Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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February/March 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1985 | Volume 36, Issue 2
Colonel Herman Haupt was very tired and very angry. On this night of August 22, 1862, the second battle of Bull Run was shaping up nearby, General Pope needed troops, and it was up to Haupt, who had command of every U.S. military railroad in the Eastern theater, to see that he got them. Four trains had simply disappeared. Haupt fumed and worried until midnight, when a conductor arrived with word that Gen. Samuel Sturgis had seized them.
Captured trains were likely enough, since Robert E. Lee was known to be in the area. But Sturgis was a Union general. Haupt sent a message to Henry Halleck, the general in chief, and then hurried four miles up the line to Sturgis’s headquarters. “Well!” the general greeted him, “I am glad you have come, for I have just sent a guard to your office to put you in arrest for disobedience of orders in failing to transport my command.” Haupt said fine: as far as he was concerned, he would be only too happy to crawl into a corner and get some sleep, but Sturgis must “understand that he was assuming a very grave responsibility; the trains were loaded with wounded; the surgeons with ambulances were waiting for them at the depot; the engines would soon be out of wood and water, and serious delays would be caused in the forwarding of troops to General Pope.”
Sturgis thought this over. “I don’t care for John Pope a pinch of owl dung!”
An orderly appeared bearing a dispatch from Halleck, amazingly strong for that most vacillant man: “No military officer has any authority to interfere with your control over railroads. Show this to General Sturgis, and if he attempts to interfere, I will arrest him.”
Haupt read this to Sturgis, but the general had become so enamored of his phrase that he was oblivious to all else. “I don’t,” he began again, “care for John Pope a pinch————.” At last the chief of staff got him to understand. “Well, then,” said the general, “take your damned railroad!”
This contretemps had kept ten thousand men out of action. Haupt went off into the night to get them moving. He did not like the military much—he had begged to serve without rank or uniform —but Halleck had backed the right man. Almost alone among Union officers, Haupt knew how to keep the trains running. A year and a half of war had taught the high command the importance of the railroads but not how they worked. And so Herman Haupt was in a position roughly analogous to being the only American in 1941 who knew how to use airnlanes in warfare.
Born in Philadelphia in 1817, Haupt graduated from West