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One historian has written that until the time of the Civil War armies moved no faster than they did in ancient Rome. If the battle had occurred in 1851, the Manassas Gap Railroad would not have existed and the Confederate troops could not have marched to the battle in time. It was the railroad that gave the Confederates their victory. That brigade delivered the battle’s knockout blow and its general, Brigadier General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, would gain his sobriquet Stonewall. Among those who rode by rail was a brigade under an eccentric professor from Virginia Military Institute. By the time of the battle the Confederates had almost as many troops as the attacking Northerners. Although it was a short distance, for an army of recent volunteers it would have been a two or three-day march. The trip by rail was only thirty-four miles. Most of the Confederates arrived just in time for the battle. There the Confederates boarded trains on the Manassas Gap Railroad heading to the Confederate line on Bull Run Creek. In fact, Johnston was marching most of his army of ten thousand eastwards to the town of Piedmont. Johnston moved forward leading Patterson to believe he was about to be attacked. It was Patterson’s duty to make sure Johnston’s Confederates remained in the Valley away from Manassas. Johnston was facing the aged Major General Robert Patterson. Johnston’s army was approximately fifty-four miles from Manassas Junction. That summer there were two Confederate army groups in the northern part of Virginia, General Beauregard’s group at Manassas Junction and another under Brigadier General Joseph Eggleston Johnston, protecting the Shenandoah Valley. What the Federals had not anticipated was the Confederate use of railroads. It appeared that the Federals with their superior numbers were on their way to winning that decisive victory. At the time, both sides were operating under the delusion that one great victory would end the war. As they left Washington, the Union force greatly outnumbered the waiting Confederates. Five days earlier the Union army under Brigadier General Irwin McDowell began its slow march out of Washington D.C.
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Perceptive Northerners knew the sound meant nothing but trouble. Union soldiers could hear the sounds of trains arriving behind Confederate lines. The Confederates had amassed a small army under General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard to protect this vital railroad junction. At Manassas Junction it connected with the Orange and Alexander Railroad as it headed south into central Virginia. There the Manassas Gap Railroad came east from the Shenandoah Valley. Behind the Confederate lines was the town of Manassas Junction. On a hot summer day in 1861, Union and Confederate troops lined up along Bull Run Creek preparing to fight the first major battle of the Civil War. The train that took Abraham Lincoln home was the last train operated by the United States Military Railroad. By the time Lincoln was laid to rest in Springfield an estimated seven million people had seen his casket. It was the sad duty of the railroad to take home the body of the assassinated president. At the end of the war, railroads played a role no one would have anticipated –helping a country grieve. While the United States Military Railroads improved existing railroads and built new ones, Confederate railroads fell apart because the Confederacy could not maintain them. Throughout the war while the Federal Government took control of the railroads and established the United States Military Railroads, the Confederacy left control in the hands of private companies up until February 1865 by which time it was too late to make a difference. Nevertheless, railroads played a prominent role in battles as far flung as Chickamauga, Chattanooga, the Peninsula Campaign, Gettysburg, the Atlanta Campaign, and Appomattox. The efficiency of moving men and supplies by rail was diminished by the poor quality of roadbeds and rails, inconsistent gauges used by different companies and company railroads not connected to each other. Soon the Confederate system was in a shambles while the Union system was strengthened. Compared to the Union the Confederacy had one-third of the freight cars, one fifth of the locomotives, less than one half of the miles of rail, one eighth of rail production, one tenth of the telegraph stations and one twenty fourth of locomotive production. From the very first the Civil War was a railroad war. That brigade delivered the battle’s knockout blow and its general, Brigadier General Thomas Jonathan Jackson, would gain his sobriquet “Stonewall”. Confederate troops were rushed by rail to confront the Union army led by Brigadier General Irwin McDowell at Bull Run.