Colonel Stonewall Jackson's operations against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1861 were aimed at disrupting the critical railroad used heavily by the opposing Union Army as a major supply route. A second goal was to capture the maximum number of locomotives and cars for use in the Confederate States of America. During this point in the war, the state of Maryland's stance was not yet determined. The B&O Railroad, then owned by the state of Maryland, ran through Maryland and along the Potomac River Valley in its pass through the Appalachian Mountains, but took a crucial turn at Harpers Ferry and passed south, through Virginia and Martinsburg while crossing the Shenandoah Valley. The railroad then continued on through much of present-day West Virginia, which then was still part of Virginia, meaning that a major portion of the route went through a state which later seceded.
Many historians have written that the operations began when the Virginia militia launched a raid in western Virginia at the end of busy noontime traffic on May 23, 1861, "the eve of Virginia's ratification of her secession ordinance", during the early days of the American Civil War. Historian James I. Robertson Jr. contests this version of events, saying that such a raid never occurred and that the story grew out of an unreliable 1885 account of the events by General John D. Imboden.
In any event, from late May through June Confederate forces controlled the railroad and destroyed track and bridges throughout the Virginia portion of the railroad. Believing that Harper's Ferry was indefensible against a Union advance, General Joseph E. Johnston was given permission to abandon the post. As part of this retreat, a major bridge was destroyed at Harper's Ferry and the railroad works at Martinsburg were destroyed. In a major engineering feat, 14 locomotives from Martinsburg were disassembled and moved across country by horse drawn teams to Strasburg, Virginia. Eventually, the locomotives were moved to Richmond where they were put to use by the Confederacy.
Background
Virginia Militia forces deploy and defend Harpers Ferry
After the Virginia Secession Convention reconvened and voted on April 17, provisionally, to secede, on the condition of a future ratification by a statewide referendum, the Governor of Virginia immediately began mobilizing the Virginia State Militia to strategic points around the state, including the assignment of Colonel Kenton Harper to Virginia's "Forces In and About Harper's Ferry, Virginia" on April 18.
Hours before Virginia Militia forces from Charlestown, West Virginia, and Winchester, Virginia, arrived on April 18, the Federal troops guarding the arsenal evacuated and burned it.Stover, p. 104 Nine days later, on 27 April, Colonel Thomas J. (later "Stonewall") Jackson, then of the Virginia State Militia, was ordered to relieve Colonel Harper. He began the task of organizing the defense of Virginia at that location. During his first day commanding forces, on April 27, 1861, Colonel Jackson's men arrested one of the only four general officers in the regular army at that time, Brigadier General William Selby Harney, at Harpers Ferry, while he was taking a train to Washington, D.C. He was commanding the Department of the West, and was traveling from his headquarters in St. Louis, Missouri.New York Herald, April 28, 1861: pddoc.com, accessed Nov 14, 2008 Sometime following this, Colonel Jackson, while familiarizing himself with the B&O Railroad line, inspected Captain John D. Imboden's (later a CSA Brigadier General) assigned post, possessing the bridge across the Potomac River at Point of Rocks, Maryland.Imboden, p. 122-123
Tensions build in May 1861 For the immediate time being, "B&O trains continued to run, with many interruptions and only with the consent of Virginia." Colonel Jackson realized that Harper's Ferry held not only important arms production factories, but was a choke-hold on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and key telegraph trunk lines connecting Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. to the Ohio Valley and interior of the United States. As the war approached, the president of the B&O Railroad, John W. Garrett, who was sympathetic to the Union, became "outspoken" against the Confederacy, using "some strong adjectives to lend stress" to the word "rebel". Delagrange notes "As war seemed to be approaching, B&O President John Garrett tried to appear neutral (his sympathies were with the North), a good business practice because people weren't certain if Maryland would go Union or, even if it did, whether the line could be kept from the Confederates. Also, West Virginia had not separated from Virginia yet, so technically most of the B&O tracks lay in the South."Delagrange, p. 14
On May 5, 1861, Federal forces seized control of the B&O Relay House west of Baltimore, so that Brigadier General B. F. Butler could "inspect and stop any further freight headed for military forces of Virginia."Stover, p. 103 Butler was eager to assume authority in the absence of official instructions and finally occupied all of Baltimore on May 13, shortly before his promotion to Major General on May 16. He "started to arrest citizens known for their open Confederate support" including "Ross Winans, long-time inventor and locomotive builder." Political instability began to mount, as martial law was declared in Baltimore, which was a very secession-sympathetic city.
May 23, 1861 Raid The events as described in this section are contested in the "Raid controversy" section below.
Colonel Jackson, gathering intelligence on freight passing on the line, determined that coal was being shipped in large quantities from the Ohio Valley to Union naval bases in Baltimore that were fueling U.S. Navy warships attempting to blockade the more southern states. "During early May, dozens of heavy coal and freight trains were moving daily over the double-track line in the Harpers Ferry area."
