The Story of "The General"

The name of the locomotive on the front of this post card is "The General". It was made famous by the 1926 Buster Keaton film, The General. In early

spring 1862 Northern forces advanced on Huntsville, Alabama, heading for Chattanooga, Tennessee. Union general Ormsby Mitchel accepted the offer of a civilian spy, James J. Andrews, a contraband merchant and trader between the lines, to lead a raiding party behind Confederate lines to Atlanta, steal a locomotive, and race northward, destroying track, telegraph lines, and maybe bridges toward Chattanooga. The raid thus aimed to knock out the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which supplied Confederate forces at Chattanooga, just as Mitchel’s army advanced. On April 7 Andrews chose twenty-two volunteers from three Ohio infantry regiments, plus one civilian. In plain clothes they slipped through the lines to Chattanooga and entrained to Marietta; two men were caught on the way. Two more overslept on the morning of April 12, when Andrews’s party boarded the northbound train. They traveled eight miles to Big Shanty (present-day Kennesaw), chosen for the train jacking because it had no telegraph. While crew and passengers ate breakfast, the raiders uncoupled most of the cars. At about 6 a.m. they steamed out of Big Shanty aboard the locomotive General, a tender, and three empty boxcars. Though it created a sensation at the time, the Andrews Raid had no military effect. General Mitchel’s forces captured Huntsville on April 11 but did not move on to Chattanooga. The cut telegraph lines and pried rails were quickly repaired. Nevertheless, the train thieves were hailed in the North as heroes. This information was taken from this website: Davis, Stephen. "Andrews Raid." New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Oct 5, 2018. https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/andrews-raid/ The post card was published by W. M. Kline Company out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a publisher of Southern view-cards as Linens and Photochomes. Most cards depicted scenes of Tennessee and North Carolina with quite a few on Cherokee Indians. They also issued a large series of real photo postcards with white borders. They existed from 1942 to 1960.