August 18, 2014 • 22 mins
The Great Locomotive Chase was a very daring - but very failed - plot to commandeer a train and destroy a crucial stretch of railroad during the Civil War. It's a wild and fun story that covers a lot of ground as it travels around the southeastern U.S. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast by
Tracy Vie Wilson. And I'm Molly Frying. So normally when
I put together an outline, I kind of sketch out
when I'm gonna say at the beginning at the top
(00:21):
of it. Um. Today it just says, trains, y'all, we
have a request. It's from John. It's about trains. Uh.
And it's the story of Andrew's Raid, which is also
known as the Great Locomotive Chase that later became the
subject of a silent film starring Buster Keaton called The General.
It's about a very daring but also very failed plot
(00:45):
to commander a train and destroy a crucial stretch of
railroad during the Civil War. And the story is so
awesome and full of excitement that we're going to tell
it in two parts. It starts outside of Shelbyville, Tennessee,
which is kind of in the middle ish part of
that state. From there it goes east to Chattanooga, which
is in Tennessee southeast corner, and then it goes south
(01:06):
to Marietta, which is a suburb of Atlanta today and
very approximately From there it follows the path of north
northwest out of Atlanta back towards Chattanooga. Again, it is
a rollicking adventure and UH to kind of set it up.
The railroad was still relatively new to the US at
(01:26):
the start of the Civil War. The first U s
railroads were built in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties,
and even so by the start of the Civil War
in eighteen sixty one, they were already absolutely critical to
logistics and strategy for both the North and the South.
Bridges and trestles especially were prime targets not only for
attack but for destruction by fleeing armies that the other
(01:50):
side wouldn't have access to them when they got there.
And the South rail network was by far the less
developed of the two, and this out also had fewer
engines and rolling stock, and so this meant that a
strategic strike against Southern rail had the potential to really
devastate its ability to move men and supplies. A particularly
(02:12):
critical stretch of this rail network was the Western and
Atlantic Railroad, and that connected Chattanooga in Tennessee with the
city of Atlanta. Chattanooga was a railway hub and so
severing it from Atlanta would have been a serious loss,
and in addition, the eastern portion of Tennessee was home
to many people who were loyal to the Union. Tennessee
(02:34):
had been the last state to seceed, and Eastern Tennessee
in particular continued to have a lot of pro Union sentiment.
Strategists theorized that by severing the artery connecting Chattanooga in Atlanta,
the Union could take Eastern Tennessee with ease and then
isolate much of the Deep South from the rest of
the Southern states. This brings us to James Andrews, who
(02:55):
was from Kentucky. We don't really know much else about
him at all, except that he had a fiance named
Elizabeth Layton. He had worked as a music teacher and
a house painter, and uh had done other random odd
jobs as well. And Andrews was really intelligent and extremely charismatic.
(03:15):
One of the other raiders, Alf Wilson, described him as
quote a noble specimen of manhood, nearly six feet in height,
powerful build, long, raven, black hair, black silken beard Roman
features a high, expansive forehead, yet with a soft voice
and gentle as that of a woman. Alf Wilson was
one of like I don't know five raiders. A lot
(03:36):
of raiders wrote books about this afterwards. Some of them
are very colorful and not necessarily in line with what
really happened. So when the war started, Andrews turned his
attention to smuggling. He took Quinine south through the northern
Black Hade. He claimed that this was so he could
earn the trust of the rebels and bring information back
to the North with him, because that's where his loyalties
(03:59):
purportedly lay. However, since malaria was still really prevalent in
the South at this point and Quinine was used to
treat malaria, this smuggling operation was probably also extremely profitable
for Andrews, and it is also possible that his loyalties
were negotiable as well for the right price. In my hand,
(04:20):
he just became Han Solo. He is very like Han Solo.
That is a great comparison. His plan was to take
a rating team of twenty two men to commandeer a
train outside of Atlanta and ride it north towards Chattanooga,
destroying the critically important Western and Atlantic railroad track behind
them as they went. He was definitely going to be
(04:42):
paid for this effort, but it is not entirely clear
exactly how much. Accounts of that part differ wildly, and
I'm guessing there's probably not a lot of documentation of
such a plan. No, there's really not for many reasons.
UM also motivating this raid where the plan ends of
General ormsby Mitchell, and he was planning to evade invade Huntsville, Alabama.
