In the spring of 1862 civilian spy James J. Andrews proposed to cut the Western and Atlantic Railroad, the line that could rush Confederate reinforcements from Atlanta to Chattanooga. A first attempt in March collapsed when the sympathetic engineer he was counting on in Marietta had been drafted onto another line and none of his eight volunteers could run a locomotive. In April Andrews returned with 22 Ohio soldiers and civilian William Hunter Campbell in plain clothes. On April 12 they seized the locomotive General during the breakfast stop at Big Shanty, a station with no telegraph office.

Andrews posed as the officer of a special ammunition train for General P.G.T. Beauregard while his men cut wires, but a red flag on a passing freight trapped them on a siding at Kingston for over an hour. Conductor William A. Fuller chased them on foot, by handcar and with the Yonah, the William R. Smith and the Texas, run in reverse. Rain soaked the bridges they meant to burn, and the General ran out of fuel 18 miles from Chattanooga. Andrews and seven men were hanged, and survivors later received the first Medals of Honor, though Andrews, as a civilian, did not.

• Two raiders who missed the rendezvous kept their cover by enlisting in a Confederate artillery unit.
• The raiders broke the track with a single crowbar and derailed Fuller’s William R. Smith north of Adairsville.
• Eight prisoners escaped, and two floated down the Chattahoochee to a Union blockade ship in the Gulf.
• Private Jacob Parrott, beaten in captivity, received the first Medal of Honor from Edwin Stanton on March 25, 1863.
• The episode inspired Buster Keaton’s The General and a 1956 Walt Disney film.