| From the Charleston Mercury |
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| January 19, 1864 |
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| 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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