(05:05):
If the w n A track was destroyed, that would
slow down reinforcements that were coming to the battle. And
as we talked about earlier, UM, they'll severing the line
between Atlanta and Chattanooga would probably make it a lot
easier for him to take eastern Tennessee as well. Andrews
had actually tried this raid idea once before, and the
(05:26):
first time around he hoped to accomplish it with a
small crew of eight men, but he'd had to abort
it at the last minute because his co conspirator, a
Georgia engineer who had turned trader, never showed up at
their rendezvous point. It really never got off the ground.
They had to abandon it basically the last minute. This time, though,
he did get to go ahead to assemble a team
(05:47):
of twenty two soldiers. Volunteers were basically hand picked from
the second one and thirty third Ohio Infantry Regiments. They
took very special care this time to select some men
who had experience with trains, because they didn't want to
repeat their experience of relying on a civilian turncoat who
may or may not actually turn Some of the volunteers
(06:09):
were also given money and sent to nearby Shelbyville to
buy civilian clothes and supplies. Others basically scrounged civilian costumes
from camp. So they turned into a very ragtag looking
assortment of guys. And these twenty two soldiers plus one
other civilian named William Campbell, met up with Andrews in
Shelbyville on April seventh. They walked through the entire plan
(06:33):
very carefully and talked about the risks involved, which were
absolutely extreme. Uh, they were going deep into enemy territory,
and since they had addressed as civilians, they would probably
be treated as spies and not as enemy soldiers if
something happened, and that would have meant that they would
be hanged versus imprisoned. So it really was very very
(06:53):
dangerous and uh, this case of you know, the stakes
being that they were going to be hung was dubly true.
Is the South had already made a show of hanging
railroad saboteurs and leaving their bodies on display, so there
was precedent for the level of danger that they were
walking into. From Shelbyville. All of them were going to
(07:14):
go to Chattanooga by whatever means they could, and they
were going to go in small groups to try to
draw less attention from there. They would take a train
south to Marietta on April tenth and spend a night
in a hotel before returning north again. Almost all of
this journey was going to take place in Southern territory,
and their cover story was that they were from Kentucky
(07:36):
and they were going to Atlanta to enlist. And now
we will get back to the exciting and daredevil adventures
of this train chase. The weather for their entire trek
to Chattanooga was dismal. It poured mercilessly, sometimes there were thunderstorms.
Most of them were going on but the whole way
and they just got absolutely drenched. Andrews was able to
(07:58):
get a horse for part of it, but otherwise they
were mostly just hungry exhausted and completely soaked to the
bone because people were suspicious and on edge. Many of
the men did indeed have to try out their cover story,
and they had varying levels of success with it. And
as a side note, uh, some of their methods in
(08:18):
doing this actually show that the stereotype of Southern people
as being ignorant really goes quite a waste back Uh.
Surviving raiders wrote a part of their disguise being to
act as uneducated as possible. This might be why two
of them, instead of being allowed to continue on their
way to Atlanta as they said they were going, did
not fare so well with their excuses. Sam Lleuwellen and
(08:42):
James Smith met some Confederates, some Confederate guards outside of Jasper, Tennessee.
These guards saw some of the kind of obvious flaws
and their story, like if you were from Kentucky, why
would you go all the way to Atlantis? Who would list?
When there were plenty of other Southern places where you
could enlist on the way? Um, this could have been
where they tried out there, I'm so stupid act Yeah,
(09:04):
I don't know. That may have been why the ones
who were acting stupid well Clearly, these guys are dumb
enough to think they need to go all the way
to Atlanta to get into the army. Um. So what
what happens to Llewellen and Smith instead was that they
were pressed into military service, where the Confederacy immediately on
the spot, and they ironically wound up defending Chattanooga in
(09:25):
later action. H Lluellen, though, did dessert as is at
his earliest opportunity, which was also sort of part of
the plan, Like if you tell them that you're gonna
enlist and they make you enlist, that's fine. Just dessert
when you have a chance to do so. Eventually, as
the weather did as we mentioned earlier, really hampered their
(09:46):
efforts to get to Chattanooga, Andrews concluded that the same
thing must be happening to Mitchell's advance into Huntsville, Alabama.
So he decided to move the raid from April eleventh,
which was the original plan date, to April twelve, uh
in an effort to give the rest of the men
extra time to arrive at their rendezvous, and apart from
the two who were now Confederate soldiers, all of the
(10:09):
men made it to Chattanooga. This was a huge accomplishment.
I don't want to overlook that fact. They had managed
to travel more than a hundred miles into enemy territory
more or less without being noticed and with no casualties. Uh,
very little went really wrong along the way for this
part of the story. And once they got to Marietta,
(10:33):
some of them stayed in the Marietta Hotel, which was
owned by Henry green Cole, who was a transplanted New
Yorker who was also acting as a Union spy. Evidence
of whether this was deliberate is entirely circumstantial. The rest
stayed at another nearby hotel called Fletcher House, which was
the same hotel where Sherman later staged his campaign to Atlanta.
