At 6:21 on the morning of April 12, 1862, a civilian named James J. Andrews walked into a rail yard in Big Shanty, Georgia, climbed aboard a Confederate locomotive called the General, and stole it while the crew ate breakfast. Behind the engine, in three empty boxcars, rode twenty-two Union volunteers in civilian clothes. They had crossed four hundred miles of enemy territory to reach this moment and had been told from the start that capture meant death by hanging as spies.
As the General pulled away from the station in front of three hundred unarmed Confederate recruits drilling nearby, the most audacious raid of the Civil War began. Andrews was a thirty-two-year-old singing teacher from Kentucky who had spent two years smuggling quinine and salt across Confederate lines while quietly serving as a spy for Union General Don Carlos Buell. In March of 1862, Buell’s Army of the Ohio had one strategic obsession: Chattanooga, Tennessee. The city was the rail heart of the western Confederacy, where four railroads converged.
Cut the rail line running north from Atlanta, and Chattanooga would be choked of supplies and reinforcements. That line was the Western and Atlantic Railroad, 138 miles of single track, wooden trestles, and covered bridges stretching from Atlanta to Chattanooga. Andrews proposed to steal a train, drive it north, burn every bridge behind him, cut the telegraph, and sever the line in a single stroke. General Ormsby Mitchell approved the plan.
Twenty-four men volunteered from three Ohio infantry regiments; twenty-two made the rendezvous point outside Shelbyville, Tennessee, on the night of April 7. They were farmers, schoolteachers, and engineers who knew how to drive a steam engine. One of them was Jacob Parrot, a nineteen-year-old orphan from Fairfield County, Ohio, still a private in the 33rd Ohio Infantry. Andrews gave the volunteers the full plan for the first time that night.
They would walk south in small groups, cross Confederate picket lines on foot, and make their way to Marietta, Georgia, twenty miles north of Atlanta. From there they would buy tickets on a northbound passenger train and wait for it to stop at Big Shanty, a small wood-and-water station that had one crucial advantage: no telegraph office. If the train was stolen there, no one could warn the line ahead. Before the mission began, Andrews offered each man an out.
If captured in civilian clothes on Confederate soil, they would not be treated as prisoners of war. They would be hanged as spies under the Articles of War. Any man who wished to withdraw could do so. Not one stepped back.
The journey south was brutal. It rained for four straight days, turning the roads into red mud. The Ohio men traveled as Kentuckians fleeing the Union draft, but their accents were wrong and their clothes too new. One was stopped by a Confederate cavalry patrol and talked his way free with a fabricated story.
Another was pressed into the Georgia Infantry at gunpoint and deserted the next day. Two men never made it at all, caught by the rain near Jasper, Tennessee, forced to abandon the mission and walk back north. By the evening of April 10, twenty raiders had reached Marietta. Andrews waited a full extra day, hoping the missing men would arrive.
They did not. On the morning of April 12, he gave the order to proceed without them. The General pulled into Big Shanty at six in the morning. The engineer, Jeff Cain, and the conductor, William Fuller, stepped down and walked into the Lacy Hotel for breakfast.
The fireman went with them. Nobody watched the locomotive. That was the point of stopping there. Andrews uncoupled the passenger coaches, leaving the travelers and all possible witnesses behind.
His engineers climbed into the cab, and the General rolled north, dragging three empty boxcars behind it. William Fuller heard the whistle scream from inside the hotel. He saw his train pulling away without him. What he did next was not in any plan Andrews had made.
He dropped his fork, ran out the door, and started chasing his train on foot. Fuller was twenty-six years old, a Georgia native who had worked the Western and Atlantic since he was nineteen. He knew every mile of track, every station, every crewman by name. Running beside him were engineer Jeff Cain and fireman Anthony Murphy.
For two miles they ran, until they found a handcar used by track repair crews, a small four-wheeled kart pumped by hand. They pulled it onto the rails and began pumping north. Five miles up the line, Andrews was executing his plan. At Moon Station, the raiders cut the telegraph wire and tore up a length of rail to delay any pursuit.
At the town of Acworth, Andrews leaned from the cab window in a black frock coat and told the station master he was a Confederate impressment officer rushing a powder train north to reinforce General Beauregard. The station master waved him through. But there was a problem that no plan could fix. It had rained for four days, and the wooden bridges of the Western and Atlantic were soaked through.
The kindling piled in the boxcars would not catch. The bridges refused to burn. Fifteen miles up the line, Fuller and his men pumped their handcar into the town of Etowah. There, parked on a siding at the Cooper Iron Works, sat a locomotive with steam up, the Yonah, belonging to the iron company.
Fuller did not ask permission. He climbed into the cab, blew the whistle, and commandeered it in the name of the Confederate States. Four minutes later, the chase was on in earnest. At Kingston, a junction thirty miles north of Big Shanty, Andrews was forced to wait over an hour while southbound Confederate freight trains clogged the switch.
He played his role perfectly, shaking hands with the station master and calmly explaining that a special train had priority. Inside the boxcars, the raiders could hear his steady voice and knew that any moment a pursuing engine could come down the track. But no engine came. Not until the switch finally cleared, and the General rolled north, did Fuller arrive at the southern edge of town.
