use in the confederacy when the war began. here's the problem. under heavy use, rail at the time, it was iron not steel, rail would tend to wear out in about three years. now the confederacy, the south did in fact roll rail. they manufactured rail. when the war began they manufactured about half the rail that they needed to replace worn out rail every ear. the other half they had to import mostly from england. when the war began, rail manufactured in the confederacy dropped to zero. because if you had a plant that could manufacture rail, guess what you're manufacturing once the war began? you're manufacturing armaments. wearing 1863, rail is out all over the south and the stockpiles are largely gone. now, when rail wears out, trains have to run slower. mishappings are more frequent. when trains run slower, you have to run more trains to keep the same volume of supply going, right? which means the locomotives work harder. which brings us to locomotives. here we see some georgia boys in 1860 posing proudly next to heir brand new locomotive made in new jersey. the confederacy, the south couldn't build locomotives. the best figure i saw was they probably built 19 locomotives in the south in 1860. the north built 451. all right. so you're not going to get any new locomotives once the war started. the biggest locomotive factory in the south was the iron works in richmond. guess what the iron works started making once the war began? cannon. armaments. so the south goes into this war with zero rail production and zero locomotive production and 1863 they're running into trouble. locomotives need to be rebuilt regularly. a steam locomotive incrementally destroys itself every time it's fired up. think about it. heat, water, pressure, and big, honking, moving parts. they need constant maintenance and they need periodic rebuilds. which means just ripping the guts out of the thing and rebuilding it. and by 1860 -- and without going into details, the confederacy lacked everything they needed for locomotive maintenance. everything. from locomotive, lubricating oils, to steel files, to gauges, you name it. they didn't have it. this is a situation on the virginia and tennessee railroad in 1863. to the best of my knowledge none of these locomotives that are out of action are due to enemy action. it's all wear and tear and the inability to repair what they've got. now, you might ask yourself, why don't they take these nine locomotives, strip them for parts, and get these nine locomotives working again? well, there's two problems with that. problem number two is that the same parts wear out on all the locomotives at the same time. problem number one is that steam locomotives at this point in history were basically hand crafted items. and you couldn't take a part from one and put it on another. so the confederacy by 1863 is running out of rail. the rail is turning bad. and their locomotives are breaking down all over the place. the situation is not much better when it comes to cars. now, these railroad cars are almost entirely wood, so, yes, you could say rail cars grew on trees. all right? most of them. if you had the labor to cut up the trees and make the rail cars, which is the problem in the confederacy by 1863. setting that aside, the wheels do not grow on trees. now, the confederacy could manufacture wheels. there were a couple of plants in the vicinity of savannah, georgia, that were capable of making 50 wheels a day. by 1863, they're down to 15 wheels a day. why? because the railroads can't get raw materials to them to make wheels. why can't the railroads get the raw materials? because the wheels on the cars are wearing out. and then you factor in inflation, which affected everything the confederacy tried to do. a railroad wheel that cost $15 when the war began cost $500 by the end of the war. d a wheel is a sophisticated device. even a minor imperfection in a wheel can damage the rail and cause a derailment. and so when wheels start to go bad, trains slow down. same problem there. okay. another declining resource is personnel. railroads at this period in history were tremendously labor intense i ever. it took five to seven men to operate a train that might be carrying 150 tons of cargo. five to seven men for 150 tons. the trains you see out here today have a two-man crew, 10,000 tons. most of the people on this crew were brakemen. this guy's job, he is not posing for a picture. that's his work place. when this train wants to stop he has to grab that handle and manually twist down the brakes that will hopefully slow that car down. so you might have three, four, five of these guys spaced out n the train as you go along. and we're running out of people. track crews. the most heavily traveled tracks at this period in history required on average four to five workmen per mile to keep that railroad in operation. all tolled, when the confederacy began the war, they had 16,000 railroad workers plus or minus. some of them were northerners. and they went home. some of them volunteered for the military. they went away. the con description law of 1862 in the south supposedly exempted railroad workers but as the war progressed, that exemption got narrower and narrower and narrower. and more and more railroad workers ended up sitting in army camps. which were hungry because the railroads couldn't deliver food to them. maybe those guys would have been better off on the railroads delivering food instead of sitting in camp eating the food. a lot of the track workers, manual workers in the south were slaves. the railroads owned a lot of slaves and would rent slaves from plantation owners. as the war progressed slaves were harder and harder to come by, too. this was extremely dangerous work. by my very rough calculation, at this time in history, approximately 2% to 4% of railroad workers were injured or killed on the job every year. now, that's not as dangerous as being in the army but it's pretty close. and one-third to one-half of those injuries were coupler