(10:55):
Once they arrived, they found out that the weather had
not actually delayed Mitchell's at Hack at all. He had
already taken Huntsville while they were on the way. And
while some of the men wanted to just abandon the
plot right at that moment, they argued pretty articulately that
the people in Chattanooga were going to panic and increase
the rail traffic coming south. Um Andrews decided to press on,
(11:19):
and reportedly Andrew said boys tried this once before and failed.
Now I will succeed or leave my bones in Dixie.
So the next morning, the raiders boarded the train with
two exceptions. Martin Hawkins, who was one of the engineers
who had been tapped for this, and John Reid Porter,
who was traveling with him, either did not make arrangements
(11:42):
with the hotel to be woken up in the morning,
or they did make arrangements but the hotel didn't do it. Uh,
because you know, we didn't really have portable alarm clocks
at this point in history. Uh. Either way, they both
got to the train platform just in time to see
pull away without them, so they missed the raid, which
(12:02):
was unfortunate because um Hawkins had more engineering experience than
the other two men who had similarly been picked, because
they knew how to work with trains. I just can't
help but feel that I would be the person that
would oversleep and missed the rate because I have a
little oversleeping problem. The rest of the men had purchased
(12:24):
tickets to various destinations north and they all sat near
each other in the same car. And this train was
pulled by an engine which was called the General. The
conductor William A. Fuller was twenty five, and he was deeply,
deeply loyal to the Confederacy, and he also had an
ironclad work ethic, and he was pretty fit because he
(12:45):
had previously before becoming a conductor, it worked as a
train hand, and being a train hand involved, among other things,
running ahead of a train carrying a flag that during
when it was in treacherous track territory, so sometimes he
would have to run ahead of a train for miles.
He had also joined the local militia after the start
of the war, before the South had decided that experienced
(13:07):
train workers would be a better service to the South
at their jobs than in the military. And as the
men boarded uh Fuller noticed them. He and other conductors
had been told to keep an eye out for large
groups of men who could be deserting, but the train
was headed towards several Confederate encampments, so it seemed unlikely
that the men who boarded the train were trying to
(13:29):
go A wall needn't really become concerned that they were
up to anything until a little bit later. As we
talked about in our episode on the Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Borders, train travel at this point was still very
very far from luxurious. In the United States, trains didn't
generally have any kind of dining or restroom facilities, so
instead they had regularly, regularly scheduled stops for people to
(13:52):
get off the train and eat and refresh themselves. This train,
in particular, was going to stop for twenty minutes in
Big Shanty, which is al Cannasaw, and its passengers were
going to get to have breakfast at the Lacey Hotel,
which was across the street from the train depot, and
aside from the enormous Confederate encampment that was directly inside
of the depot, it was the perfect place to take
(14:14):
the train. Uh In addition to a twenty minute window
when the train would be completely empty, the station at
Big Shanty had no telegraphs, so they would be unable
to call for help. So the train stopped in Big
Shanty at about six am and the passengers got off.
Andrews and his men casually decoupled the mail car and
the passenger cars and cut the bell cable that ran
(14:37):
through to the passenger cars. This left them with the engine,
the tender, and three empty box cars at their disposal.
Andrews then got into the engine with his engine crew,
which were two million two men named William Knight and
Wilson Brown, and they, as we said earlier, both had
trained experience. The rest of the men clambered into the
last empty box car, and as sat at his breakfast table,
(15:01):
Fuller saw them pull away, and he and two of
his crew, uh Anthony Murphy, who was a foreman with
the railroad who was on the way to Alatoona to
inspect machinery, and E. Jefferson Caine, the engineer, gave chase
with him, all of them on foot. The Confederate soldiers,
though right there next to the train tracks, did not
(15:22):
really get involved at this point. They left it to
Fuller and his men. Well they didn't. They didn't exactly
know what was happening. Fullerler probably identified the problem quickly,
whereas they would not recognize what was happening. Yeah, he
was absolutely sure that what was happening was was something
that was up to no good. And so he's, uh,
he's the kind of guy who um like, when you
(15:42):
see someone have a medical emergency, there needs to be
somebody off on hand. It's like you call an ambulance,
you do CPR right, Fuller was that guy. He directed
someone to go to the telegraph station and call for help,
and he directed someone else to go for a horse
and get like. He was very on top of tell
(16:03):
people what to do to get this situation under control.
