A WAR-TIME RAILROAD.
Gen. Grant wanted a railroad for the transportation of supplies and ammunition to the front and he had one built.
There was no pretense of grading; they just placed ties on top of the ground and laid the rails across them.
After the road reached the front it was run along in the rear of the lines and as they were extended the road followed.
The “Johnnies” got a range on the road for a mile or more and they wasted a lot of ammunition trying to hit the flying trains, which were partially protected by earthworks.
They did not run any parlor cars for the soldiers in those days and one day when the writer was the bearer of some dispatches to City Point he rode in a box car with Gens. Horace Porter, Forsythe and other officers of Grant’s staff, and it occurred to him that we were in greater danger than when at the front. After we got out of the car I heard the engineer talking about the flying run and laughing about the shaking up he gave the officers.
BEN BUTLER.
Ben Butler was the most unique character of the civil war on the Union side and was as full of eccentricities then as in public life in later years.
When Gen. Grant started out on his campaign against Richmond in 1864 he sent Gen. Butler with a force of 40,000 soldiers around by water to operate from the south side.
Butler landed his army on Bermuda Hundred, a peninsula that lies between the James and Appomattox rivers and there the confederates hemmed him in, or as Gen. Grant expressed it, “bottled him up” until Grant’s army arrived at Petersburg. Then his intrenched position became of vast importance in the operations against the confederate capital.