The development of railroads did not get underway until 1836 in North Carolina. It did not take long, however, for the railroads to have an impact on the mail system. Numerous examples of stampless covers exist from the 1840's to the 1850's and were carried on the Wilmington or Raleigh Railroad. The North Carolina Railroad was started in 1851 with groundbreaking in Greensboro. Its completion allowed for direct rail service across the state. The availability of railroad covers carried on this rail system prior to the Civil War is an indication of mail activity carried on this network. Figures 2 and 3 are examples of early pre-war letters carried on the North Carolina Railroad.

To date, more than 100 covers are known that have markings indicating they were carried on North Carolina's rail system prior to the start of the Civil War. We know by this time, dedicated rail cars were regularly carrying the mails across North Carolina. A strange occurrence took place with the beginning of the war. Virtually no mail exists with North Carolina markings during the war. It is my intent, with this article, to explore what was happening during this time with the railroad mails.

Few southern railroads during the Civil War were more strategically placed than the North Carolina Railroad (NCRR) or played a greater role in determining the fate of the Confederacy. The NCRR was new in 1861, a product of the American railroad boom of the 1850's. Like other southern roads, it was built with state aid in fact, the State of North Carolina contributed three-quarters of its original capital and held a like proportion of its stock.

The longest railroad and largest business corporation in the state when chartered in 1849 and completed in 1856, the NCRR extended in an arc 223 miles from Goldsboro in the east through Raleigh, Greensboro, and Salisbury before terminating at Charlotte in the west. There it met the Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad which ran southward through Columbia. Further roads connected to Augusta, Georgia, and ultimately New Orleans.

To say that the two roads met is not to say that they joined physically. The NCRR and most of its connecting roads adhered to the 4'8½" gauge that later became standard across the nation. The CSCRR and its connections farther south had the 5' gauge that was then standard through most of the South. There was no continuous running of cars through Charlotte, as there was between the NCRR and its eastern neighbors. One of these was the Raleigh & Gaston, running northeast from Raleigh to the small rail hub of Weldon, North Carolina, on the Roanoke River. At the NCRR's eastern terminus of Goldsboro it connected with the Wilmington & Weldon, a north-south road linking Weldon with the state's largest seaport. From Weldon, through traffic proceeded either northward to Petersburg and Richmond or northeastward to Portsmouth, Virginia, next to Norfolk. At Goldsboro the NCRR also met the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad, another state-controlled road that ran from Goldsboro to the seaports of New Bern and Morehead City/Beaufort. Finally, the NCRR connected at Salisbury, north of Charlotte, with the Western North Carolina Railroad, the third state-controlled road, built to extend westward to Tennessee and there link up with roads extending perchance to the Pacific coast. Actually, the WNCRR was completed in this period only to Morganton, at the foot of the Blue Ridge.

Corporate headquarters were located at the village of Company Shops in Alamance County, at the midpoint of the line. This place was chosen for the road's repair shops, completed in 1859, and a company town was built around them. Lacking churches, schools, and other amenities, the village did not appeal as a residence for many company officers or mechanics save as their jobs required it. To enhance the quality of life and attract additional workers, in 1863 the road reluctantly gave up its monopoly on land ownership in the town and laid off streets and lots for private sale. The descriptive but dowdy name Company Shops (see NCPHS Vol. 13 2 & 3 for related article) was dropped for one of greater dignity: Vance, after Governor Zebulon Vance, who had just appointed 8 of the 12 directors. Owing to wartime stringency, the town-building efforts came to little and the name Vance was quietly shelved along with the new policy. Today, the town is known as Burlington.

The war that no one wanted came at last. The smoke of the first cannonade drifted over the Carolina marshes upon a pleasant April Sunday, while on the battery at Charleston an excited crowd lustily cheered its own doom.

At Montgomery, the Confederate government realized some of the implications. They knew the South was helpless upon the sea the new nation stood deficient in manpower, the tools at war and the means to produce them. In lieu of numbers and proper munitions, they knew with certain sincerity to trust in solution skills and southern courage.

Given adequate inland transportation facilities, intelligently utilized, the Confederate states would find themselves in possession of a constant opportunity to get there first with the most men. Who first initiated the first deliberate effort to harness the iron horse of war? In April 1861, Postmaster General Reagan called a convention of key railroad officials to meet at Montgomery on the 26th of April.

Reagan's purpose was logical enough; he desired to arrange definite mail contracts. Even after the outbreak of hostilities, the United States Post Office had continued to function throughout the seceded states, an astonishing situation which the Postmaster General of the Confederacy found as impracticable as it was embarrassing. He could scarcely bring it to an end without prior arrangements with the carriers. But before the railway officers could arrive, so much difficulty had arisen over military transportation that the War Department became interested as well.

The convention met on schedule. Represented were nearly all the companies of the existing Confederacy, save those of Texas and Virginia, a total of four thousand miles of line. Conspicuous among the delegates were Richard R. Cuyler of the Central of Georgia, Charles T. Pollard of the Alabama & Florida and John Caldwell of the South Carolina road; there even appeared three well-known figures from states which had yet seceded: Presidents William S. Ashe of the Wilmington & Weldon, William Johnston of the Charlotte & South Carolina, and Samuel Tate of the Memphis & Charleston. The Montgomery Daily Mail thought it a body "which for worth, ability and capital represented was perhaps the most distinguished that ever assembled in the South."

The first order of business was a brief communication from the Secretary of War, containing a tentative plan for regulating the movement of troops and military supplies. It was a simple program, conceived in innocence: it strove to order the transportation needs of a warring people in just two paragraphs. It proposed first that soldiers should be carried at a fare of two cents per mile and that military freight should move at "half the regular local rates." Secondly, the roads were to receive payment in bonds or treasury notes of the Confederate States at par, if ordinary currency were not available. That was all, and the Daily Mail reported that the delegates extended their approval "with a unanimity almost without parallel in the history of conventions." In the freshness of their patriotism they attached a minimum of qualifying clauses; one provided that the new rates should go into effect on May 1, 1861; another stipulated that troops were to be transported at the official fare only upon presentation of "requisite authority" from the Quartermaster General, or "other proper officer of the Confederate States;" a third merely requested that the Quartermaster General designate the class of certificate to be used.

The convention proved equally receptive to the wishes of Reagan. In a communication which "elicited high commendation from the various members...for its perspicuity and grasp of the whole subject," the Postmaster General outlined a schedule of payments for carrying the mails that differed sharply from the old United States agreements. The rail carriers of the Confederacy were to be divided into three classes: "The great through lines connecting important points and conveying heavy mails," to receive an annual compensation of one hundred and fifty dollars per mile; completed railroads carrying heavy local mail, to be paid one hundred dollars per mile; and short, unimportant, or unfinished roads not carrying much mail, which were to be tendered fifty dollars per mile. Though these figures represented reductions in existing payments, the service was to be simplified for all concerned, and the costs thereof reduced, by discontinuing the double daily mails previously operate upon many routes. Payments were to be made, if necessary, in Confederate bonds or treasury notes. No specific time limitation was imposed; in any case, important changes would have to have congressional sanction. The whole of Reagan's proposal was promptly ratified by the delegates; they added only a recommendation that Sunday mails be dispensed with as soon as practicable and a clarifying section which limited mail deliveries to the precincts of their own depots. The substance of the program presently was enacted into law by the Provisional Congress.

As the war began to heat up, railway labor of all kinds became in short supply. The problem was most acute with skilled mechanics, who were limited in number anyway and whose skills were valuable in the army. Some of the best workers enlisted in the army early in the war or were lured away by higher wages on other roads, in other industries, or even working for the government. Thus the quality as well as quantity of workers diminished. The shortage also extended to common laborers and section hands—usually hired slaves—whose services were sought by urban and rural employers of every kind and by army work details.

Confederate conscription laws in 1862 limited railroad exemptions to higher officials, conductors, engineers, station agents, section masters, mechanics, and two track hands for each eight-mile section of road. In 1864 that was cut one man per section. President Webb protested vigorously at the cutbacks in 1864 and threatened to curtail services. The head of the Conscription Bureau in Richmond believed he had already been too lenient with the NCRR and responded by proposing to cut even more workers from the road than originally mandated.

Wartime wages of railway workers lagged well behind the inflation rate. By 1863 those in North Carolina received less than half in real wages that they had earned in 1860. The NCRR had the temerity in 1862 actually to lower the pay of its section masters, from $33 to $15 per month. But the road did not record its wages for free laborers systematically until 1865, making wartime comparisons impossible.

Wartime travel on southern railroads became high adventure: trains were overcrowded; speeds were lowered to 10 miles per hour, even to walking speed under some conditions; as roadbed and equipment deteriorated; breakdowns were increasingly common and it became almost impossible to adhere to schedules. Many soldiers, consigned to crowed and stifling boxcars, chose to ride on top; others were transported on open flatcars. One army officer estimated that a railway trip from Montgomery to Richmond was as hazardous as picket duty on the Potomac.

On the NCRR, passenger trains quickly grew from two partially filled cars before the war to six to 10 overflowing ones. Their speeds, previously up to 22 miles per hour including stops, were reduced to 17 in the first year of the war and more drastically thereafter. Two daily passenger trains (one a mixed or accommodation train including freight cars) were the rule throughout most of the war. To preserve a semblance of their posted schedules, trains sometimes cut short their stops or even passed rural stations all together. In these circumstances the road eventually gave up advertising its schedules.

Given the conditions described, wartime mail service was irregular at best. Nineteenth-century papers disseminated the news by exchanging with and copying each other. Even after the advent of the telegraph they were largely dependent on the mails—and the railroads that carried the mails—for news in the he form of out-of-town papers and for the circulation of their own papers. they were acutely sensitive to train schedules, therefore, sometimes changing publication times to anticipate the departure of the daily mail train.

Mail service along the NCRR was particularly bad at times of heavy troop movements or crises in supplying the army, when the government impressed trains or even suspended civilian traffic altogether. Newspapers along the road sporadically noted, lamented, or exploded over interruptions, delays, and other inconveniences in the mail service. Often ignorant of the causes, they were inclined to blame the most visible target, the railroad.

Sometimes the train, mail car and all, would arrive more or less on schedule but without any mail, leaving editors to fume helplessly about "gross negligence somewhere." In April 1864 and again in March 1865 government impressment of all available trains suspended mail service entirely for several days. The Raleigh Confederate finally suspended publication until further notice in March 1865 because of the current "derangement of the mails."

Through March 1865 the war had been a distant presence, affecting almost everything the railroad did, but still out of sight. In April, destined to be the last month of the war, the NCRR was suddenly at the center of things. for the first time, and virtually from one end to the other, it found itself under enemy attack. It was the Union army's most important target, next to Johnston's army. The first blows came from the west, between April 11 and 13. Major General George Stoneman led three brigades of Union cavalry, numbering about 6,000 men, across the mountains from Tennessee late in March, intending to cut off Lee's escape routes in the event of his expected defeat in Virginia. This entailed, among other things, cutting the Piedmont and NCRR lines between Danville and Salisbury. From Greensboro southward these operations would also cut off the main supply and retreat route for Joseph Johnston's army near Raleigh. Stoneman's command first veered northward into Virginia to cut railroads there. Riding hard, his men returned to North Carolina on April 9, coincidentally the day of Lee's surrender.

Next day Stoneman detached one of his brigades under Colonel William J. Palmer to take Salem and then move eastward to cut the railroads north and south of Greensboro. Stoneman himself proceeded southward with the remainder of his command toward Salisbury.

At Salem, Palmer divided his own command into four columns. One of these, consisting of 100 men, reached the Piedmont's bridge over Reedy Fork, 10 miles north of Greensboro, on the morning of April 11 and burned it just after Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had crossed it, fleeing southward from Virginia. Palmer's men missed capturing the entire Confederate government by perhaps as little as half an hour.

Johnston's position had become hopeless. He met Sherman on April 18 near Durham, both of them traveling part of the way by train from their respective headquarters. The terms that Sherman stipulated that day contained political ramifications that were unacceptable in Washington. Technically, the war resumed. No battles were fought, however, and on April 26 the two generals met again at the same place. the terms reached this time were approved and the war came to an end. It is fitting to note that this event was delayed by two hours while Johnston, coming from Greensboro, was held up by an accident on the NCRR.

Throughout the entire war, it was obvious that mail did flow somewhat haphazard across the North Carolina Railroad. A search of over 1000 remaining North Carolina Confederate covers can find no official post office markings related to mails carried on the railroad.

Howver, two examples of a Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad handstamp are known. Both were official railroad business and did not enter the Confederate mail system. The Dietz Catalogue lists a Confederate North Carolina railoroad marking and a Western North Carolina railroad marking. No price is given for these markings indicating the editors had no record of their sale. In twenty-five years of collecting, I have not seen these covers.

Only two North Carolina Confederate covers are known with a railroad related address, one being a cover from Kitrell, North Carolina carried March 23, 1863 to a North Carolina soldier at Murphy Station GRRR (Gaston & Raleigh Railroad).

Several covers are known addressed to railroad station or depots. Apparently, the post office was within the railroad depot.

The conclusion one comes to is, the conditions of war, such as a shortage of labor, created major changes in how the mails were handled on the railroad. From the beginning of the war, the mail cars that once carried not only the mail, but men to sort and cancel the mail, soon became the only cars to carry mail when possible. One of the many hardships that the south had to survive. By 1869, the mails were once again flowing freely on the North Carolina Railroad. One example of such a cover was mailed from Baltimore to Hillsboro, North Carolina and carried on the North Carolina Railroad. The war created many shortages, one of which was railroad covers for us collectors to collect.