| From the Richmond Dispatch |
| |
| January 12, 1864 |
| |
| Conscripting railroad employees |
| The Presidents of the
Richmond
&
Petersburg
and
Richmond
and Fredericksburg {Richmond, Fredericksburg
& Potomac} Railroads a few
days since presented to Congress a most sensible remonstrance against
the indiscriminate conscription 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 others incapable of
military service for men educated for, and employed in, these
pursuits. The simplest of them requires far more peculiar 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 of 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 railroad 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 widespread 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 seal 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. |
|