While he was and this is the part that makes
this just delightful, he was running in a full classic
conductor's uniform, complete with a gold watch with a chain
across the front of his vest and and and his
hat and running as fast as a train, running as
(16:25):
fast as he could have the train. Um, because I
because I'm a jerk, We're gonna leave it here with
this cliffhanger, uh, which is one of the moments in
this story that makes you see how perfect it is
for a silent movie starring Buster Keaton. Yes, um, which
(16:45):
I have watched and it is also delightful, and it
is on Netflix if you are into that. So, yes,
we are going to pick up the second half of
the story with everyone either on the train or chasing
the train in our next episode. And for now, we
will have some listener mail. Helay. So this listener mail
(17:07):
I have us from Elise, and Elie says, hey, ladies,
I'm an amateur historian myself with a bachelor's degree in
history from University of Oklahoma, having studied the Tulsa Race
riot a bit in my program and leisure, I have
to say your time constrained presentation was very informative and accurate. However,
regarding the aftermath, there's one thing that wasn't taken into
account in your admonition of the state's report Slash Commission.
(17:32):
And currently, there were thirty eight federally recognized American Indian
tribes that claimed Oklahoma for their tribal government headquarters. I
am a member of the Muskogee. These thirty eight tribes,
plus many more across the country have fought for reparations
for centuries, not merely eighty years. Failing the victims of
the race right is a horrible state in our states history,
but so is the treatment of sovereign nations then and now. Unfortunately,
(17:54):
if the Report Slash Commission determined that direct reparations were
to be paid immediately or even over a number of years,
then they would have said a precedent that would lead
to payments being made to every person and the sendate
within its tribes. While morally the right thing to do,
it would bankrupt the state. The report Slash Commission couldn't
risk that. Again, unfortunate and heartbreaking, but this is the
(18:16):
reality of our history and our present at least um
So I wanted to read this for two reasons. One
is that we talked a little bit about reparations in
the controversy surrounding reparations, and this is really what I
was referring to. That there are lots and lots and
lots of different peoples within the United States who could
make a pretty compelling case for reparations. Right there's the
(18:38):
entirety of the Native American population up there are many
many African Americans who can directly tie their ancestry to
people who were brought over as slaves. There are a
lot of people that can make a compelling case for that.
So what we were talking about was not really, from
my point of view, an admonition. It was more shock
(18:58):
that this was a time when repper rations were not granted.
And the reason for that is that the state of
Florida granted reparations to the people who were involved in
the Rosewood Massacre, which was a very similar incident of
racial violence that was a couple of years before the
Tulsa race riot. UM. The state of North Carolina also
(19:18):
paid direct reparations to people who were affected by the
eugenics movement. So there is precedent for states uh giving
direct reparations to people who had been directly affected by
the state, and we're still living um so in my mind,
and this could maybe be more of an admonition than
what was in the prior episode, UH that the idea
(19:42):
of setting precedent is not Actually that's more of an
excuse than a reason in my mind for having um
not uh not agreed to pay the reparations that the
commission recommended. UM. You can read the entire commission's report online.
It's posted in a couple of places, UM, and it's
(20:03):
a it's a hugely distressing read. I read the whole
thing as part of the research for the podcast. But
UM that what I was trying to express in the
previous episode was really shocked because their argument is so
compelling and the way it's articulated is so profoundly uh moving,
that I was surprised that people were unmoved to then
(20:25):
pay the record reparations that were recommended. So yes, I
am definitely aware that there are many many, many people
who have centuries of history that could make a compelling
case for reparations in additions to people who were affected
by Um this particular event in history. So thank you
(20:46):
very much, Elise Um. We also got lots of other
emails and letters and Facebook messages from people from Tulsa
or from other places in Oklahoma who either didn't know
much at all about the race right it, or they
knew about it but only a little bit, or they
knew about pretty well. And the common theme in all
of this is the sense that this particular event and
(21:08):
it's aftermath continue to have a profound and negative effect
on race for relations in Tulsa, UM and farther into
Oklahoma as well, which is part of why we do
episodes about things like this to understand why things in
today's world are the way they are in today's world. Yeah, so,
(21:31):
if you would like to write to us, we are
at History Podcasts at how Stuff Works dot com. We're
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(21:53):
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would like to learn more about another interesting and exciting
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(22:14):
notes and interesting tidbits and all kinds of other stuff.
