| From the Richmond Daily Dispatch |
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| February 10, 1862 |
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| The Reclamation of the Trans-Allegheny |
| It is now apparent that where our forces
in the field have been sustained by lines of railway reaching to them,
they have over-matched the enemy; and where they have had to rely for
their transportation on dirt roads, they have been driven back by the
well-prepared and outnumbering force of their adversaries. At
Manassas, Bowling Green, and Belmont, our troops were in communication
with their supplies and reinforcements by rail, and have beaten the
enemy or held their positions. At Sewell Mountain, Cotton Hill, and
Somerset, our troops relied on dirt roads, and were obliged to
withdraw. It is no fault of generalship that disasters have happened
under such conditions, but of the roads. The Republic has been
prodigal of the lives of her sons on these lines, but has been stingy
of the means of sustaining them in their remote positions, and
therefore has failed. It is notorious that the Pierpoint Government
exists in Trans Allegheny to-day, only because the State has neglected
to provide access for her troops to her own frontier, to which an
active and intelligent enemy has uncontested transit by land and
water. Caesar held Gaul, Napoleon held Italy, and Austria holds
Lombardy and Venice, by roads as well as arms; while Virginia, in
defiance of all experience, looses half her territory by the stupid
and disastrous experiment of Lasser faire. By its means the people are
estranged; their trade and attachments belong to the enemy, and their
territory is neither a province nor a portion of the empire of the
State, except on paper. No State before ever attempted to govern and
defend what it could not reach, or so defied interest, safety, and
example, in its blind abandonment and neglect of its wide frontier,
open to its enemy and obstinately kept shut to itself. |
| An effort is now being made in the Senate
of Virginia to awaken the State on this subject. It is proposed by Mr.
Christian, of Augusta, to negotiate with the Confederate Government
for a present advance of one million of dollars of the war debt due
the State, to be applied to the extension of the Covington & Ohio Railroad
westward. The parsimonious member is told that the
appropriation is so much of the appropriation already made to that
road, and does not increase the debt of the State. The anti-internal
improvement member is told that the improvement is not for local
benefit and welfare; but for the general defence and State existence.
Demonstration is made of the fact that we cannot successfully meet the
enemy, except in the mountains, with the climate, diseases, and
difficulties as our allies, and that we cannot maintain ourselves
there without adequate transportation in the rear. |
| From the enemy's position at Ganley
Bridge, to which he has water transportation to Sewell, is thirty
miles, and from Lewisburg, to which we ought to have transportation by
rail to the same point, is also thirty miles.--By the lack of railway
from Lewisburg to Jackson river, thirty-six miles, we have more than
twice the difficulty of the enemy in reaching the Sewell, which is the
Gibraltar of the mountains. This disadvantage the enemy is increasing
by using the winter to mend the roads on his side, while we delay or
hesitate to do the same on ours. If the enemy enter Greenbrier and
Monroe, he secures portable property, useful and tributary to war,
worth more than it would cost to extend the Covington and Ohio road,
by temporary track, to the westward of those counties, and to preserve
this immense property for the use of our own army. The Southwestern
and Central Railroads would then belong to him, and with such success
into the State, the authority of Pierpont would be felt in the city of
Richmond. |
| The only economical and certain defence of
that country and those roads, is to keep the enemy in the mountains if
we cannot drive them beyond the Ohio. To keep him there, or to drive
him westward, we must increase our means of transportation and
economize in its cost. This can only be done successfully by pushing
the railroad. The cost of transportation
for an army of fifteen thousand men, by wagons, from Covington to the
White Sulphur for nine months, will pay for the building of a temporary
railroad on the same route. Mr. W. A.
Kuper, civil engineer, estimates the cost of such a road, built of the
iron taken from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad,
from Covington to White Sulphur, to be $563,000, and states that it
can be built in nine months. During last summer each four-horse team
hauled only four-barrels of flour and its own forage between those
points, and took three days to make the round trip of twenty-three
miles and back. Such a team as subsistence, and driver, cost the
Government not less than $10 per day. The army estimates allow four
pounds of subsistence so each soldier per day, to which it would be
safe to add one pound per day for baggage, &c. The daily arrival
of freight at White Sulphur for an army of fifteen thousand men,
therefore, would be 75,000 pounds, to deliver which from Covington it
would take 217 such teams as did the hauling of last summer for the
army of the Kanawha. At a cost of ten dollars per day for each of
these, transportation for a nine months campaign for an army of 15,000
men would cost $585,900, or $22,900 more than the first cost of the railroad. |
| When the transportation is so great and
succedent as it is for a large army, the cost is inversely
proportioned to the value and thoroughness of the road or other means
used. Thus, while the greatest economy results from the railroad,
the next most economical plan is to plank the turnpikes, 2nd the next
is to pave them. One or the other of these plans should be at once
adopted. Even if economy is no object with the Government, in no other
way can the transportation for a Western army of 15,000 men be
obtained. There are not enough unemployed wagons in the Confederacy to
do the work on the present bad roads. |
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