The freight trains were still fouling the line, so Fuller abandoned the Yonah, ran three hundred yards to another locomotive, the William R. Smith, and commandeered her. The gap between the two trains was now measured in minutes, not hours. The raiders tore up another rail, cut the telegraph, and dropped ties across the track.
When the William R. Smith reached the torn rail, Fuller and Murphy abandoned the engine and ran on foot again. Two miles up the track they flagged down a southbound freight, a locomotive called the Texas, hauling twenty cars. There was no turntable nearby and no time to turn her around.
Fuller made the decision that would decide the race: uncouple the freight cars, leave them on a siding, and run the Texas north in reverse, tender first, at full throttle. William Fuller stood on top of the tender, watching the track ahead and shouting instructions back to the engineer, who drove blind. They reached sixty miles an hour on the straight sections, possibly sixty-five, almost certainly the fastest any locomotive had ever been driven on southern rails. For the next hour and a half, the stolen train and its backward chaser played a running duel over nearly eighty miles of track.
Andrews stopped four times to tear up rail. Fuller cleared each obstruction and kept coming. Andrews uncoupled a boxcar and let it drift downhill to derail the pursuit; the Texas hit it and shoved it ahead until it could be pushed onto a siding. At Resaca, the raiders set the last boxcar on fire inside the covered Ochatanola River Bridge, the moment on which the entire mission hinged.
But the wood was too wet. The bridge did not catch. The Texas rolled through the smoke without slowing. Andrews knew the raid was over.
The General was running out of fuel and water. Two miles past Ringgold, Georgia, in a shallow cut through a low ridge, the engine sputtered and died. Andrews ordered the raiders to reverse into the Texas in a last desperate attempt to derail the pursuers, but there was not enough steam left to make it work. The General coasted to a full stop, eighty-seven miles from Big Shanty and eighteen miles from Chattanooga.
Andrews gave the last order: every man for himself, into the woods, try to make it to Union lines. The Texas arrived twenty minutes later. Within two hours, Fuller had Confederate cavalry, bloodhounds, and county militia hunting the raiders across three counties. Over the next week, all twenty men were captured.
Some were caught within hours; others hid for days. Jacob Parrot was caught on April 15 near Cleveland, Tennessee, and beaten for four days by Confederate interrogators who wanted the names of Andrews’s superiors. He gave up nothing. The raiders were transported in chains to Atlanta and held in a converted slave pen known as the Fulton County Jail.
A court-martial in Chattanooga condemned them as spies. James Andrews was hanged on June 7, 1862, in a vacant field on the outskirts of Atlanta. The rope was too long, and his feet touched the ground beneath the scaffold; soldiers had to pull him upward by hand until he strangled. He was thirty-two years old.
Eleven days later, seven more raiders were hanged on the same gallows and buried in unmarked graves. Their remains were not recovered until 1866, when they were reinterred at the National Cemetery in Chattanooga. The fourteen remaining raiders sat in prison through the summer and autumn of 1862, awaiting their turn on the gallows. On the night of October 16, eight of them worked loose an iron bar on the jail window, overpowered their jailers, and escaped into the Georgia night.
Two made it to Union lines by walking east across the state and boarding a blockade ship off the coast. The other six reached the North after months of hiding, sheltered by southern Unionists and escaped slaves. The six who could not escape, including Jacob Parrot and William Pittinger, were finally exchanged as prisoners of war in a diplomatic reversal of the spy designation, arriving at City Point, Virginia, on March 17, 1863. Eight days later, in the office of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in Washington, a ceremony was held that had never been held before.
Congress had created a new decoration in the summer of 1862, signed into law by President Lincoln on July 12 of that year, to recognize gallantry in action. It was called the Medal of Honor. Until March 25, 1863, no medal had ever been presented to any soldier. The first six recipients were the surviving Andrews Raiders who had just returned from Confederate captivity.
The very first medal handed to anyone in American history went to Private Jacob Parrot, the twenty-year-old orphan farm boy who had been beaten for four days and given up nothing. Secretary Stanton then escorted the six men across Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, where President Lincoln shook each one’s hand personally. In total, nineteen Medals of Honor were awarded to Andrews Raiders. James Andrews himself, as a civilian, was ineligible under the original statute, an omission that historians still argue over today.
The General survived the war, was repaired by Confederate mechanics, and returned to service. It ran through the Battle of Chickamauga, survived Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, and remained in commercial use into the 1890s. It was restored for exhibition and is on permanent display at the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw, Georgia, the town once called Big Shanty. Historians debate what might have happened if the bridges had burned.
Russell S. Bonds, in his account Stealing the General, argues that Chattanooga might have fallen in the spring of 1862, a year and a half before it actually did. The Chickamauga campaign, which cost sixteen thousand Union casualties, might never have happened as it did. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and the burning of Atlanta might have taken a radically different shape.
The war might have ended a year sooner. Other historians argue that the Union simply lacked the manpower to hold Chattanooga even if the mission had succeeded. We cannot know. What is known is that twenty-two men rode a stolen locomotive eighty-seven miles into enemy territory and failed because it rained, because soaked bridges would not catch, and because a Georgia conductor named William Fuller refused to stop running.
From that failure came the first physical recognition in American history that some acts of courage transcend victory and defeat. Every Medal of Honor awarded since March 25, 1863, from Gettysburg to Fallujah, traces back to a rainy morning in Big Shanty, Georgia, and to a nineteen-year-old private who refused to talk.