related. on the right you have the automatic couplers we use today. you want to couple cars, you just bang them together and those knuckle couplers automatically engage. to e civil war, you had link the cars manually. this is a lincoln pin coupler. say there is a locomotive that is going to come back and pick up this train. somebody has to stand there between the rails holding that link in his hand, bring the locomotive back. he guides that link into the pocket on the locomotive and then drops the pin down to secure it. pretty dangerous work. now, the most spectacular way to become a casualty on the railroad was through boiler explosion and the most common way of boiler explosions occurring was if the crew was inattentive, if their gauges were bad, they were lazy, under trained, or fatigued. they wouldn't have enough water in the boiler. if there isn't water covering the top of the fire box the top of the fire box will get hotter and hotter and hotter until it softens and ruptures. if it is a little rupture it will be a blast of live steam come rushing back into the cab and the crew might even survive. the rupture is big enough enough oh, my the water is over 250 degrees fahrenheit. the only thing that keeps it in liquid form is it is under pressure. if all of the pressure is released at the same time all of that water tries to turn to steam, expanding 1,600 times in volume, exploding like a bomb. like that. this is the result of a 20th century explosion. similar locomotives operated about 140 pounds per square inch. in the 20th century they're in excess of 200 pounds per square inch. there is one boiler explosion in the 1930's that they calculated that when the boiler blew, it exploded with a force of 3 million pounds per square inch. is is very dangerous business. the most serious shortage was with machines, what they would have called mechanics. these guys are essential for locomotive manufacture and repair. and the south didn't have very many of them. this guy is a craftsman. it takes years to go through the experience and apprenticeship to become a master machinist. years. when the war began some of these guys were northerners. they went home. a lot of them went to work for the armaments industry and there was not time. the war didn't last long enough to grow new machinists. so these guys are in very short supply. deferred maintenance, that is just going to complicate all the problems with locomotives breaking. this ain't looking too good, is it, folks? just as all of this is coming together at about 1863, all of these chickens are coming home to roost, the rail going bad, the locomotives wearing out, running out of people, the union is starting to get really, really good at raiding confederate railroads. by 1864 it is getting to the point where the confederacy cannot always repair the damage done. when a railroad does get torn up, very often to repair an important railroad the confederates will go out and cannibalize track from some rural railroad out someplace. what is the net effect of that over time? eventually you have huge areas of the confederacy basically cut off from parts of world because the railroads have been ripped up. they're no good to the war effort anymore. even more devastating were the retreats. when the confederates retreated they had a choice. they could either destroy their own stuff or leave it behind or the union to use. by contrast, this is a u.s. military railroad shop. the union's railroad, military railroad in alexandria, virginia. i showed you this picture before to show you the coupler. this is all rail. this is all rail. they're telling the confederate raiders, bring it. come on. tear up rail. go ahead. waste your time. that's what we have to replace it. it is not just the material but the organization. folks, i hope you are stunned by this ugly, ugly organizational chart. i have been squirling around for this topic for about 20 years now and for the life of me i cannot figure out who answered to who and how the lines of authority ran. i don't think the people who were doing it knew either. this is ugly but this isn't. this is what the u.s. military railroad set up down at the operating level. they had a separate group of people to do construction and another group of people to run he trains. they organized it like a civilian railroad and virtually everybody in the organizations is a civilian. some have been given military rank. most of them have not. the workers, the train crews, straight civilians. but they knew what they were doing and they answered to a military chain of command. these are the rules herman haupt set up to operate railroads in the proximity of the enemy. his took some doing. he had to get the secretary of war to tell the army i don't care what your rank is. i do not care if you're a general officer. you do not walk up to the railroad track and take charge of a train. wrong answer. if do you that i'll fire you. we aren't going to ship you everything you think you want. we're going to ship you what we think you need. and when it gets to the front, everybody unloads trains. if there is an infantry regiment standing around when the train pulls up the train master says, you guys unload this train or the secretary of ar going to fire your colonel. unload the train. in places where there was no telegraph to control the movement of trains they operated on a rigid schedule and nobody interfered no matter what their rank was. this is some advice the assistant secretary of war gave colonel haupt. with apologies to any general officers who may be in the room tonight. it got to the point by 1863 that the union, u.s. military railroad construction crews, could rebuild track about as fast as the confederates could tear it up. and about 10,000 of these people on these construction, there were about 10,000 of these people in the construction crews and a large proportion were freedmen, ex-slaves. one of herman haupt's most remarkable accomplishments came in 1862 when he was called upon