Uh So, you can do all that and a whole
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of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast by
Tracy Vie Wilson. And I'm Molly Frying. So normally when
I put together an outline, I kind of sketch out
when I'm gonna say at the beginning at the top
(00:21):
of it. Um. Today it just says, trains, y'all, we
have a request. It's from John. It's about trains. Uh.
And it's the story of Andrew's Raid, which is also
known as the Great Locomotive Chase that later became the
subject of a silent film starring Buster Keaton called The General.
It's about a very daring but also very failed plot
(00:45):
to commander a train and destroy a crucial stretch of
railroad during the Civil War. And the story is so
awesome and full of excitement that we're going to tell
it in two parts. It starts outside of Shelbyville, Tennessee,
which is kind of in the middle ish part of
that state. From there it goes east to Chattanooga, which
is in Tennessee southeast corner, and then it goes south
(01:06):
to Marietta, which is a suburb of Atlanta today and
very approximately From there it follows the path of north
northwest out of Atlanta back towards Chattanooga. Again, it is
a rollicking adventure and UH to kind of set it up.
The railroad was still relatively new to the US at
(01:26):
the start of the Civil War. The first U s
railroads were built in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties,
and even so by the start of the Civil War
in eighteen sixty one, they were already absolutely critical to
logistics and strategy for both the North and the South.
Bridges and trestles especially were prime targets not only for
attack but for destruction by fleeing armies that the other
(01:50):
side wouldn't have access to them when they got there.
And the South rail network was by far the less
developed of the two, and this out also had fewer
engines and rolling stock, and so this meant that a
strategic strike against Southern rail had the potential to really
devastate its ability to move men and supplies. A particularly
(02:12):
critical stretch of this rail network was the Western and
Atlantic Railroad, and that connected Chattanooga in Tennessee with the
city of Atlanta. Chattanooga was a railway hub and so
severing it from Atlanta would have been a serious loss,
and in addition, the eastern portion of Tennessee was home
to many people who were loyal to the Union. Tennessee
(02:34):
had been the last state to seceed, and Eastern Tennessee
in particular continued to have a lot of pro Union sentiment.
Strategists theorized that by severing the artery connecting Chattanooga in Atlanta,
the Union could take Eastern Tennessee with ease and then
isolate much of the Deep South from the rest of
the Southern states. This brings us to James Andrews, who
(02:55):
was from Kentucky. We don't really know much else about
him at all, except that he had a fiance named
Elizabeth Layton. He had worked as a music teacher and
a house painter, and uh had done other random odd
jobs as well. And Andrews was really intelligent and extremely charismatic.
(03:15):
One of the other raiders, Alf Wilson, described him as
quote a noble specimen of manhood, nearly six feet in height,
powerful build, long, raven, black hair, black silken beard Roman
features a high, expansive forehead, yet with a soft voice
and gentle as that of a woman. Alf Wilson was
one of like I don't know five raiders. A lot
(03:36):
of raiders wrote books about this afterwards. Some of them
are very colorful and not necessarily in line with what
really happened. So when the war started, Andrews turned his
attention to smuggling. He took Quinine south through the northern
Black Hade. He claimed that this was so he could
earn the trust of the rebels and bring information back
to the North with him, because that's where his loyalties
(03:59):
purportedly lay. However, since malaria was still really prevalent in
the South at this point and Quinine was used to
treat malaria, this smuggling operation was probably also extremely profitable
for Andrews, and it is also possible that his loyalties
were negotiable as well for the right price. In my hand,
(04:20):
he just became Han Solo. He is very like Han Solo.
That is a great comparison. His plan was to take
a rating team of twenty two men to commandeer a
train outside of Atlanta and ride it north towards Chattanooga,
destroying the critically important Western and Atlantic railroad track behind
them as they went. He was definitely going to be
(04:42):
paid for this effort, but it is not entirely clear
exactly how much. Accounts of that part differ wildly, and
I'm guessing there's probably not a lot of documentation of
such a plan. No, there's really not for many reasons.
UM also motivating this raid where the plan ends of
General ormsby Mitchell, and he was planning to evade invade Huntsville, Alabama.
(05:05):
If the w n A track was destroyed, that would
slow down reinforcements that were coming to the battle. And
as we talked about earlier, UM, they'll severing the line
between Atlanta and Chattanooga would probably make it a lot
easier for him to take eastern Tennessee as well. Andrews
had actually tried this raid idea once before, and the
(05:26):
first time around he hoped to accomplish it with a
small crew of eight men, but he'd had to abort
it at the last minute because his co conspirator, a
Georgia engineer who had turned trader, never showed up at
their rendezvous point. It really never got off the ground.
