Recollections of the Civil War / With the Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties

by Charles A. Dana

The key to the Shenandoah Valley was, in Sheridan's judgment, the line of the Opequan Creek, which was rather a deep cañon than an ordinary watercourse. Sheridan's idea I understood to be to fall back to the proper defensive point upon that creek, and there to construct fortifications which would effectually cover the approach to the Potomac.

I left Sheridan at Cedar Creek, and went back to Washington by way of Manassas Gap.

All through the fall of 1864 and the following winter I remained in Washington, very much occupied with the regular routine business of the department and various matters of incidental interest. Some of these incidents I shall group together here, without strict regard to sequence.

An important part of the work of the department was in relation to the railroads and to railroad transportation. Sometimes it was a whole army corps to be moved. At another time the demand would be equally sudden and urgent, if less vital to the Union cause. I remember particularly the great turkey movement in November of that year. The presidential election was hardly over before the people of the North began to prepare Thanksgiving boxes for the army. George Bliss, Jr., of New York, telegraphed me, on November 16th, that they had twenty thousand turkeys ready in that city to send to the front; and the next day, fearing, I suppose, that that wasn't enough, he wired: "It would be a very great convenience in our turkey business if I could know definitely the approximate number of men in each of armies of Potomac, James, and Shenandoah, respectively."

From Philadelphia I received a message asking for transportation to Sheridan's army for "boxes containing four thousand turkeys, and Heaven knows what else, as a Thanksgiving dinner for the brave fellows." And so it was from all over the country. The North not only poured out food and clothing generously for our own men, but, when Savannah was entered by Sherman, great quantities of provisions were sent there for gratuitous distribution, and when Charleston fell every effort was made to relieve destitution.

A couple of months later, in January, 1865, a piece of work not so different from the "turkey business," but on a rather larger scale, fell to me. This was the transfer of the Twenty-third Army Corps, commanded by Major-General John M. Schofield, from its position on the Tennessee River to Chesapeake Bay. There being no prospect of a winter campaign under Thomas, Grant had ordered the corps transferred as quickly as possible, and Mr. Stanton turned over the direction to me. On January 10th I telegraphed to Grant at City Point the plan to be followed. This, briefly, was to send Colonel Lewis B. Parsons, chief of railroad and river transportation, to the West to take charge of the corps. I proposed to move the whole body by boats to Parkersburg if navigation allowed, and thence by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to Annapolis, for I remembered well with what promptness and success Hooker's forces, the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps, were moved into Tennessee in 1863 by that road. A capital advantage of that line was that it avoided all large towns—and the temptations of large towns were bad for the soldiers in transit. If the Ohio River should be frozen, I proposed to move the corps by rail from Cairo, Evansville, and Jeffersonville to Parkersburg or Bellaire, according to circumstances.

Commanders in the vicinity of the corps were advised of the change, and ordered to prepare steamboats and transports. Loyal officers of railroads were requested to meet Colonel Parsons at given points to arrange for the concentration of rolling stock in case the river could not be used. Liquor shops were ordered closed along the route, and arrangements were made for the comfort of the troops by supplying to them, as often as once in every hundred miles of travel, an abundance of hot coffee in addition to their rations.

Colonel Parsons proceeded at once to Louisville, where he arrived on the 13th. By the morning of the 18th he had started the first division from the mouth of the Tennessee up the Ohio, and had transportation ready for the rest of the corps. He then hurried to Cincinnati, where, as the river was too full of ice to permit a further transfer by water, he loaded about three thousand men on the cars waiting there and started them eastward. The rest of the corps rapidly followed. In spite of fogs and ice on the river, and broken rails and machinery on the railroads, the entire army corps was encamped on the banks of the Potomac on February 2d.

The distance over which the corps was transported was nearly fourteen hundred miles, about equally divided between land and water. The average time of transportation, from the embarkment on the Tennessee to the arrival on the banks of the Potomac, did not exceed eleven days; and what was still more important was the fact that during the whole movement not a single accident happened causing loss of life, limb, or property, except in a single instance where a soldier improperly jumped from the car, under apprehension of danger, and thus lost his life. Had he remained quiet, he would have been as safe as were his comrades of the same car.

Much of the success of the movement was due to the hearty co-operation of J. W. Garrett, president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Colonel Parsons did not say too much when he wrote, in his report of the transfer of Schofield's troops: