Daring and Suffering: A History of the Andrews Railroad Raid - Softcover

William Pittenger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1581820348 ISBN 13: 9781581820348

Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing, 1999

Synopsis

This is a facsimile reprint of the third edition of the classic firsthand account of the 1862 raid that was meant to splinter the Confederacy by making northern Georgia into a Union stronghold. The endeavor is better known as the Great Locomotive Chase, one of the greatest adventures of the war.

About this title

About the Author:

WILLIAM PITTENGER (1840-1904) was a corporal in the Second Ohio Infantry when he volunteered for the Andrews raid. He became a minister after the war, and he and his wife, Winnie, had six children and eventually settled in Fullbrook, California. COL. JAMES G. BOGLE has written several articles about the men and legends associated with the Great Locomotive Chase. In 1982 he supervised the restoration of the locomotive Texas, which had been commandeered by conductor Fuller during his pursuit of Andrews raiders. Colonel Bogle and his wife live in Atlanta.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The story of "the Great Locomotive Chase" or "the Andrews Raid" has attained a unique place in the history of the Civil War. That regard is largely due to the writings of one man, William Pittenger, the author of this book. Few stories in our history present such high adventure and portray so vividly the ideal of American courage and tenacity.

The story of the raid first appeared in print just three days after the event, on April 15, 1862, in the pages of the Southern Confederacy, an Atlanta newspaper. Pittenger, one of the men involved in the abortive raid who spent most of the following year in a Confederate prison, acquired a copy of this newspaper. A year and a half later he published his first book on the chase, which was titled Daring and Suffering. By then he had been paroled and returned to the North, where he completed his military service and received a disability discharge. He continued his research on the raid and published a second edition in 1881. The current volume is Pittenger's third edition, published in 1887 after further research and refinement.

What follows is the story of a group of twenty Union volunteers and two civilians who succeeded in making their way 200 miles behind enemy lines, stole a train, and then steamed northward 87 miles in an effort to destroy one of the main rail arteries of the Confederacy and isolate Chattanooga. The leader of this group was a civilian spy, James J. Andrews, about whom little is known. The raiders themselves were men from Gen. Ormsby M. Mitchel's division of Ohioans then stationed near Shelbyville, Tennessee. Pittenger was a corporal in the Second Ohio Infantry.

The locale of the action was northern Georgia along the Western and Atlantic Railroad that connected Atlanta and Chattanooga. Andrews's scheme, however, quickly became a race and a struggle for survival when the conductor of the stolen train, William A. Fuller, and a passenger, Anthony Murphy, superintendent of machinery and motive power for the Western and Atlantic, took up the pursuit to regain their train. The two railroad men began on foot, then used a pole car, and later three steam locomotives in the chase before it ended and the raiders were apprehended.

Pittenger relates the story of the chase and what happened to the men involved when it was over. All twenty-two of the raiders were captured and imprisoned. Later, eight of them, including the leader Andrews, were hanged in Atlanta. Six months later, eight of the surviving raiders escaped from a jail in Atlanta and made their way back to Union lines. The remaining six, including Pittenger, were exchanged a little more than a year after the raid. These six were the first to receive the newly commissioned Medal of Honor, the first awards of this nation's highest military decoration. Subsequently, eighteen of the raiders received the medal.

Many accounts have been written about this daring mission behind the lines, among which were versions by other members of the raiding party and by conductor Fuller and superintendent Murphy. Several differences marked these accounts, further whetting the imaginations of readers everywhere. Eventually, the story was translated from the page to the silver screen, and three motion pictures were released over the years. Yet had it not been for Pittenger's early recognition of the potential of this adventure and his efforts to record the details so early, this story might have been lost amid the many incidents of war that raged over the Confederate landscape, a mere footnote as opposed to an epic.

This is Pittenger's story, a story that, truthfully, records little strategic military significance to the outcome of the Civil War, but nevertheless it remains one of the greatest railroad stories of all time, a story charged with danger and suspense, daring and suffering.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1581820348
• ISBN 13: 9781581820348
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 482