Passengers riding the Orange & Alexandria Railroad in early 1864 witnessed a bleak landscape disfigured by nearly three years of war. “Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with War Virginia is,” Walt Whitman recorded on a trip from Washington, D.C., to Culpeper, Va., that February. “Virginia wears an air of gloom and desolation; no fences, no homes—nothing but the debris of destroyed property and continuous camps of soldiers,” seconded a U.S. Christian Commission representative. “There was nothing,” opined a newspaper correspondent, “absolutely nothing but the abomination of desolation.”
The Union Army of the Potomac’s winter camps surrounding Culpeper depended on the railroad for provisions, munitions, and forage. Keeping the army supplied required 40 locomotives running daily along the 70-mile stretch of tracks that were vulnerable to floods, prone to accidents, and often attacked by Confederate cavalry raiders. Yet such was the efficiency of the U.S. Military Rail Road’s management that when 22 miles had been destroyed by retreating Confederates the previous fall, the line was restored within days, and the high bridge over the Rappahannock River was rebuilt in 19 hours.
On March 10, a special train comprised of a locomotive and two cars chugged its way south. Aboard the first car was a detachment of soldiers, but riding in the other was the United States’ new general-in-chief, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and a small party that included staff officers, his son Fred, and his principal political sponsor, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne. Grant had formally received his promotion the day before from President Abraham Lincoln in a ceremony attended by the Cabinet. There was awkwardness—Grant was unfamiliar with Washington and nearly all its officials, including Lincoln, whom he had only just met, and the general-in-chief was a stranger to them. More discomfiture lay ahead at his destination—the winter camps of the
