The North-South War 160 years ago was the largest and most explicit rift in American history, and has affected the present social, economic and psychological situation. Although one side finally signed the surrender instrument, it was a lose-lose situation. If you have to determine a winner, then the railway can be counted as one.
01
A day's march, the train takes only an hour
Looking at different versions of the pre-war balance of north-south forces charts, you can see the railway. Before the war, the total length of railways in the United States was 48,000 kilometers, of which 34,000 kilometers were in the north and 14,000 kilometers in the south, a ratio of 73 points. It seems that the North has the upper hand, and in the end, the North has won the war.
However, there are also experts who analyze that at the beginning of the war, the railway advantage of the north was not so obvious.
According to the railway mileage per capita, the per capita is more than 1 meter. If it is calculated by the degree of new and old, the South is even better. According to the distribution location, the battlefield is in the south, and the Southern Railway Company naturally supports the south.
Indeed, it was also the South that took the lead in incorporating the railway into the platoon and giving it its first taste of victory.
Among the many battle names of the Civil War, You can often see Manassas and Niuben River, and the two names refer to the same battle. Manassas is on the banks of the Cattle Run River, and the north and south are called differently, so there is a mixture of narratives.
The battlefield is not only convenient for water transportation by the Niu run river, but also a railway hub. The railway from Washington to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, was connected to the railway to the Shenandoah Valley and became a strategic powerhouse. In July 1861, the first duel between the North and the South took place here, known as the First Battle of Manassas. A year later, here again, took place the Second Battle of Manassas.
In both battles, the Confederates won. In the early days of the war, both sides were inexperienced and full of mistakes. More commendably, in the first Battle of Manassas, the South creatively used rail transport to transport troops, unknowingly transferred troops from the Shenandoah Valley, and quickly increased the number of front-line troops.
In the era of marching on two legs, the movement speed of the troops was generally 24 kilometers per day, and when chasing and fleeing, they could reach 48 kilometers, and the average carrying equipment was 20 kilograms. The railway, even if the initial brigade speed is slower, can complete this progress in one or two hours, and it is still a surplus of troops and more materials and equipment.
Later, in early September 1863, the Confederates once again rapidly transferred 12,000 troops by rail from Virginia to Georgia, encircled with neighboring Tennessee forces, and won the Battle of Chattanooga.
When the Civil War took place, the railway was just starting out. As the war deepened, the powerful role of the railway was increasingly discovered. The South was the first to taste the sweetness, using the railway to quickly transfer troops, unexpectedly allocating troops to the front. In the first two years of the Civil War, the Confederate Army took advantage of the geographical advantages and people.
The Northern Army also gradually felt the life-saving grace of railway transportation. They fought away, and if the soldiers were wounded and incapacitated, they had to be transported back to the rear hundreds of kilometers away by people, which was inefficient. Some wounded and sick people hang up without timely treatment. The railway saved time and effort and saved many lives. In the Battle of Antietan, which took more than 23,000 casualties, all wounded soldiers were rescued by rail transport within 24 hours.
After the war, it was found that almost all the fighting took place in an area within 30 kilometers of the railway line.
02
When railroad companies bargain with the army
Railroads are so important. But the Federal Army in the North had initially difficulty moving the railroads because the property was privately owned. While the ammunition and munitions piled as high as a hill lie at the station waiting to be transported, the boss of the railway company is bargaining with the head of the army, seeing the money and paying a high price before he is willing to transport it.
Cameron, the war secretary of the Northern, U.S. federal government, was the controlling shareholder of several railroad companies, and his deputy, who was also the president of the railroad company, was unique. Their priority, though, is corporate profit. Not only raising the price of transportation, but also suppressing other railroad companies, using only their own railways.
So why did Lincoln choose such a man as his Secretary of War? Born with a merchant's sense of smell, Cameron made his fortune through railroads, canals, and banks in his early years, and then entered politics and was elected to the U.S. Senate. In the 1860 election, he judged that he had no chance of being elected president, so he led the forces under his control to Lincoln. After Lincoln was elected, he reluctantly arranged for Cameron to join the cabinet in return.
Both Party A and Party B, Cameron earned a fortune in the railroad and military transportation contracts. Cameron's name was left in American history along with corruption.
Lincoln, who had always kept an eye on the details of the progress of the war, was determined to strike. Six months later, in January 1862, Cameron was transferred to Russia as ambassador, and Stanton took over as Minister of War. That same month, Congress passed the Railroad and Telegraph Act.
Emphasis: After the substitution legislation, the North established the American Military Railroad Company, giving wartime powers to seize and operate any railroad or telegraph equipment. That is to say, the railway and telegraph companies are still privately owned and operated, but they must be subject to the deployment of the army when necessary, otherwise the army has the right to seize and use.
From then until the end of the war, not a single railroad boss in the North tried to challenge the authority of military transportation, and the U.S. Military Railroad Company encountered no need to seize private railroad equipment.
