NP, CM 1/19/1864

From the Charleston Mercury
 
January 19, 1864
 
Conscripting Railroad Employees
   The Presidents of the Richmond & Petersburg and Richmond and Fredericksburg Railroads, a few days since presented to Congress a most sensible remonstrances against the indiscriminate conscripting of railroad employees, and replacing them with disabled soldiers. This remonstrance is endorsed by the Presidents of the Wilmington & Weldon, Wilmington & Manchester, and other roads of the Confederacy. The following is an extract from this remonstrance:
   It is the idle dream of theorists and declaimers to substitute disabled soldiers, or other incapable of military service, for men educated for, and employed in, these pursuits. The simplest of them requires far more peculliar skill and experience than the inexperienced can be made to understand. And nothing is more certain than that men unfit for military service are wholly unfit for the employment on railroads. Actual experience has established this beyond doubt. This blind zeal to put every male in the army can only increase the number to be fed, armed and clothed, while it destroys the only resources for transporting troops, food, arms, or clothes for them -- already inadequate for the armies in the field. At this time, with the existing laws and military regulations, the efficiency and capacity of every railroad in the Confederacy is very greatly diminished for want of suitable men to operate and keep them in repair.
   The employment of inexperienced men produces confusion, and multiplies collisions and accidents, while the want of mechanics keeps a large portion of machinery and cars useless for want of repairs. Take any considerable number of the railroad employees remaining, and the operations of the railroads must cease. Let the Government undertake to carry them on with disabled soldiers, boys, or old men, without experience or skill, and but a few months or weeks will suffice to show the last train run on the last rail road in the confederacy. No agencies have been more efficient and necessary in carrying on this war than the railroad companies. Adopt the measures proposed, and not only will you inflict wide-spread loss on stockholders (many of them soldiers in the army), but you put an end to railroad transportation. What substitute for it can be had? It requires one thousand wagons and drivers, and four thousand horses, to transport in five days what a railroad train can in one or five times that number to do it one day. Where are these to come from, when enough for the other wants of the army cannot be had?
   With those best acquainted with the condition and resources of our railroads, including the officers of Government having special charge of railroad transportation, it has been long a subject of most anxious consideration by what means these agencies can be maintained in operation with every fostering care and aid which the Government can bestow on them, and all are oppressed with the apprehension that not a few of them must be abandoned with each successive year of this war. What, then, must be the result, and how soon must it occur, when the Government, instead of fostering, still further cripples and destroys them? Already the Government has a Bureau of the War Department superintending railroad transportation. Let the officers of that bureau be consulted as to the effect of the proposed measures. They are impartial, and they are informed on this subject. But let not a blind zeal for swelling the numbers of the army, or a prejudice against railroad companies (who were the first to sustain the Government by offering to perform its transportation at half rates of toll, and to receive payment in Government bonds and notes when they had no market value) precipitate the country and its armies into irretrievable disaster.

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