They had to abandon it basically the last minute. This time, though,
he did get to go ahead to assemble a team
(05:47):
of twenty two soldiers. Volunteers were basically hand picked from
the second one and thirty third Ohio Infantry Regiments. They
took very special care this time to select some men
who had experience with trains, because they didn't want to
repeat their experience of relying on a civilian turncoat who
may or may not actually turn Some of the volunteers
(06:09):
were also given money and sent to nearby Shelbyville to
buy civilian clothes and supplies. Others basically scrounged civilian costumes
from camp. So they turned into a very ragtag looking
assortment of guys. And these twenty two soldiers plus one
other civilian named William Campbell, met up with Andrews in
Shelbyville on April seventh. They walked through the entire plan
(06:33):
very carefully and talked about the risks involved, which were
absolutely extreme. Uh, they were going deep into enemy territory,
and since they had addressed as civilians, they would probably
be treated as spies and not as enemy soldiers if
something happened, and that would have meant that they would
be hanged versus imprisoned. So it really was very very
(06:53):
dangerous and uh, this case of you know, the stakes
being that they were going to be hung was dubly true.
Is the South had already made a show of hanging
railroad saboteurs and leaving their bodies on display, so there
was precedent for the level of danger that they were
walking into. From Shelbyville. All of them were going to
(07:14):
go to Chattanooga by whatever means they could, and they
were going to go in small groups to try to
draw less attention from there. They would take a train
south to Marietta on April tenth and spend a night
in a hotel before returning north again. Almost all of
this journey was going to take place in Southern territory,
and their cover story was that they were from Kentucky
(07:36):
and they were going to Atlanta to enlist. And now
we will get back to the exciting and daredevil adventures
of this train chase. The weather for their entire trek
to Chattanooga was dismal. It poured mercilessly, sometimes there were thunderstorms.
Most of them were going on but the whole way
and they just got absolutely drenched. Andrews was able to
(07:58):
get a horse for part of it, but otherwise they
were mostly just hungry exhausted and completely soaked to the
bone because people were suspicious and on edge. Many of
the men did indeed have to try out their cover story,
and they had varying levels of success with it. And
as a side note, uh, some of their methods in
(08:18):
doing this actually show that the stereotype of Southern people
as being ignorant really goes quite a waste back Uh.
Surviving raiders wrote a part of their disguise being to
act as uneducated as possible. This might be why two
of them, instead of being allowed to continue on their
way to Atlanta as they said they were going, did
not fare so well with their excuses. Sam Lleuwellen and
(08:42):
James Smith met some Confederates, some Confederate guards outside of Jasper, Tennessee.
These guards saw some of the kind of obvious flaws
and their story, like if you were from Kentucky, why
would you go all the way to Atlantis? Who would list?
When there were plenty of other Southern places where you
could enlist on the way? Um, this could have been
where they tried out there, I'm so stupid act Yeah,
(09:04):
I don't know. That may have been why the ones
who were acting stupid well Clearly, these guys are dumb
enough to think they need to go all the way
to Atlanta to get into the army. Um. So what
what happens to Llewellen and Smith instead was that they
were pressed into military service, where the Confederacy immediately on
the spot, and they ironically wound up defending Chattanooga in
(09:25):
later action. H Lluellen, though, did dessert as is at
his earliest opportunity, which was also sort of part of
the plan, Like if you tell them that you're gonna
enlist and they make you enlist, that's fine. Just dessert
when you have a chance to do so. Eventually, as
the weather did as we mentioned earlier, really hampered their
(09:46):
efforts to get to Chattanooga, Andrews concluded that the same
thing must be happening to Mitchell's advance into Huntsville, Alabama.
So he decided to move the raid from April eleventh,
which was the original plan date, to April twelve, uh
in an effort to give the rest of the men
extra time to arrive at their rendezvous, and apart from
the two who were now Confederate soldiers, all of the
(10:09):
men made it to Chattanooga. This was a huge accomplishment.
I don't want to overlook that fact. They had managed
to travel more than a hundred miles into enemy territory
more or less without being noticed and with no casualties. Uh,
very little went really wrong along the way for this
part of the story. And once they got to Marietta,
(10:33):
some of them stayed in the Marietta Hotel, which was
owned by Henry green Cole, who was a transplanted New
Yorker who was also acting as a Union spy. Evidence
of whether this was deliberate is entirely circumstantial. The rest
stayed at another nearby hotel called Fletcher House, which was
the same hotel where Sherman later staged his campaign to Atlanta.
