Baltimore & Ohio Railroad: The Union’s Most Important Supply Line

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After fighting its way through the crowd, the 6th Massachusetts finally boarded B&O cars and made their way to Washington. To prevent further outbreaks of violence, Garrett and Mayor Brown suspended rail operations in and around Baltimore for three days. For several weeks after April 19, Union troops could only reach Washington by Chesapeake Bay steamers and the railhead at Annapolis.

In April 1861, Confederate forces under ‘Stonewall’ Jackson occupied Harpers Ferry, at the mouth of the Shenandoah River in western Virginia. Under orders from Virginia Governor John Letcher, Jackson was forced to allow B&O trains carrying coal.

Jackson found the arrangement insufferable because he knew the coal passing through his sector fueled Northern factories and industries. He convinced the B&O president to restrict the carrier’s traffic to regularly scheduled passenger and express trains that ran only during daylight hours. ‘The noise of your trains is intolerable,’ Jackson complained. ‘My men find their repose disturbed by them every night. You will have to work out some other method of operating them.’

Garrett realized that he was at Jackson’s mercy, as the B&O line in and around Harpers Ferry was subject to destruction. Garrett also reasoned that since Jackson had neither captured nor destroyed B&O property in Harpers Ferry, then perhaps the general would continue to allow the B&O to pass through the region unmolested. Garrett therefore complied with Jackson’s request and ordered B&O engineers to restrict rail operations in the Harpers Ferry region to daylight hours only.

Several days later, Jackson sent Garrett yet another letter: Could the B&O further limit its daytime traffic through the Harpers Ferry area to a two-hour corridor in order to prevent interference with routine training conducted by Confederate troops? Garrett again complied, and the B&O began to funnel all traffic through Harpers Ferry only between 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

On May 23, 1861, the same day Virginia seceded from the Union, Jackson sprang his trap on the B&O Railroad. While voters across Virginia went to the polls, Jackson ordered Captain John Imboden at Point of Rocks, Md., to allow all B&O westbound trains to proceed as they normally did until noon that day. Jackson further instructed Imboden to stop all eastbound traffic on the main stem. Beginning at midday, Imboden and his men destroyed enough B&O track to necessitate several days of repair. At the same time, Colonel Kenton Harper in Martinsburg was under orders to allow all eastbound traffic to pass without delay but to stop all trains traveling westbound and then destroy a sizable portion of track. Unable to travel east or west, more than 300 rail cars and 56 locomotives fell into Confederate hands. Several days later, Jackson ordered the equipment moved to Richmond, where the captured engines and cars became part of the Confederate rail service.

For the remainder of the summer, Jackson’s regiments continued to harass and disrupt rail operations around Harpers Ferry. In June Jackson destroyed 42 engines and numerous shops in the Martinsburg yard of the B&O. By the end of August, Jackson had wreaked enough damage on the railroad to cause it to cease operations on its main stem for more than 10 months.

In contrast, the line’s finest moment came in September 1863 when the B&O played a leading role in the longest Civil War-era deployment by rail of soldiers from one theater of operations to another. In early September, Confederate General Braxton Bragg defeated Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans at Chickamauga in northwest Georgia. Federal Secretary of War Edwin Stanton realized the loss at Chickamauga threatened the safety of the Union stronghold at Chattanooga, Tenn.

On September 24, Stanton convened a meeting at the War Department to discuss methods of moving the approximately 25,000 men of the XI and XII corps from Virginia to Chattanooga to reinforce Rosecrans. Stanton knew speed was essential, and the next morning orders went out from the War Department to move the men by rail. The reinforcements began their journey on cars powered by locomotives belonging to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. By the time the last of the 30 trains consisting of more than 700 cars reached Chattanooga, only eight days had elapsed since Garrett and Stanton worked out the details of the movement. The effort helped keep Chattanooga in Union hands for the remainder of the war.

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Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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