3
An Interruption of War
The drumbeats of sectional rivalry that had been heard in the debate over a transcontinental railroad route became a call to arms when South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860. A banner headline in the Charleston Mercury screamed the news—“The Union Is Dissolved”—while out in Charleston Harbor, a garrison of seventy-odd Union artillery troops under the command of Major Robert Anderson awaited its fate.
Confederate batteries led by fiery Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard began a bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Two days later, Major Anderson, who had once been Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point, surrendered the post. Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis, whose call for reason over politics had gone unheeded when it came to selecting a transcontinental railroad route, had been elected president of the Confederate States of America.
The outbreak of war had an immediate impact on the Pennsylvania Railroad. William Jackson Palmer’s high-level errand-running for J. Edgar Thomson suddenly became much more dangerous. Maryland’s status as a border state was tenuous at best, and Southern sympathies ran high there. When normal communications and train traffic through the state were disrupted, Thomson feared that Washington, DC, would become totally isolated from the North.
“The suspension of intercourse between this place [Philadelphia] and Washington,” Thomson wrote Lincoln’s secretary of war, Simon Cameron, “has caused an intense feeling here in relation to the safety of the capital, and there is great eagerness to rush to its assistance.”1
Thomson offered the full services of his railroad to the federal government, but orders for troop displacements were painfully slow in coming. Noting the lack of troops moving south from Philadelphia despite his arrangements for transporting five regiments per day, Thomson grew caustic. “We infer from this,” he scolded Cameron, “that you must feel entirely safe at Annapolis and at Washington.”2
Meanwhile, Cameron was busy raiding Thomson’s corporate pocket for talent. Because telegraph lines were down, Palmer hand-carried a dispatch from Cameron to Thomas A. Scott, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s vice president. Cameron wanted Scott’s managerial skills in the War Department, and within days, Scott was assistant secretary of war for transportation. He soon became the Union army’s railroad czar.
“This morning we open three daily passenger lines to and from Baltimore,” Scott wrote Palmer shortly thereafter, “also one daily freight train—from all of which you will perceive that the U.S. Military Routes are progressing towards the P.R.R. [Pennsylvania Railroad] standard.”3
As the railroads struggled with their new roles, the nation as a whole—both blue and gray—found that there would be no quick end to the war. Cries of “On to Richmond!” aside, General Irvin McDowell’s neophyte Union army smacked into the stone wall of Jackson and his compatriots at a creek called Bull Run and was sent fleeing back to Washington. Realization sunk in that this would not be a short family quarrel but rather the testing piece of a generation.
William Jackson Palmer reluctantly put aside his Quaker upbringing and recruited a special troop of cavalry from among the gentlemen class of Pennsylvania. And who better to identify with than that hero of Fort Sumter, Major Anderson? Thus was born the Anderson Troop. Palmer wrote to his circle of friends throughout Pennsylvania and to business associates of J. Edgar Thomson, urging them to nominate suitable young men for the outfit. While he originally disclaimed interest in the position, Palmer, to no one’s surprise, was elected captain of the troop.4
Their first battle came soon enough. Early in 1862, Ulysses S. Grant began a concerted drive south up the Tennessee River. Fort Henry fell to him, and the capture of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River earned him the sobriquet “Unconditional Surrender.” With the lower Cumberland in Union hands, Palmer and the Anderson Troop went with General Don Carlos Buell’s headquarters staff to Nashville.
As Grant plunged onward toward the critical rail junction of Corinth, Mississippi, Buell’s Army of the Ohio moved south from Nashville to protect his left flank. The climax came on April 6 at a little church called Shiloh, a stone’s throw from Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River. While Palmer’s cavalry saw no direct action, Palmer averred as to how “Buell has undoubtedly saved Grant’s army,” albeit with frightful losses on both sides.5
Until Shiloh, the horror of what the war would become had not yet sunk into the national consciousness. Despite the war—both boldly and perhaps a little naively—the United States Congress resolved to do in war what it had been unable to do in peace.
Old-line Whigs and new Republicans in the North had long advocated the expenditure of federal dollars for what were characterized as “internal improvements”: roads, canals, and river and harbor facilities. The Republican Party platforms of 1856 and 1860 added railroads to this category and not only called for a railroad to the Pacific but also urged government aid in its construction. In 1860 Democrats also supported a railroad to the Pacific, but the party maintained its longstanding opposition to the direct use of federal dollars for the effort, particularly if the route was to be one of the more northerly choices.
Now, relieved of southern Democrats, the remaining Republican majority in Congress once again considered the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Colonel John J. Abert’s 1849 assertion that the “integrity of the Union” demanded such a road was trumpeted anew with an increased sense of urgency.