to rebuild a bridge behind mcdowell's corps during the peninsula campaign. what haupt did, the bridge was completely destroyed by the confederates. haupt showed up, he built a saw mill n site, and that saw cut 34,760 linal feet of timber and working largely with unskilled men haupt built that bridge in nine days. president lincoln came out to see it. when he went back to washington he said that man haupt has built a bridge across potomac creek about 400 feet long and nearly 100 feet high over which loaded trains are running every hour and upon my word, gentlemen, there is nothing in it but bean poles and corn talks. nine days. you know what herman haupt's reaction was? too slow. back in alexandria the u.s. military railroad started prefabricating bridge components. it got to the point where they could almost replace a bridge as fast as the confederates could destroy one such as this one over bull run on the orange and alexandria railroad. by the end of the war the u.s. military railroad was i think the largest railroad in the united states by a considerable margin. most of this track was out west, tennessee, in particular. but this is big-time rrg here. what is the impact on campaigns? in 1863 when lee started his second invasion of the north, the army of the potomac started moving north paralleling lee's force and as hooker and later meade advanced toward pennsylvania herman haupt said you guys are going to need rail support, so he rushed up here to frederick and opened a rail depot here on the baltimore and ohio. as the army kept going north, he rushed over here to the western maryland which was a crafty little railroad. he brought in work crews and quickly threw it into order and they started delivering supplies from there and then he sent people up to the gettysburg railroad and opened a rail head here. the gettysburg railroad did not open in time for the battle but it opened in time to help evacuate about 15,000 wounded soldiers. the remarkable thing is when the army started north not even he army commander knew where it was going but herman haupt and u.s. military railroads managed to keep rail supply consistently throughout the campaign. there was never a supply shortage. then we look out west the following year. some of the folks from virginia traveled out to support sherman's campaign from chattanooga to atlanta, including now brigadier general mccallum, the head of the u.s. military railroads, and in the course of this campaign, the u.s. military railroads built 75 miles of track. hey replaced 11 major bridges. and the first train rolled into atlanta one day after the city surrendered. similar story in the east. when grant started his campaign and ended up at petersburg his army was being supplied in culpepper courthouse off the orange and alexandria as he did wilderness and spotsylvania he supplied from culpepper and they reopened the creek line to fredericksburg and got some wagon haul from a landing at port royal. they went down to north anna as he headed down toward cold harbor, grant sent some forces and some railroad men by water down here to white house. they opened up this little railroad and had a rail head waiting for him when he arrived at cold harbor. this may be the only time in recorded military history where an army invading a foreign country advanced toward its supply base. when he swung around petersburg u.s. military railroads put the city point railroad into operation and began supplying his army there. close up of petersburg, this is petersburg and city point. as the union lines extended around the confederate lines, the u.s. military railroads laid a railroad just right out on the ground parallel to the union lines so there was delivery straight to the front line troops by rail. during the siege of petersburg. hat's pretty impressive stuff. by contrast, on the confederate side, the end is near. as sherman moved into south carolina, the confederate government ordered the railroads in north carolina to change their gauge so that some of the cars and locomotives from south carolina could be evacuated. the governor vance of north carolina just said no so all of that equipment was lost. hoke's division tried to move 48 miles on the piedmont railroad, took one brigade three days. the rest of the division walked. none of that was due to enemy action. it was due to the other deterioration of the rail, rolling stock, and the locomotives. finally, the commissary general about a month before appamotox reported that the military order for supplies in the richmond area amounted to about 500 tons of food a day on top of the other rail traffic that was supplying the civilians and he said i don't think i can do it. the food is out there. the railroads can't move it anymore. asymmetry is complete. the rails in the north are blooming and prospering. the rails in the south, the wheels have literally come off. i would suggest to you that the northern supremacy in the railroad war did not just happen nor was it preordained. lincoln's war department grasped early in the war that railroads would play a vital role in the conflict and it acted forcefully to assure effective support from both civilian and military railroads. the confederacy never succeeded in finding the organization, the expertise, or the material to maintain its railroads in a protracted war of attrition. thus the union railroads laid the foundation for victory while the confederate railroadsd and died. states the confederate of america on the road to oblivion. ladies and gentlemen, i thank you for your kind attention. [applause] >> if you have a question, please come up to the microphone. indeed, it does increase the vulnerability. yes, sir? piles of preassembled ties and rails. is that a new thing? >> yes. see it. not >> it was rather new. most railroads were built locally with local resources. railroad it is pre-have for -- pre-fabricating professionally designed railroad bridges. question? >> yes, ma'am. it is a little weird to be way up front here. a