Great Locomotive Chase  "A Daring Plan"  April 12, 1862

"Boys, we're going into danger, but for results that can be tremendous." said Union spy turned saboteur James J. Andrews to the 24 volunteers he had recruited from three Ohio regiments to take part in a secret railroad-bridge-burning mission. Union Gen. Ormsby M. Mitchel wanted to capture the Confederate city of Chattanooga, Tenn., and he and Andrews had concocted a plan to isolate that important munitions center from Rebel reinforcements by cutting its rail connections and then sending in the Union army.

Andrews and his men, in civilian clothes, were to make their way in groups of three or four to Chattanooga, where they would board a train going south toward Atlanta. They would get off about 25 miles north of Atlanta at Marietta, where they would commander a northbound train and race back toward Union lines, burning bridges and cutting telegraph lines along the way. Meanwhile, Mitchel's army would move to cut the tracks west of Chattanooga and be poised to take the city when the raiders returned.

Two of the undercover Union raiders were drafted into the Confederate army before they reached Marietta and two others overslept, but at first light on the morning of April 12, 1862, Andrews and the remaining 20 raiders boarded the morning train from Atlanta and started back north.

The train was pulled by the locomotive General and was composed of a tender followed by three empty boxcars and a string of passenger cars. At 6:46am the train pulled into the station at Big Shanty, GA., for a 20 minute breakfast stop. While the train crew and the passengers all got out and filed into Lucy's Hotel to eat, Andrews's men quickly undid the the coupling in front of the passenger cars, and three of the raiders with railroading experience climbed aboard the General. One of the diners in the hotel looked out the window and shouted to the train's conductor, "Someone is moving your engine!"

Fascinating Fact:  A patriotic Union man, Andrews worked as a spy for Union Gen. Don Carlos Buell in Tennessee. He smuggled medicine into the South and came back out with military intelligence.


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