(10:55):
Once they arrived, they found out that the weather had
not actually delayed Mitchell's at Hack at all. He had
already taken Huntsville while they were on the way. And
while some of the men wanted to just abandon the
plot right at that moment, they argued pretty articulately that
the people in Chattanooga were going to panic and increase
the rail traffic coming south. Um Andrews decided to press on,
(11:19):
and reportedly Andrew said boys tried this once before and failed.
Now I will succeed or leave my bones in Dixie.
So the next morning, the raiders boarded the train with
two exceptions. Martin Hawkins, who was one of the engineers
who had been tapped for this, and John Reid Porter,
who was traveling with him, either did not make arrangements
(11:42):
with the hotel to be woken up in the morning,
or they did make arrangements but the hotel didn't do it. Uh,
because you know, we didn't really have portable alarm clocks
at this point in history. Uh. Either way, they both
got to the train platform just in time to see
pull away without them, so they missed the raid, which
(12:02):
was unfortunate because um Hawkins had more engineering experience than
the other two men who had similarly been picked, because
they knew how to work with trains. I just can't
help but feel that I would be the person that
would oversleep and missed the rate because I have a
little oversleeping problem. The rest of the men had purchased
(12:24):
tickets to various destinations north and they all sat near
each other in the same car. And this train was
pulled by an engine which was called the General. The
conductor William A. Fuller was twenty five, and he was deeply,
deeply loyal to the Confederacy, and he also had an
ironclad work ethic, and he was pretty fit because he
(12:45):
had previously before becoming a conductor, it worked as a
train hand, and being a train hand involved, among other things,
running ahead of a train carrying a flag that during
when it was in treacherous track territory, so sometimes he
would have to run ahead of a train for miles.
He had also joined the local militia after the start
of the war, before the South had decided that experienced
(13:07):
train workers would be a better service to the South
at their jobs than in the military. And as the
men boarded uh Fuller noticed them. He and other conductors
had been told to keep an eye out for large
groups of men who could be deserting, but the train
was headed towards several Confederate encampments, so it seemed unlikely
that the men who boarded the train were trying to
(13:29):
go A wall needn't really become concerned that they were
up to anything until a little bit later. As we
talked about in our episode on the Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Borders, train travel at this point was still very
very far from luxurious. In the United States, trains didn't
generally have any kind of dining or restroom facilities, so
instead they had regularly, regularly scheduled stops for people to
(13:52):
get off the train and eat and refresh themselves. This train,
in particular, was going to stop for twenty minutes in
Big Shanty, which is al Cannasaw, and its passengers were
going to get to have breakfast at the Lacey Hotel,
which was across the street from the train depot, and
aside from the enormous Confederate encampment that was directly inside
of the depot, it was the perfect place to take
(14:14):
the train. Uh In addition to a twenty minute window
when the train would be completely empty, the station at
Big Shanty had no telegraphs, so they would be unable
to call for help. So the train stopped in Big
Shanty at about six am and the passengers got off.
Andrews and his men casually decoupled the mail car and
the passenger cars and cut the bell cable that ran
(14:37):
through to the passenger cars. This left them with the engine,
the tender, and three empty box cars at their disposal.
Andrews then got into the engine with his engine crew,
which were two million two men named William Knight and
Wilson Brown, and they, as we said earlier, both had
trained experience. The rest of the men clambered into the
last empty box car, and as sat at his breakfast table,
(15:01):
Fuller saw them pull away, and he and two of
his crew, uh Anthony Murphy, who was a foreman with
the railroad who was on the way to Alatoona to
inspect machinery, and E. Jefferson Caine, the engineer, gave chase
with him, all of them on foot. The Confederate soldiers,
though right there next to the train tracks, did not
(15:22):
really get involved at this point. They left it to
Fuller and his men. Well they didn't. They didn't exactly
know what was happening. Fullerler probably identified the problem quickly,
whereas they would not recognize what was happening. Yeah, he
was absolutely sure that what was happening was was something
that was up to no good. And so he's, uh,
he's the kind of guy who um like, when you
(15:42):
see someone have a medical emergency, there needs to be
somebody off on hand. It's like you call an ambulance,
you do CPR right, Fuller was that guy. He directed
someone to go to the telegraph station and call for help,
and he directed someone else to go for a horse
and get like. He was very on top of tell
(16:03):
people what to do to get this situation under control.
