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1864 | Photograph
"Long Bridge" over the Potomac River, 1864
The original footbridge across the Potomac was replaced with this railroad bridge in 1864 by the U.S. Military Railroads, connecting Washington, D.C., with the army?s growing camps, hospitals, and defenses near Alexandria, Virginia.
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1864 | Photograph
Bird?s Eye View of Machine Shops, with East Yard of Orange and Alexandria Railroad. Alexandria, Va., [1861-1865]
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, African Americans seized the opportunity to work and to travel. Visible just to the left of the railroad shop smokestack and roundhouse stood the old Price and Birch "Slave Pen" at 1315 Duke Street.
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1864 | Photograph
Boxcars with Refugees at Railroad, Atlanta, Ga., 1864
With the capture of Atlanta, General William T. Sherman?s army seized an important rail hub for the Confederacy. This image of refugees and African Americans, sitting on rail cars with their possessions, indicates the massive displacement that came with the war.
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1864 | Photograph
Fortified Railroad Bridge Across Cumberland River, Nashville, Tennessee, 1864
Confederate guerrilla forces, often operating as regular cavalry units, attacked Union-controlled railroad lines. They shot into trains, destroyed tracks, took prisoners, killed Union soldiers, and burned bridges. Union commanders responded by developing block houses and fortified bridges to protect the vulnerable lines, equipping trains with special armor, recruiting loyal local citizens to ferret out guerrillas, and dispatching special counterinsurgency cavalry units to track down the Confederate guerrillas.
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1864 | Photograph
General William T. Sherman at Fort No. 7, Atlanta, Ga., overlooking Chattanooga Railroad lines, 1864
Sherman recognized the importance and vulnerability of railroad corridors. In September 1862 Sherman ordered an expedition to ?destroy? the town of Randolph, Tennessee, because guerrillas had fired on Union steamships from the banks of the Mississippi River. In 1864 he adopted similarly hard measures to protect the railroads during his Atlanta Campaign.
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1864 | Photograph
Military Railroad Bridge over Potomac Creek, 1864
This bridge was destroyed and rebuilt several times. In May 1862 General Irwin McDowell employed hundreds of contraband laborers, who replaced the bridge in nine days. Here, in May 1864, the U.S. Military Railroads, again with large numbers of black freedmen, constructed the bridge in forty hours. Photographs such as this one indicated the complexity, cost, and scale of the bridges across many of the South?s rivers and also conveyed the precarious, and sublime, ways the railroad was thought to defy nature.
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1864 | Photograph
No. 1. Steam engines "Telegraph" and "O. A. Bull," Atlanta, Ga., 1864
No. 1. Steam engines ?Telegraph? and ?O. A. Bull? remained in position amid the ruins of a Confederate roundhouse in Atlanta in 1864. The South possessed some of the most beautiful depots and railroad facilities in the nation in 1861. Sherman?s campaigns sought to dismantle the Confederate railroad system and in so doing deny any claim to modernity and progress. African American workers stand atop the old Georgia Railroad flatcar.
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1864 | Photograph
The roundhouse, Chattanooga Railroad, Atlanta, in 1864
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July 25, 1864 | Photograph
Railroad mortar "The Dictator" at Petersburg, Virginia, July 25, 1864
