May 23, 1861 Raid
- The events as described in this section are contested in the "Raid controversy" section below.
Colonel Jackson, gathering intelligence on freight passing on the line, determined that coal was being shipped in large quantities from the Ohio Valley to Union naval bases in Baltimore that were fueling U.S. Navy warships attempting to blockade the more southern states. "During early May, dozens of heavy coal and freight trains were moving daily over the double-track line in the Harpers Ferry area."
About the middle of May Jackson then devised a covert plan to destroy B&O Railroad operations while simultaneously benefiting Virginia and possibly the Confederacy. Jackson complained to the B&O Railroad that the "noisy night railroad traffic" of the trains disturbed the rest of his troops, and notified John Garrett that trains would only be allowed to pass through Harpers Ferry at first only during daylight hours, but within a few days demanded a tighter timetable restriction between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. in order to ensure their rest was not disturbed. Delagrange notes "He complained strongly that the trains were disturbing the rest of his tired troops at Harper’s Ferry. Garrett agreed to run as many trains as possible through around noon." Thus only two hours in the day, centered around noon, were allowed for train traffic through the Harpers Ferry area after the middle of May. This timetable bottleneck caused the B&O Railroad to pile up trains in yards and along the lines on the double tracks on either side of Harpers Ferry in order to maximize their throughput during this new curfew.
On the night of May 22, Jackson sent the 5th Virginia Infantry under Kenton Harper to Cherry Run, west of Martinsburg, and he sent Captain John D. Imboden's cavalry to Point of Rocks, east of Harpers Ferry. The 5th Virginia positioned themselves at a bridge spanning the Potomac River near Cherry Run, thirty-two miles east of Harpers Ferry on the Potomac River north and west of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Martinsburg Shops. Imboden's cavalry staged themselves at the signal tower west of Point of Rocks, twelve miles (19 km) east of Harpers Ferry.
The following morning, May 23, the trains waiting to the east and west of this forty-four mile section "arrived on schedule" and began moving across this curfewed span at 11:00 a.m. "freely entering the zone for an hour after eleven o'clock." This one hour period allowed for just enough time for these trains to make it only part way into their forty-four mile stretch without reaching the other end on the doubled-up tracks of that main stem section. Then, "at the end of the busy noontime traffic," just as all these trains had filled up the east and westbound lanes, practically coupler to coupler, "Imboden and Harper suddenly halted traffic at midday" by emerging forth and not allowing the trains now coming toward each of their positions to pass and get out of this double-track stretch. Thus Col Jackson had now "bagged" the "largest single haul of rolling stock taken intact during the war" on the very first day of the war from Virginia's perspective: May 23, 1861.
The B&O Railroad's main stem now filled with "dozens of wrathy, impatient locomotive engineers wondering what was causing the tie up." Locomotives and trains were caught in various places all along this section, and this trapped a large quantity of rolling stock in between, which "was soon concentrated in the big rail yard at Martinsburg, West Virginia." From Harpers Ferry, the Winchester and Potomac Railroad ran as a spur off the B&O Railroad mainline south to Winchester, Virginia, allowing Jackson an opportunity to try and move his captured rail assets quickly to Winchester. The entire forty-four mile railine between Cherry Run and Harper's Ferry, with the huge railyard at Martinsburg, and the thirty-two mile Winchester spur was now entirely isolated as a whole and separate system of seventy-six miles of railroad, apart from the western and eastern runs of the main B&O Railroad stem.
Read more about this topic: Jackson's Operations Against The B&O Railroad (1861)
Famous quotes containing the word raid:
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)