As the battlefield expanded to the south, the U.S. Military Railroad Company took on more responsibility for confiscating and managing the road property of companies in the South.
The situation in the South was getting worse and worse, and at the level of the Confederate government, it did not have absolute command of the Southern Railway from beginning to end.
03
All kinds of brain-opening railroad weapons
At that time, the railway was still in its infancy. However, the emergency wisdom of war quickly transformed it into a variety of new and powerful weapons.
Armed trains appeared, consisting of locomotives plus a few carports and flatbed cars, and were used to patrol railways, assert control, scout enemy camp positions, and sometimes fight an encounter. Steam power allows existing weapons to exert more powerful and fast combat effectiveness than mule and horse transport. As a mobile barracks, the van can sit people, and the flatbed trucks are equipped with artillery and have a longer range.
Locomotives are often targeted. Sharpshooters lurking on both sides of the railway can instantly unload the power of the armed train if they successfully hit the boiler, or if they hit the driver. As a result, the locomotive began to be modified, with a thick iron armor shield, and the cab windows were reduced to the extreme, leaving only the lookout holes. This ironclad protection was later extended to naval military battles, and inspired by this, the U.S. Navy moved from wooden warships to the era of ironclad warships.
In the offensive and defensive competition, a mine-style weapon appears, hidden under a sleeper, and the pressure of the locomotive will detonate it. Therefore, later, before the armed train was dispatched, the attacking side first sent a single-section locomotive to reconnoiter the road to reduce losses.
Locomotives filled with incendiary gunpowder were also used as drones to rush towards the enemy, blow up railway lines, especially bridges, and prevent enemy attacks or retreats.
All kinds of brain holes, brutal and violent use of destroyed railway equipment, let me, a railroad man more than a hundred years later, look inexplicably distressed.
04
Conservation and renewal is the vitality
People who have done transportation know that the road is not open and finished, and it needs to be continuously maintained and repaired in use, maintained and improved.
Now China's high-speed rail, during the day sports car, at night closed maintenance. I have been to the maintenance site many times, and the workers work the night shift every day, gather after dinner to prepare, work on the line all night, calibrate the line, until four or five o'clock in the morning, safely drive a road car, can hand over the line to a daytime operation. The same is true for the overhaul of high-speed rail TRAINS.
The railways of the American Civil War period were low in technology and lacked maintenance, which could withstand such a heartless and lungless toss. Before long, the railway line was in ruins.
At this time, the industrial base of the North showed its advantages, and the production capacity of railways, locomotives, and various carriages was concentrated in the North of the United States, and the supply of materials was sufficient. The north was born a star railway engineering team, the leading engineer Hopter became famous in one fell swoop, he used the prefabricated parts method, prepared the components of the line and bridge in advance, and transported to the scene when needed to quickly repair the railway and bridge, which became the magic weapon for the north to win. The south, where farming was traditional, had completely lost railroad support by the end of the war.
Atlanta, Georgia, is a city pulled by railroad. Four railways intersect here, giving birth to the city. During the Civil War, Atlanta was an important base in the South, where arsenals, hospitals, arsenals, and supply depots were concentrated. In September 1864, the Northern general General Sherman captured Atlanta, laying the foundation for victory and giving Lincoln key points for his re-election as president.
Before attacking Atlanta, Sherman sent 10,000 railroad engineers to open the way. Previously, the railway from north to south to Atlanta had been interrupted, and some were destroyed by the war, and some were demolished by the defending Confederate army at any time. Sherman's engineers were able to repair the railroad lines in the direction of the advance in a single day. When they occupied Atlanta and began the famous "march to the sea", they quickly dismantled the railway behind them to avoid the pursuit of the Confederate army. The troops ignited fire and bent sections of red-hot rail around nearby trees. They jokingly called these variants of the rails "Sherman bows." They knew that there was only one factory in the South with the ability to repair rails, and they couldn't keep up with demand in terms of capacity and time. This is also the reason why Sherman's army swept through the south without resistance.
Not only that, but the north still had the spare strength to lay out a more efficient and unified railway network in the war. On July 1, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act, authorizing the construction of a major thoroughfare across the continental United States. After countless Chinese laborers paid sweat and lives, on May 10, 1869, the Pacific Railway opened.
It is worth mentioning that the railroad, which made a significant contribution to the US federal economy, was surveyed a few years before the war began, but has not been determined to start construction. Leading the survey was Davis, then U.S. Secretary of War and later Confederate President, who guarded the rapidly defeating Southern Railroad during the Civil War.
05
Grabbing land to build roads earns the bottom of the big country
The war made people realize the importance of railways. After the war, the United States made a great leap forward in the development of railroads. The heroes of the war, both in the South and in the North, joined the ranks of investing in railways, building railways, and operating railways.
The U.S. federal government's drug use is staggering: railroad companies are subsidized by the mileage they build, $10,000 per kilometer in plains, $20,000 in hilly areas, and $30,000 in alpine areas. In addition, the railway company can also obtain land use rights of 16 kilometers wide on each side of the line.
