WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will award the Medal of Honor on Wednesday for “conspicuous gallantry” to a pair of Union soldiers who stole a locomotive deep in Confederate territory during the American Civil War and drove it north for 87 miles as they destroyed railroad tracks and telegraph lines.
U.S. Army Privates Philip G. Shadrach and George D. Wilson were captured by Confederates and executed by hanging. Biden is recognizing their courage 162 years later with the country’s highest military decoration.
The posthumous recognition comes as the legacy of the Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members — both Union and Confederate — between 1861 and 1865, continues to shape U.S. politics in a contentious election year in which issues of race, constitutional rights and presidential power are at the forefront.
Biden, a Democrat, has said that the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump was the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War. Meanwhile, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, riffed at a recent Pennsylvania rally about the Battle of Gettysburg and about the Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Shadrach and Wilson are being recognized for participating in what became known as “the Great Locomotive Chase.”
A Kentucky-born civilian spy and scout named James J. Andrews put together a group of volunteers, including Shadrach and Wilson, to degrade the railway and telegraph lines used by Confederates in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
On April 12, 1862, 22 of the men in what was later called “Andrews’ Raiders” met up in Marietta, Georgia, and hijacked a train named “The General.” The group tore up tracks and sliced through telegraph wires while taking the train north.
Confederate troops chased them, initially on foot and later by train. The Confederate troops eventually caught the group. Andrews and seven others were executed, while the others either escaped or remained prisoners of war.
The first Medal of Honor award ever bestowed went to Private Jacob Parrott, who participated in the locomotive hijacking and was beaten while imprisoned by the Confederacy.
The government later recognized 18 other participants who took part in the raid with the honor, but Shadrach and Wilson were excluded. They were later authorized to receive the medal as part of the fiscal 2008 National Defense Authorization Act.
Born on Sept. 15, 1840, in Pennsylvania, Shadrach was just 21 years old when he volunteered for the mission. He was orphaned at a young age and left home in 1861 to enlist in an Ohio infantry regiment after the start of the Civil War.
Wilson was born in 1830 in Belmont County, Ohio. He worked as a journeyman shoemaker before the war and enlisted in an Ohio-based volunteer infantry in 1861.
The Walt Disney Corp. made a 1956 movie about the hijacking entitled “The Great Locomotive Chase” that starred Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter. The 1926 silent film “The General” starring Buster Keaton was also based on the historic event.