A Daring Escape in Georgia

October 16, 1862: Fourteen Soldiers of the 2nd, 21st and 33rd Ohio Infantry Regiments sat in Fulton County Prison, expecting to be tried for their lives.  Eight of their number had already been hanged as spies, including their leader, a civilian named James J. Andrews.  Having staged one escape attempt that had freed only two of them briefly, they decided to hatch a daring and audacious plan.
It all began in April 1862, when General Don Carlos Buell took his Army of the Ohio west to fight the Battle of Shiloh north of Corinth, Mississippi.  He left one division of 10,000 men under General Ormsby Mitchel to guard Nashville in his absence.  Mitchel planned to march south, cut the east-west railroad line at Huntsville, Alabama, then march east to overwhelm the small force holding Chattanooga.  To cut the rail line south from Atlanta, Mitchel sent a civilian, James J. Andrews, with 20 enlisted men and one other civilian into Georgia to burn the railroad bridges.  On April 12, they boarded the train"The General" in Marietta wearing civilian clothes and hijacked the locomotive and three boxcars at Big Shanty, where the crew stopped for breakfast.  The conductor, William A. Fuller, actually took off after his train on foot, accompanied by the engineer, Jeff Cain, and the superintendent of the railroad, Anthony Murphy.

(L to R) James J. Andrews, the General, and William A Fuller

The spies stopped to cut the telegraph wire between stations and removed a rail with tools they borrowed from a work crew. Strangely, none had thought to bring tools for tearing up track, so they lacked a reliable device for removing rail spikes.  Fuller, Cain, and Murphy took a handcar from the work crew near Acworth and continued north until they reached an ironworks, where they commandeered a small switch engine, the Yonah.  Southbound traffic was heavier than usual and delayed the General for over an hour in Kingston.  By the time the raiders rolled out, Fuller was close behind them.  He took on a faster train at Kingston, but the raiders took out another rail to stop him.  The last southbound train, the Texas, came to Fuller's aid.

Superintendent Anthony Murphy, the Texas, and Engineer Pete Bracken 

The Texas was heading south, so Fuller directed Bracken to drop his cars in Adairsville and head north in reverse.  The raiders sent a boxcar down a hill to derail the Texas, but the attempt failed.  The raiders had planned to burn the bridges along the rail line, but several days of rain made that mission all but impossible.  Picking up a telegraph operator named Joe Henderson in Calhoun, Fuller dictated a message to him, which he sent out from Dalton to Chattanooga before the raiders could cut the telegraph wire again.  Near Ringgold, the General ran low on fuel and the raiders abandoned it.  Soldiers and citizens took to the woods and rounded up every raider from Andrews' band.  Since they wore civilian clothes in a sabotage mission behind enemy lines, all were to be tried as spies in Knoxville, TN.  Due to Union Army movements threatening that city, however, only eight trials took place.  Andrews and William Campbell, the two civilians, as well as Private (PVT) George Wilson, PVT Perry Shadrach, PVT Samuel Robertson, PVT Samuel Slavens, Sergeant John Scott, and Sergeant Major Marion Ross were convicted of spying and hanged in June 1862.  The other fourteen spies waited in suspense until October.

Fulton County Jail, Private John Porter, Private John Wollam, Private Robert Buffum

Kept on the second floor of Fulton County Jail, the raiders decided to escape out the front door at dinner time, rushing the guards with bare hands.  William Knight, one of the engineers, had managed to scrounge a pocket knife and carve makeshift keys out of chicken bones to open some of their wrist shackles.  The elderly jailer, Mr. Turner, came to the cell to pick up their dinner dishes on October 16.  When he opened the door, two raiders grabbed him and Bob Buffum took his keys, opening the other cells on the floor.  They took the six guards by surprise, some of whom were playing cards with their rifles stacked.  After a short melee, fourteen fled, and eight got away in pairs.
Porter and Wollam hid in the woods until dark, then headed northwest to the Chattanooga area.  Finding Buell's Army no longer there, they stole a canoe and traveled west on the Tennessee River.  They reached Union lines near Corinth, MS, a month later.

Private William Knight, Private Wilson Brown, Corporal Daniel Dorsey, and Corporal Martin Hawkins

William Knight and Wilson Brown headed northeast through the Blue Ridge Mountains into East Tennessee. On one occasion, they approached a home and asked for breakfast.  When a posse approached the home, they realized that their "Union sympathizer" host was not as friendly as he seemed.  The vigilantes sent hounds after them, but Brown and Knight fended off their pursuers with rocks and rejoined their regiment in Kentucky.  Dorsey and Hawkins followed a similar route through Tennessee, taking advantage of the divided loyalties of the residents of Appalachia to gain food and shelter from a number of civilians.

Alf Wilson and Mark Wood chose perhaps the most daring escape route, as they fled south instead of north.  Stealing a small boat, they found the Chattahoochee River and floated through Georgia, along the border with Alabama, and all the way to the Union naval fleet floating off the mouth of the river in Mobile Bay.  The Andrews Raiders became the first recipients of the Medal of Honor on March 25, 1863.
Read and Watch More: Russell Bonds wrote a magnificent book titled "Stealing the General" in 2007.  Disney made a very accurate movie titled "The Great Locomotive Chase" starring Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter in 1956.  Both are available at Amazon.com.