THE INFLUENCE OF RAILROAD TRANSPOR- 
TATION ON THE CIVIL WAR 
It is always interesting to speculate on the effects a par- 
ticular invention may have on the movements or tendencies 
in world history, but until such invention has passed the acid 
test of use under trying conditions, it is not safe to predict its 
ultimate success. Before 1861, the railroad had proved its 
undoubted value in the commercial field, but military experts 
were still speculating on the value of and the best means of 
using the railroad as a war agency. It is true that the British 
realized that there might be great possibilities in the use of the 
railroad as a military agency as early as 1830 when a regi- 
ment was carried a two-days’ march in two hours over the 
Liverpool and Manchester Railroad, but this was a rather in- 
significant troop movement.^ A more ambitious movement of 
troops took place in 1859 in the war between France and 
Austria when several thousand French troops were moved by 
rail to the sea coast of France and thence by ship to Italy, 
but the railroad in this war was only an aid and not a deter- 
mining factor.^ 
So it was left for the great Civil War in America to test to 
the limit the powerful agency made possible by the applica- 
tion of the steam engine to land travel and transportation. 
The vast size of our country, the long battle front extending 
from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River and be- 
yond, and the long line of communications that must be main- 
tained in such campaigns as that of Sherman’s around 
Atlanta, made it next to impossible to bring such a war to a 
successful conclusion without the help of the railroad.^ Even 
where water transportation was reasonably efficient, as in the 
case of McClellan’s Peninsular campaign, the difficulties of 
moving troops over the execrable roads made campaigning 
^ Edwin A. Pratt, Rise of Rail-Power in War and Conquest, 1833-1914 (Philadelphia, 
1915), 1. 
2 Ihid., 10. 
William T. Sherman in his Memmrs (New York, 1875), II, 398, says that the 
Atlanta campaign would have been impossible without the railroad. 
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