While he was and this is the part that makes
this just delightful, he was running in a full classic
conductor's uniform, complete with a gold watch with a chain
across the front of his vest and and and his
hat and running as fast as a train, running as
(16:25):
fast as he could have the train. Um, because I
because I'm a jerk, We're gonna leave it here with
this cliffhanger, uh, which is one of the moments in
this story that makes you see how perfect it is
for a silent movie starring Buster Keaton. Yes, um, which
(16:45):
I have watched and it is also delightful, and it
is on Netflix if you are into that. So, yes,
we are going to pick up the second half of
the story with everyone either on the train or chasing
the train in our next episode. And for now, we
will have some listener mail. Helay. So this listener mail
(17:07):
I have us from Elise, and Elie says, hey, ladies,
I'm an amateur historian myself with a bachelor's degree in
history from University of Oklahoma, having studied the Tulsa Race
riot a bit in my program and leisure, I have
to say your time constrained presentation was very informative and accurate. However,
regarding the aftermath, there's one thing that wasn't taken into
account in your admonition of the state's report Slash Commission.
(17:32):
And currently, there were thirty eight federally recognized American Indian
tribes that claimed Oklahoma for their tribal government headquarters. I
am a member of the Muskogee. These thirty eight tribes,
plus many more across the country have fought for reparations
for centuries, not merely eighty years. Failing the victims of
the race right is a horrible state in our states history,
but so is the treatment of sovereign nations then and now. Unfortunately,
(17:54):
if the Report Slash Commission determined that direct reparations were
to be paid immediately or even over a number of years,
then they would have said a precedent that would lead
to payments being made to every person and the sendate
within its tribes. While morally the right thing to do,
it would bankrupt the state. The report Slash Commission couldn't
risk that. Again, unfortunate and heartbreaking, but this is the
(18:16):
reality of our history and our present at least um
So I wanted to read this for two reasons. One
is that we talked a little bit about reparations in
the controversy surrounding reparations, and this is really what I
was referring to. That there are lots and lots and
lots of different peoples within the United States who could
make a pretty compelling case for reparations. Right there's the
(18:38):
entirety of the Native American population up there are many
many African Americans who can directly tie their ancestry to
people who were brought over as slaves. There are a
lot of people that can make a compelling case for that.
So what we were talking about was not really, from
my point of view, an admonition. It was more shock
(18:58):
that this was a time when repper rations were not granted.
And the reason for that is that the state of
Florida granted reparations to the people who were involved in
the Rosewood Massacre, which was a very similar incident of
racial violence that was a couple of years before the
Tulsa race riot. UM. The state of North Carolina also
(19:18):
paid direct reparations to people who were affected by the
eugenics movement. So there is precedent for states uh giving
direct reparations to people who had been directly affected by
the state, and we're still living um so in my mind,
and this could maybe be more of an admonition than
what was in the prior episode, UH that the idea
(19:42):
of setting precedent is not Actually that's more of an
excuse than a reason in my mind for having um
not uh not agreed to pay the reparations that the
commission recommended. UM. You can read the entire commission's report online.
It's posted in a couple of places, UM, and it's
(20:03):
a it's a hugely distressing read. I read the whole
thing as part of the research for the podcast. But
UM that what I was trying to express in the
previous episode was really shocked because their argument is so
compelling and the way it's articulated is so profoundly uh moving,
that I was surprised that people were unmoved to then
(20:25):
pay the record reparations that were recommended. So yes, I
am definitely aware that there are many many, many people
who have centuries of history that could make a compelling
case for reparations in additions to people who were affected
by Um this particular event in history. So thank you
(20:46):
very much, Elise Um. We also got lots of other
emails and letters and Facebook messages from people from Tulsa
or from other places in Oklahoma who either didn't know
much at all about the race right it, or they
knew about it but only a little bit, or they
knew about pretty well. And the common theme in all
of this is the sense that this particular event and
(21:08):
it's aftermath continue to have a profound and negative effect
on race for relations in Tulsa, UM and farther into
Oklahoma as well, which is part of why we do
episodes about things like this to understand why things in
today's world are the way they are in today's world. Yeah, so,
(21:31):
if you would like to write to us, we are
at History Podcasts at how Stuff Works dot com. We're
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in
history and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumblers
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are
on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss in history.
We have a brand news spread Shirts store full of
T shirts and other goodies that you can purchase. It
(21:53):
is at missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. He
would like to learn more about another interesting and exciting
and fun train story, You can come to our parent
company's website and you can put the word train robbery
in the search bar and you will find how the
great train robbery worked. You can also come to our website,
which has missed in history dot com to find show
(22:14):
notes and interesting tidbits and all kinds of other stuff.
Uh So, you can do all that and a whole
lot more at how stuff works dot com or missed
in History dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com
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