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Weird Foods and Methods People Used to Survive During the Civil War

Khalid Elhassan July 21, 2021 36 min

Civil War Union civilian scout and hero James J. Andrews. Flicker

12. James J. Andrews’ Daring Raid

It was early 1862, and Union forces in the war’s Western Theater were worried about the possibility that Confederate forces might make a swift descent upon Chattanooga from Atlanta via the Western & Atlantic Railroad (W&R). So James J. Andrews, a Union civilian scout, proposed a daring raid to sever that rail connection. He and a picked band would seize a locomotive in Georgia, then travel north, and destroy a pair of connecting railway lines, along with their vital bridges.

Andrews’ idea was approved, and in early April 1862, he recruited Union Army volunteers for his raid. They slipped individually and in small groups through Confederate lines in civilian clothes, then, in accordance to plan, they rendezvoused in Marietta, Georgia. There, they boarded a train on April 11^th. When it reached a small stop called “Big Shanty”, which had been selected by Andrews because it had no telegraph the Confederates could use to send out an alarm, the raiders sprang into action and seized the train’s locomotive, named the General.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.