Who We Are - Chapter 6: Tom Scott and the Pennsylvania Railroad in the Civil War - Part 2
By Anton Chaitkin; Copyright Anton Chaitkin
Chapter 6: Tom Scott and the Pennsylvania Railroad in the Civil War
Part 2 of 2
By Anton Chaitkin, copyright Anton Chaitkin
Fort Sumter was surrendered to Confederate forces on April 13 after 33 hours of shelling.
The U.S. at the time had only about 15,000 troops, and only 3,000 of them in the east where needed. Above all, the national capital, Washington, was in danger.
President Lincoln issued a proclamation April 15, calling for 75,000 volunteers to be supplied by the militia of the loyal states. The details were to be worked out between state governors and the War Department, led by Secretary of War Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania.
Governor Curtin immediately conferred with Cameron and began planning the mobilization of soldiers in Pennsylvania. Curtin appointed Tom Scott his personal aide and gave Scott control of railroads, telegraphs and troop movements in the Harrisburg area, and from Harrisburg southward toward Washington.[1]
That state capital city was the crossroads of east-west and north-south rail lines, and was 20 miles closer to Washington than was Philadelphia. (Scott’s responsibility included moving troops out of Harrisburg on the Northern Central Railroad, which ran south through York, Pennsylvania, to Baltimore.)
PRR President J. Edgar Thomson met on April 17 with Secretary of War Cameron, who put Thomson in temporary charge of all arrangements for transporting troops and supplies to Washington. Thomson brought in as his assistant PW & B President Samuel M. Felton, who had helped manage the intelligence gathering and route planning for Lincoln to bypass the murder threat in Baltimore. (Felton’s line ran southwest from New York through Philadelphia, through Wilmington, Delaware, to Baltimore.)
The Philadelphians Confront Treason in Baltimore -- April 1861
We have previously discussed, in Chapter 5, the anti-Union element among the elite in Maryland. They did not succeed in moving that slave state to join the southern Confederacy. But this faction organized a Maryland segment of the clandestine Knights of the Golden Circle.[2] Their capability for sabotage and terror was especially amplified after Virginia’s April 17 secession, since Northern troops would now be forced to run the gauntlet through Maryland to get to Washington.
The Baltimore Commissioner (or “Marshal”) of Police, George P. Kane, was probably the most important single figure active in Maryland’s treason apparatus, from the first days of armed conflict, on through Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, in which Kane would play a significant part.[3]
At the very outset of the war, Scott, Thomson, and Felton were confronted with deadly mob violence, largely orchestrated by Commissioner Kane, obstructing the passage of Union forces.
A first contingent of Pennsylvania militia troops passed through Baltimore on April 18, and though they were assaulted by a rock-throwing mob, they managed to get through to Washington.
The Sixth Massachusetts Militia, about 1800 men, entrained from Boston April 17. Travelling on Felton’s PW & B, they reached Baltimore on the 19th. Felton had deliberately avoided informing Kane’s police that they were coming, until a half-hour before their arrival.
Crossing Baltimore required uncoupling the train cars and having them pulled by horses though a city street to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad terminal to continue on south to Washington. When a mob assailed the horse-drawn cars, soldiers got out and marched. The mob attacked with bricks and pistols, drawing return fire. The Union soldiers who were killed (four) and wounded (36), and the 12 civilian deaths in this April 19th Pratt Street Riot, were the first casualties of the Civil War.
In the evening after the Platt Street attack, Marshal Kane called for Confederate troops and volunteers to be sent at once to Baltimore to confront the “hordes” of Union troops arriving the next day. [4]
Late that night, Kane was informed that J. Edgar Thomson had ordered a new troop shipment through Baltimore. Kane devised a plan to destroy rail and telegraph lines through the state, and procured the cooperation of the mayor and governor to carry it out.[5]
Kane, Mayor Brown and other local officials then
ordered the destruction of the tracks and bridges on the two lines of railroad entering the city from the North. Two days later the mob completed the city’s isolation by cutting down the wires and poles on all telegraph lines in Baltimore which gave communication with the North.[6]
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