The Great Locomotive Chase

On the morning of April twelfth, eighteen sixty-two, a group of twenty-two Union soldiers and a civilian spy named James J. Andrews sat down for breakfast at the Lacy Hotel in Big Shanty, Georgia, the town now called Kennesaw, just outside your window. They had been riding the Western and Atlantic Railroad south from Chattanooga disguised as ordinary travelers. When the conductor, the engineer, and the passengers stepped off for their meal, Andrews and his men climbed back on board, uncoupled the passenger cars, and stole the locomotive.

The engine was a four-four-oh wood-burning steam locomotive called the General, built in eighteen fifty-five in Paterson, New Jersey. Andrews intended to race it north toward Chattanooga, burning bridges and tearing up track behind him to sever the Confederacy's main supply artery between Atlanta and Tennessee. It was a mission that could have shortened the war by years.

What followed was a pursuit that reads like a dime novel. The General's conductor, William Fuller, bolted out of the hotel on foot, commandeered a handcar, then switched to a smaller locomotive, the Yonah, then the William R. Smith. When Andrews tore up a section of track to stop him, Fuller simply sprinted around the gap and requisitioned yet another engine, the Texas, running it in reverse, tender-first, at full throttle. Fuller was a man with exactly one idea, and he held it with both hands for eighty-seven miles.

The chase lasted about seven hours through the North Georgia hills. Andrews' men dropped cross-ties on the tracks, cut telegraph wires, and tried three times to burn a covered bridge over the Oostanaula River, but rain-soaked wood and Fuller's relentless pressure prevented every attempt. When the General finally ran out of wood and steam just north of Ringgold, Georgia, Andrews ordered his men to scatter. All were captured within two weeks. Andrews and seven of his raiders were hanged as spies in Atlanta. Eight others eventually escaped from prison; six who were exchanged became the first recipients in American history of the Medal of Honor, awarded by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in March of eighteen sixty-three.

The General itself survived the war, served out its working life, and today stands on permanent display at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History, right here in Kennesaw, where this extraordinary morning began.