“I could be up here for days ... talking about the bravery they displayed,” the historian and re-enactor told an audience earlier this month at the Champaign County Library.
But at a program marking the 150th anniversary of the Andrews Raid deep into Confederate territory, George said that as a military operation theirs may not compare favorably with the Seal Team Six strike on Osama Bin Laden.
“Throughout history there are times when something can start out as a simple plan and become something great,” he said in his April 2 talk. “Sometimes it’s planned to be great and goes the other way.
“You be the judge.”
George’s presentation was the first of two library programs honoring Champaign County’s Ross, who is remembered with a historic marker on the edge of Christiansburg.
The second event, held Thursday, on the anniversary of the raid, brought Ohio House of Representatives Majority Whip John Adams (R-Sidney) to the library for a ceremony.
The showing that day of the 1956 Disney movie “The Great Locomotive Chase” was testimony to the place the raid once held in American legend.
Although largely forgotten today, memory of the case drew 50,000 visitors to see The General, one of the locomotives involved, during a 1963 tour of Eastern Ohio.
It had finished up that tour that August when the locomotive chugged by more throngs in Dayton, Springfield, Urbana and Bellefontaine.
Mighty purpose
George said the Andrews Raid had a weighty military purpose: To cut telegraph lines and destroy crucial railroad track from Atlanta to Chattanooga.
But its leader, James Andrews, was not even in the Union Army, said George, “So right away, we’re mixing apples and oranges.”
Andrews was a contraband runner, a man aware that a bottle of quinine going for $5 in New York early in the war cost $50 in Atlanta, George said.
“He knew you can take things like that, run them down South and make a profit,” George said.
Andrews also found it profitable to return with information for the Union Army.
His first planned raid fell apart when the Confederate engineer he’d persuaded to drive a stolen locomotive north “got drunk, went home” and was never seen again, George said.
For the second attempt, Andrews decided to take an engineer with him, along with 22 soldiers from the 2nd, 21st and 33rd Ohio Volunteer Infantries.
His volunteers — including Ross, Parrott and Wilson Brown (a Logan County native) — all agreed to go south in civilian dress knowing the risk they would be treated as spies, not soldiers.
Logistical issues
Even if things had gone better, the logistics of the plan were daunting: The locomotive they planned to escape on averaged 16 miles an hour and required five times as much wood to make the journey as it could carry.
In addition, the distances involved made it nearly impossible for the raiders to coordinate with the Union Army as planned.
The plan was for Maj. Gen. Ormsby Mitchell to attack Huntsville, Ala., with 10,000 cavalry, take it, then move his troops to near Chattanooga, Tenn., to cover Andrews’ retreat.
Not only did that timetable fall apart, but constant rain slowed the Andrews parties from the outset when they were walking south from Chattanooga to catch a train.
The rain was so heavy and the Ohio boys so unfamiliar with the territory that some were captured before they could board.
Meanwhile — unbeknownst to the raiders — just to the west, the Battle of Shiloh was being fought, the aftermath of which would throw a major monkey wrench into their plans.
A rude awakening
Having made it by train to Marietta, Ga., 20 miles from Atlanta, Andrews’ raiders started their day on April 12, 1862, by boarding the 5 a.m. northbound train for Chattanooga.
It was at the next stop in Big Shanty (now Kennesaw), Ga., that they got their first surprise: There was a Confederate boot camp across the tracks from the station in Big Shanty.
Because it had been dark, “They didn’t see it the night before” on their trip down, George said.
The raiders went ahead with their plans anyway. While The General’s other passengers and its crew were breakfasting in a nearby station, they stole the train.
Some mistakenly thought it was a prank pulled by the soldiers-in-training, but the engineer and brakeman, apparently unamused, took up chase in a handcart propelled by poles of the kind used to push boats through canals.
Keystone Cops
Buster Keaton starred in a 1926 movie loosely based on the chase, but the mishaps of the Great Locomotive Chase seem more like the adventures of the Keystone Cops.
At the first place they intended to destroy track, the raiders discovered they’d left their tools in the caboose they’d unhooked in Big Shanty to lighten their load.
With borrowed tools, they severed one telegraph line but were able to loosen just one rail before the cart with the angry pursuers came in sight.
While passing by the switch engine Yohan at Etowah, Ga., the party talked about destroying it to keep the men on the cart from using it. Andrews nixed the plan.
The General’s progress later was slowed when it was forced to a side track so several trains, including one pulled by the locomotive Texas, could go south with wounded Confederate troops from Shiloh.
Using the Yohan, their pursuers sounded the alarm to the crew of the Texas. Although they were unable to turn the locomotive around, engineers put the Texas in reverse and gave chase.
The Andrews group released a box car to slow down the Texas, which was forced to push it. When the Ohio soldiers tried to further delay the Texas by releasing a second box car and setting it on fire, the car’s wood, soaked by days of deluges, wouldn’t ignite.
Just south of the Tennessee border, the Texas caught the General, which had run out of fuel.
Although the Union soldiers scattered, all were soon captured. Eight would be executed, including the two civilians, Andrews and William Campbell.
No gallows humor
Consistent with the rest of the operation, “It’s a botched hanging as far as Andrews goes,” George said.
After a swift trial in Atlanta, a gallows was hastily built “which did not take into account that Andrews was over 6 feet tall,” George said.
The result was a grisly scene in which his neck was not broken and he was strangled to death.
George said two of the other raiders, civilian Campbell and soldier Samuel Slavens, had to be hanged twice because of another faulty gallows. The five men in between them, including Ross, had been executed on the first attempt but the far ends of the platform holding Campbell and Slavens leaned in toward the center, causing them to do a desperate dance as they fought against strangulation.
“The ropes broke, and (Slaven and Campbell) just slid down the board,” George said.
The events might have seemed comical in a gallows humor way, had the gallows not been real.
After the war, the Andrews Raiders who were hanged were honored by burial at the National Military Cemetery in Chattanooga. A special monument with a replica of The General was built there with funds provided by Ohioans.
Those who survived the raid were imprisoned, and some of them were beaten and whipped, but eventually all of them either escaped North or were released in prisoner exchanges.
Medals of Honor
It was only when Parrott and others who were released nearly a year later and went to Washington that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton decided to honor them.
George suggested Stanton’s timing may have been designed to boost Union war efforts at a time when spirits were low.
In its March 23, 1863 edition, the Daily National Republican of Washington, D.C., reported “the Secretary presented each of them a medal such as was authorized by the late Congress for meritorious conduct, these being the first testimonials of that character that had been awarded.”
About the Author