Southern Railroads during CW

[BamaBill]

Can someone tell me how it is that the Union Army was able to effectively take control of the Southern Railroads so early in the war and maintain that control? Seems to me that the South had the trains and men to resist this, but seemed to lose control, a little too easily.

[Shortstack]

In 1861 (the first year that the USA invaded the CSA), the USA had a standing army, with equipment and mobility. The CSA did NOT have a standing army and did not have immidiate plans to form one. Their first priority was to establish the framework of civilian leadership; to include elected houses of congress patterned after the USA. After all, the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was copied word for word from the US Constitution except for the title and a few adjatives and adverbs. And, of course, they inserted that one Article specifiying that the importation of slaves from outside of the CSA was illegal. THAT would have been the first step to abolishing slavery altogether, but the invasion halted any further growth in the new country. The US Army was able to move in quickly and destroy a lot of the railway structure. All of us who have gone to school in the post-war era have been taught that it was a civil war which, of course, it was not. One dictionary defines a civil war as, "A war between citizens of the same country." Another one says it is "a war between factions or regions of one country." As we all know--the areas of the USA that were known as the South, seceded from the US and organized together to form a new, sovereign country they named The Confederate States of America. Too many folks today mock those facts and call them bogus.

[transplant]

I live in a conquer nation, force to pay for a govt that could care less, we are being taxed at a higher rate than what England ever put on the colony. we own land but can't do anything with it until the govt says you can. and if the govt wants it, they come and get it . and then give it to someone else for a higher and better use, they call it. the people of the south need to demand their country back!!

[BamaBill]

Mr. Beale, the Union Army grabbed the Huntsville, Alabama depot in 1862 and proceeded to grab sections of railroad North, West, and East of there and build blockhouse fortifications at certain critical junctures and crossings to protect them from Confederate attack, thereby controlling the Railroad through Alabama. Also, along the Memphis and Charleston Railroad (to the North of the Tennessee/Alabama line) the Union Army almost made a sport out of disrupting Confederate shipping.