[Emailed July 14, 1997]

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER...

Whoops! Went to bed early Sunday evening, forgot to type in this week's history lesson. In atonement, I offer a long (not hilariously funny, but amusing and shrewd) story about Stonewall Jackson in the early days of the War (although he wasn't nicknamed "Stonewall" yet--more on that next week). Anyway, the time is the spring of 1861; Virginia is preparing for war, and Jackson has been ordered to report to Harper's Ferry, an important railroad junction in the northwestern part of the state, to take command of the garrison and armory there. Grab some popcorn and listen in...

"One of the first distractions to stir his ire, disrupt his sleep, and aggravate his dyspepsia was the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. [Jackson] found the activity on the B&O's main rail stem insufferable. Whistling locomotives pounded up and down the line relentlessly. Heavy freights loaded with coal for the Union cause swayed and thundered eastbound by day. Empty cars rocked and banged and clattered westbound back up the main stem all night.

"Permitting all those trains to pass unchallenged was hard on Jackson; not only was the steam coal they hauled helping the enemy, but he knew the Confederacy was desperate for rolling stock, particularly locomotives. It could use those engines thundering by. But since he was under orders from Richmond to leave the railroad alone, he suffered and endured.

"By late May, however, Jackson was through doing both. 'The noise of your trains is intolerable.' he had complained to B&O president John Garrett earlier in the month. 'My men find their repose disturbed by them each night. You will have to work out some other method of operating them.'...Garrett's sidewhiskers must have quivered with impatience and displeasure, but he didn't have much choice...Jackson's will was that the B&O confine the nighttime traffic on its main stem to regularly scheduled passenger and express trains only.

"Garrett no sooner had his nighttime traffic painfully rearranged to suit Jackson's taste than the infuriating Confederate commander took exception to his daytime schedule as well. He believed it interfered with necessary military routine. So the railroad president had to work out yet another arrangement: the B&O was now to funnel *all* of its freight traffic, eastbound and westbound, through a daily two-hour window--11 AM to 1 PM.

"'We then had, for two hours every day,' said one of Jackson's officers, 'the liveliest railroad in America.' It was a dispatcher's nightmare.

"Virginians awoke on May 23 to the palpable feel of history in the making...the secession convention's decision to leave the Union was before the people for a vote. And while Virginians were going to the polls, Jackson had some major trouble scheduled for the B&O. While the electorate was endorsing the secession resolution three to one, he dramatically ended the hands-off policy toward the railroad. He had never liked it anyway.

With the line's traffic patterns now constricted to his liking, he ordered Capt. John Imboden at Point of Rocks on the Maryland side of the Potomac, to permit all westbound trains to pass as usual until 12 noon on that day, but let none go east. At noon Imboden was to disrupt the line so that it would take several days to repair. At the same time, Col. Kenton Harper in Martinsburg [Virginia] was to let all trains pass east, but let none go west. At noon, Harper was to foul the line on his end. At that moment the B&O's main stem between Point of Rocks and Martinsburg slammed shut, bottling up fifty-six locomotives and more than three hundred cars in the thirty-one mile pocket between the two points.

"It was a train robbery to write home about. Jackson's earlier demands on Garrett for changes in the schedule were now seen for what they really were--a setup."