About the middle of May Jackson then devised a covert plan to destroy B&O Railroad operations while simultaneously benefiting Virginia and possibly the Confederacy. Imboden, pp. 122–123 Jackson complained to the B&O Railroad that the "noisy night railroad traffic" of the trains disturbed the rest of his troops, and notified John Garrett that trains would only be allowed to pass through Harpers Ferry at first only during daylight hours, but within a few days demanded a tighter timetable restriction between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.Candenquist, , accessed August 2008Imboden, p. 122Civil War Trails sign at Point of Rocks railroad station, corroborating the train raid in May 1861, with specific enforce time tables used to bottleneck the trainsHistorical Marker Database: hmdb.org , accessed November 10, 2008Historical Marker Database: hmdb.org , accessed November 10, 2008; "In May 1861, Col. Thomas J. (later Gen. "Stonewall") Jackson convinced the railroad to consolidate its coal shipments at a specific time period." - Civil War Trails sign at Point of Rocks railroad station, corroborating the timetable restriction starting in May 1861 in order to ensure their rest was not disturbed. Delagrange notes "He complained strongly that the trains were disturbing the rest of his tired troops at Harper's Ferry. Garrett agreed to run as many trains as possible through around noon." Thus only two hours in the day, centered around noon, were allowed for train traffic through the Harpers Ferry area after the middle of May. This timetable bottleneck caused the B&O Railroad to pile up trains in yards and along the lines on the double tracks on either side of Harpers Ferry in order to maximize their throughput during this new curfew.
On the night of May 22, Jackson sent the 5th Virginia Infantry under Kenton Harper to Cherry Run, west of Martinsburg, and he sent Captain John D. Imboden's cavalry to Point of Rocks, east of Harpers Ferry.Imboden, p. 123 The 5th Virginia positioned themselves at a bridge spanning the Potomac River near Cherry Run, thirty-two miles west of Harpers Ferry on the Potomac River north and west of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Martinsburg Shops. Imboden's cavalry staged themselves at the signal tower west of Point of Rocks, east of Harpers Ferry.
The following morning, May 23, the trains waiting to the east and west of this forty-four mile section "arrived on schedule" and began moving across this curfewed span at 11:00 a.m. "freely entering the zone for an hour after eleven o'clock."Johnston, p. 24 This one-hour period allowed for just enough time for these trains to make it only part way into their forty-four mile stretch without reaching the other end on the doubled-up tracks of that main stem section. Then, "at the end of the busy noontime traffic," just as all these trains had filled up the east and westbound lanes, practically coupler to coupler, "Imboden and Harper suddenly halted traffic at midday" by emerging forth and not allowing the trains now coming toward each of their positions to pass and get out of this double-track stretch. Thus Colonel Jackson had now "bagged" the "largest single haul of rolling stock taken intact during the war" on the very first day of the war from Virginia's perspective: May 23, 1861.
The B&O Railroad's main stem now filled with "dozens of wrathy, impatient locomotive engineers wondering what was causing the tie up."Stover, p. 105 Locomotives and trains were caught in various places all along this section, and this trapped a large quantity of rolling stock in between, which "was soon concentrated in the big rail yard at Martinsburg, West Virginia."Stover, pp. 104–105 From Harpers Ferry, the Winchester and Potomac Railroad ran as a spur off the B&O Railroad mainline south to Winchester, Virginia, allowing Jackson an opportunity to try and move his captured rail assets quickly to Winchester. The entire forty-four mile railline between Cherry Run and Harper's Ferry, with the huge railyard at Martinsburg, and the thirty-two mile Winchester spur was now entirely isolated as a whole and separate system of seventy-six miles of railroad, apart from the western and eastern runs of the main B&O Railroad stem.
Hauling away the bounty {| class="wikitable" |+ B&O locomotives captured during the Great Train Raid of 1861 ! Engine !!Type |- | No. 17 | Norris 4–2–0 |- | No. 34 | Mason 4–4–0 |- | No. 187 | Camelback 0–8–0 |- | No. 188(CSA name "Lady Davis") | Tyson 4-4-0 "Dutch Wagon" |- | No. 193 | Camelback 0–8–0 |- | No. 198 | Hayes Camelback 0–8–0 |- | No. 199 | Camelback 0–8–0 |- | No. 201 | ?
Initial capture
Sources disagree on both the number of locomotives and railroad cars captured and the dates that the captures occurred. Historian Edward Hungerford, in his centennial history of the B&O Railroad published in 1928, describes the May capture as follows:
Hungerford writes,
This was real strategy and Jackson undoubtedly would have repeated it, had it not been that Harper's Ferry was beginning to be untenable for him." After the evacuation of Harper's Ferry, beginning on June 20, Jackson fell back to Martinsburg and "forty-two locomotives and their tenders at that important railroad center, in addition to 305 cars, chiefly coal gondolas, were given the torch.Hungerford, v. 2, pp. 8-9