October 6, 1864
At the beginning of the letter, Abbott mentions that his regiment had recently left Chattanooga to stop Confederate leader Forrest from cutting railroad lines between Chattanooga and Nashville. While this is really the only time he mentions it in the letter, destruction of railroad lines was an important enough tactic during the war that I thought it merited a post! For example, as Union soldiers moved into the South, they proceeded to tear up rails “by pulling them up, heating them until they could bend” and then wrapped them around trees. This type of rail track destruction was called “Sherman’s Neckties,” named after General William T. Sherman. This would seem to be a highly effective way to tear apart railroad tracks. The goal here was to prevent the rails from being repaired. Sherman apparently said merely bending the rails would not be sufficient: “Officers should be instructed that bars simply bent may be used again.” By twisting them while still hot, they would be rendered unusable. It’s a pretty clever way to ensure that Southern railroad lines would not be in proper working order. These “neckties” became a defining symbol of Sherman’s March to the Sea, as he left devastating destruction throughout Georgia in his wake. This bit of trivia is something that I’d never heard about until I started trying to find information regarding railroads during the war. The I.M. Abbott collection is cool in this way because it allows for better understanding of soldiers’ lives and personal insight into major battles, but also leads to discovering other interesting facts. I probably never would have learned about “Sherman’s neckties” if I hadn’t been working my way through the collection! Works Cited: The Civil War Trust: Saving America’s Civil War Battlefields. “Railroads of the Confederacy." http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/warfare-and-logistics/logistics/railroads.html (accessed March 19, 2014). About North Georgia, "Sherman's Neckties." http://www.aboutnorthgeorgia.com/ang/Sherman%27s_Neckties (accessed March 21, 2014). Photo Credit: wikipedia.org Civil War Daily Gazette. "Jeb Stuart Begins His Raid into Pennsylvania." http://civilwardailygazette.com/2012/10/09/jeb-stuart-begins-his-raid-into-pennsylvania/ (accessed March 21, 2014).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorTessa Wakefield, student intern at the Concordia College Archives, assembled these blog entries in 2013-2014 for the Isaac Mark Abbott Civil War Letters Collection. The posts summarize the content of the letters, interpret Abbott's experiences and place them in the larger context of the Civil War. Archives
March 2014
Categories
All
|