The states have also gone to great lengths to scramble for investment: to build railroads within the state, to exempt railroad companies from taxes, and to provide loans. Shares or bonds issued by railway companies, the government provides a liability guarantee and organizes the purchase.
To set up a project is to grab land, and to build a road is to make money. The economic history of the United States in the second half of the 19th century is more like a history of railroad development. Railroad bonds created the first bull market for Securities trading on Wall Street. In the 15 years after the war, $1.535 billion came across the Atlantic in Europe to invest in American railroads, accounting for 76 percent of its total investment in the United States. By 1900, U.S. railroad operations had soared from 48,000 kilometers at the outbreak of the Civil War to more than 300,000 kilometers in 40 years, surpassing the total length of European rail lines and half of the world's railways. So far, the U.S. rail mileage still ranks first in the world, and the family's bottom is earned during that period.
The shortcomings of the early railways were magnified by the fierce war, and they were corrected and compensated in time before the boom in railway construction on the Big Dry Express.
The biggest problem with pre-war railways was that the railways were controlled by different companies, were not connected to each other, and had inconsistent gauges.
For example, in Richmond, the capital of the Confederation, there are four or five railways of various sizes, built and authorized by different investors, mainly responsible for transporting agricultural products to the city, and the terminals are located inside and outside Richmond, there is no railway connection between each other, and the gauge is also different. When a train of military supplies arrived in Richmond, it had to be unloaded, pulled by hundreds of wagons to another corner of the city, and loaded into the wagon. Due to the limited gauge of the locomotive and carriage, the locomotive and carriage can only be applied to matching lines, and after damage, the lines cannot be called between each line.
In 1863, the Confederates attempted to transfer Washington, D.C. troops to Bridgeport, Alabama for reinforcements. The U.S. Military Railroad used nine railroads to relay transportation. These 9 railways were not connected to each other, and the troops had to get off the train and walk dozens of kilometers to change trains, and what was more exaggerated was that some railways looked across the river and did not connect with each other, and the soldiers had to walk through the improvised pontoon bridge.
Despite the painstaking efforts, the operation, which moved 25,000 soldiers 2,000 kilometers away in 12 days, was an amazing feat. Without railroads, such a strategic mobilization would take more than a month to complete. Of course, with China's high-speed rail, similar transportation tasks can be completed in 6 hours. It's not just time, it's also stamina. Time plus physical strength is the combat effectiveness.
Post-war railway construction, began to use a unified gauge, 1.435 meters, a somewhat demon number, accurate to 3 decimal places, accurate to millimeters, it is said to come from the distance between the two axles in the carriage era, equivalent to the length of two horse butts, which has made many countries and companies dissatisfied, so when building railways, some use integers of 1 meter, referred to as meter gauges, and some use wider gauges.
The connection can form a road network, which can improve the efficiency of transportation by geometric progression. People finally shelved the controversy and their own active ideas, and promoted this old ancestor as a standard gauge to command the world.
Railways have led to the development of other industries and provided accumulation for the rise of great powers. In 1894, the Gross Domestic Product of the United States surpassed that of the United Kingdom, and in 1910, the comprehensive national strength of the United States became the world's largest.
Perhaps at that time, the passion for road construction was too high, and capital overflowed and flowed to China at the end of the Qing Dynasty. In the name of "Railway Road", the Anglo-American Company applied for approval and built a railway from the urban area to Wusong Port in Shanghai, known in history as the Wusong Railway, the first railway operated in China, written on the first page of China's railway history. The year it opened was 1876, and Qing government officials did not know much about the rumbling monster, and after a year of running, they spent money to redeem and dismantle it. It was only after 20 years that the reaction was made, and the Songhu Railway was rebuilt along this roadbed. The rebuilt railway passenger and freight traffic was lively for nearly a hundred years, until it was completely suspended in 1988, and it is now part of the Shanghai Metro Line 3.
A dog has his day. China's railways have become a rising star, with a total mileage of 140,000 kilometers by the end of 2021, ranking second in the world, and most of them are newly built and iterative. Once in a model train shop in a small town in the south of the United States, the owner of the old man is a railway enthusiast, and when he learned that I was a Chinese railwayman, he sighed: Now the railway in the United States is the third world, and the Chinese railway is the first world.
After reaching its peak in the 1920s, American railroads began to fall, some were demolished, some were not renewed after natural damage, and the mileage decreased year by year. Check the data of recent years, there are still more than 200,000 kilometers left, mainly heavy freight. Passenger transport was replaced by motor transport. The high-speed rail has been in a bad state for several years.
When traveling by car in the American countryside, we occasionally encountered large freight trains on adjacent rail lines, and mixed groups of vans, open cars, flatbed cars, and tanker cars, more than a hundred knots, pulled by three or four locomotives, were first caught up by us, parallel, and left behind. I would watch from car to car, counting, sometimes trance, as if traveling through history.
Edited by Zhai Hui
Supervisor 丨Sun Yingli