A look at the Confederacy's lifeline on land
For more than 125 years – until the Atlantic Coast Line pulled its headquarters out of downtown Wilmington in 1960 – the railroad was the single overwhelming force that shaped the Port City's history. Except for one corporate history of the ACL, however, that story has never been properly told.
Until now. Wilmington native James C. Burke, who teaches at Cape Fear Community College, is in the process of writing a multi-volume history of the Coast Line's predecessor, the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad, which at one point in the 1800s was the longest single stretch of track in the world.
Volume I, which came out last summer, covered the railroad's history from its chartering in 1833 (when it began as the Wilmington & Raleigh) through 1854. The new volume, just out, picks up the story through the most tumultuous period in the line's history, when it served as part of "the lifeline of the Confederacy."
In many ways, it was a wonder the railroad ran at all. Union forces tried repeatedly to cut the line, raiding Mount Olive, Warsaw and Rocky Mount, burning bridges and tearing up track. All their efforts, however, disrupted service for only a few days. The yellow fever epidemic that hit Wilmington in 1862 killed the Wilmington & Weldon's secretary-treasurer and an unknown number of employees, and service slowed for months.
In the midst of everything else, the railroad's president, former congressman William S. Ashe, was killed in a grisly rail accident. (Ashe had been riding a hand car to his home, 19 miles outside Wilmington, when he was struck by a mail train. Ironically, the president had ignored a basic rule of rail safety, moving on the tracks after dark without a lantern.)
As the war effort taxed the Confederacy's scarce stock of metals, the wear and tear on the road took its toll. Many engines and cars couldn't run for want of axles or other parts. Only heroic efforts by the Wilmington & Weldon's superintendent, S.L. Fremont, and by Ashe's successor, the level-headed Stephen D. Wallace – for whom the town of Wallace, in Duplin County, is named – kept the railroad going to the Confederacy's bitter end.
Burke challenges some conventional assumptions about the railroad and the war.
Most accounts have focused on the glamorous role of the blockade runners, which steamed into Wilmington and off-loaded cargoes that the Wilmington & Weldon carried north. Just as important, however, Burke argues, was the railroad's link to westbound and southbound lines such as the Wilmington & Manchester and Wilmington, Charlotte & Rutherford. Using surviving freight vouchers and other records, he shows that the railroad carried tons of bacon, flour, sugar, salt and other foodstuffs from South Carolina, Georgia and other Deep South states to the Virginia theater.
It wasn't enough. The needs of war overtaxed the Wilmington & Weldon and other Southern lines. There was too much cargo, not enough trains; diarists recorded seeing piles of foodstuffs rotting beside depots in North Carolina while Robert E. Lee's soldiers starved.
Using the Wilmington & Weldon's annual reports, Burke also demonstrates that internal sabotage on the line was nearly as much a headache for the railroad as Yankee raids.
Burke's account continues past the fall of Fort Fisher and Appomattox. Despite heavy losses (and lots of capital tied up in now-worthless Confederate bonds), the railroad was able to survive and even thrive; by 1868, passenger receipts nearly matched antebellum levels and freight receipts exceeded those before the war.
While the previous volume focused exclusively on the company, this second volume includes much material about Wilmington as well, with vivid accounts of the secession controversy in the Lower Cape Fear, of the 1862 epidemic, and of wartime conditions, when many residents fled the city, leaving it to speculators, smugglers and a host of shady characters.
Burke writes as an academic. He gets off the occasional zinger – comparing wartime Wilmington to "a rented-out storefront in the guise of being a place" – but more often reverts to passive voice. The story he tells is so exciting, though, that many readers will be enthralled anyway. As an economic history, "The Wilmington & Weldon Railroad Co. in the Civil War" ranks alongside Alan D. Watson's classic "Wilmington: Port of North Carolina."