question about andersonville. one of the explanations i have -- whyor white and son andersonville got so bad, the railroads were not running anymore. but the railroads were running well enough for men to get there. do you knowain -- anything about this particular problem? or alleged problem? >> part of the problem by that point in the war was the area of the confederate military officers are able to draw supplies from our oftentimes very, very remote. why in 1864, lee's army up in virginia is actually drawing much of its supplies from georgia. -- itrt of the problem may not have been that the rails were not running. it was that food was getting sucked up to the army in northern virginia, possibly to prisonersent of the in andersonville, and certainly to the detriment of the tennessee, army of which ironically was defending georgia and watching the food in georgia go out on rail cars other armies. >> thank you. >> yes, ma'am. sir? >> yes, i read this statistic the other day, the total casualties of the confederates versus the union. the confederates took far more casualties. did the railroads contribute heavily toward that? >> it does contribute in a way. one argument you can make is tied soarmies were close to the railhead, it may decisive maneuvers difficult. ifn if you defeated an army, it had real supplies, chances are it could be reinforced before you could finish it off. it is my contention in some of that the existence of the railroad helped make the civil war lasted as long as they did. in that sense, it would have added to the casualties. moree union side had casualties than the confederates. that is what i am asking. >> i think the biggest imprints there is union forces are on the offensive through most of the war and it is an axiom of war that the guy on the offensive is going to take more casualties. i would suspect it is that more than the railroads themselves. sir? have you read or heard anything about -- sometime , russia world war ii change there will road gauge to retard invasions. is not the right time and place, and that is not true either. they started to build the railroads the same time the americans did. it is really easy to move a five foot gauge to four feet. the germans could have had it pretty easy if they had prepared for it when it came to re-gauging soviet railroads. let's say the soviets had built a four foot railroad. when the germans showed up, they would have had to move that rail out. that changes all of the distances between tracks. that changes bridges and tunnels. that changes yards. that is hard to do. so, if the russians deliberately did it, they get it wrong. [laughter] yes, sir? >> i am wondering about raw oferials for manufacture iron components in the south. did they have an adequate supply of raw materials? >> they had supplies, but they were not adequate for all of their needs. this is the problem when it comes to obtaining goods from outside. they would have liked to have gotten british iron products to supplement their own inadequate supplies. but when you think about it, those british supplies will have to comment by blockade runner. think about railroad rail for example. they would love to have had reddish rail coming in, but on a blockade runner? i mean, that is like going to home depot and shoplifting bricks. [laughter] profit item.a low it is very heavy, very hard to move, and it don't pay. one of the problems is, the blockade runners were largely in it for profit. , theswer your question confederates had some supplies, but not nearly adequate for their needs. yes, ma'am? >> considering resources, how are resources divided between new nations and armaments and rails? who made those calls? and especially the south looking at having less resources available, however those choices made? >> it is my sense -- i cannot document -- the south was suffering from a fair degree of militarism in its .ecision-making processes and anything other then don's and were fighting was going to get short shrift. so, the confederate government with jefferson davis is present, and military officer, or x secretary of war, he got a railroad guy, and he has an army guy who comes and argues for iron -- the army guy is going to win. shows up indirectly in some other ways. the confederacy is short of rail by 1863. some of their rail got ripped off by the confederate navy, because they used railroad rail thed hoc armor on some of ironclad vehicles. the confederate government allow this to happen. government allow old soldiers -- allowed soldiers go work onmp to ironclads, but it would not allow soldiers to leave camp to go work on railroads. so, i think it is just a pervasive sense of macho thatsterone militarism affected some of their decision-making there. but it called for some pretty clear thinking to say, you know, folks, in the long run, these will be operating. these guns will not do us any good. that kind of thinking was not always at the forefront. >> ladies and gentlemen -- [applause] >> thank you very much. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] war errors. every saturday at 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. eastern time. for more civil war anytime, visit our website, www.c-span.org/history. >> sunday at 6 p.m. eastern, we explore an exhibit at the library of congress marking the 100th anniversary of the panama canal opening. curator show how newspaper reports, photographs, and sheet music document the creation. artifacts, aerican weekly program that takes bureaus into archives and historic sites around the country. >> next on the civil war, carol ember 10 discusses the provision slavesrty among freed during reconstruction. she discusses the attempts of the government to provide aid to establishing the fridman's freed men'se bureau. --s is a portion of the 24 2014 civil war symposium. it is about 45 minutes. >> good morning, again. for those of you who have come late, i am the codirector of the u.s. capital historical society. i am currently the the junior