Railroads of the Confederacy

By Ralph Arnold

Presentation to CCWRT on 17 February 2011, Summarized by Mike Rhein

Photography by Shane Gamble

©Cincinnati CWRT, 2011

“They had so little to start with.” This statement made by our February speaker, Mr. Ralph Arnold, crystallized the South’s meager resources with which to fight a war. A key illustration of this Confederate dilemma was its railway system, aptly described by Mr. Arnold whose career included 25 years in transportation operations and management.

Rails Held Together with Wood on a Confederate Railroad Late in the War

Using a good array of slides and providing a detailed map of the Confederate railroads, Mr. Arnold explained such factors daunting the South’s capability in transporting armies and food as gauge variances (just over 4’-8” to 5’-6”), predominance of single-track railroads, inadequate iron production, little cooperation between state and national governments, inefficient coordination among local railroad companies with military departments, and competing commercial interests.

According to Mr. Arnold, whose interest in military logistics and maps led him to tour all the main Civil War battlefields, “railroads were the biggest business of the day” in the 1850s, citing such key railroad entities as the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore & Ohio and the New York Central. He said that, due to manufactured goods from New England and New York areas being shipped westward and foodstuffs eastward from the West, railroad networks assumed an east-west pattern, therefore bypassing the southern region until railroads later developed the north-south format.

However, Mr. Arnold emphasized that cotton, being “the major crop of the South,” created a southern railroad pattern leading to coastal ports which shipped this product to “textile mills of England and Europe.” Because of cotton, he added, it created “insurance” and “warehousing” industries and “regular scheduled transportation,” therefore enabling the South to ship the “greatest number of exports out of the country,” ultimately to be the “richest” part of the United States.

Atlanta Railroad Depot, 1864. Photos by George Barnard, Library of Congress 02220 & 02223.

Nonetheless, in the South, railroad right-of-ways tended to be “poorly constructed,” and railroads themselves were “cheaply constructed,” the speaker stressed, adding that iron was a “cheaper brand” with wood being the “major fuel” as opposed to coal. He said that “not one rail was manufactured in the South during the war.” Mr. Arnold noted the poor maintenance of the southern railway network which contributed to slower speeds (averaging 10-15 miles per hour by 1864), consuming more cords of wood mileage-wise, down to an average of “30-40 miles per cord of wood” from the pre-war average of 70-80 miles per cord. Because “safety was not the first feature,” he said, there was “no central track control,” leading to accidents. In fact, Mr. Arnold commented that the United States Military Railroad would rebuild southern railroads “once it was in the area” where a northern army took control.

Confederate troop movements became more hampered by the deteriorating railways, taking longer to travel to their objectives. Mr. Arnold cited examples such as General Braxton Bragg’s army having to move from Tupelo, Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama to Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1862 in a circuitous route of 600 miles, taking three weeks and General James Longstreet’s 20,000 men of the First Corps (Army of the Northern Virginia) traveling from Virginia to northern Georgia in 15 days. He added that only about 4,000 of Longstreet’s corps made it to the Chickamauga battlefield.

Considering the South’s continual transportation difficulties in the Civil War, Mr. Arnold expressed admiration for southern ingenuity and adaptability in coping with them. “It was amazing what they accomplished,” he said. As his presentation clearly pointed out, the South’s perplexities in maintaining an aging, overtaxed rail network with fewer box cars and engines than the Northern system, reflected the shortages in materials, industry and manpower with which the Confederacy had to utilize against the industrial-commercial-military resources of the North.