President Joe Biden awarded posthumous Medals of Honor on Wednesday evening to two Civil War veterans whose remains are buried in Chattanooga, honoring their role in a legendary covert mission in North Georgia.
Pvt. Philip G. Shadrach and Pvt. George D. Wilson were among Andrews' Raiders — a group that attempted a daring train hijacking behind Confederate lines in 1862 before the participants were caught and most of them executed.
Nearly all of them received the then-newly created Medal of Honor, either shortly after or eventually. But because of what advocates say was an administrative error, Shadrach and Wilson did not — until now.
"Today, we right that wrong," Biden said at the White House in a Wednesday evening ceremony where he told the two men's stories and connected them to challenges of the present day before giving the medals to two descendants. "Today, they finally receive the recognition they deserve."
Advocates celebrated the award as long coming.
"Today's decision rectifies a historical oversight that has deprived Privates Shadrach and Wilson from receiving our nation's highest military honor for valor on the battlefield," David Currey, the executive director of Chattanooga's Medal of Honor Heritage Center, said in a statement. "The incredible story of Andrews' Raid and the Great Locomotive Chase created the first of several undeniable historical connections between Chattanooga and the Medal of Honor."
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Biden awards posthumous Medal of Honor for two men buried in Chattanooga, for role in ‘Great Locomotive Chase’
The medal is awarded to U.S. military members who, in certain circumstances, "distinguish themselves conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of their own lives above and beyond the call of duty," according to the White House.
The ceremony was the culmination of a decadeslong effort by descendants of the men and other advocates to get Shadrach and Wilson recognition for the role they played in a dangerous mission, which, a historian told reporters by phone this week, could have significantly shortened the Civil War.
The ceremony for Shadrach and Wilson began with a prayer that their heroics would inspire people today to uphold justice and righteousness in their own lives.
Then Biden told the story, starting with the premise of the mission.
"They would steal a Confederate train near Atlanta and drive it North to Chattanooga, just over the Georgia border, which union troops were preparing to capture," Biden said, describing how the cohort sought to destroy communication and supply lines en route.
The operation is today named after the civilian scout James Andrews, who in 1862 recruited roughly two dozen soldiers from Ohio-based regiments for the plan, which resembled one he'd recently aborted.
Among those recruited for the new mission were Shadrach, a 21-year-old from Pennsylvania.
"From what we know, he was a free spirit, always searching for adventure," Biden said.
And then there was Wilson, an Ohioan who was in his early 30s at the time, a thoughtful man and a "hell of a debater," Biden said.
Andrews and the men — who, Biden noted, were given the chance to decline the mission — set off South in plain clothes and in small groups, instructed to report to any suspicious types that they were Kentuckians escaping Yankees, moving South to enlist and support the Confederate cause.
(READ MORE: The story of Medal of Honor recipient Charles Coolidge)
The charade required subtlety. According to one report, Shadrach and another soldier, upon meeting a farmer, expressed radical "Southern views" — and were later chastised by Wilson for being "better rebels than the rebels themselves."
Some Tennesseans they encountered were indeed suspicious. Others were "elated" to meet men apparently coming to join the Confederates. At one point, some undercover men lodged with a "slave hunter" who, one later recalled, "tracked Negroes with bloodhounds for money."
The raiders walked and talked their way to Chattanooga, from which they caught a southbound train to Marietta, Georgia, where they booked into a hotel for the night.
"The uncertainty of what the light of the next day's sun would bring in our particular cases was the reason some of us, myself at least of the number, didn't sleep very much," one member of the party said in a later account.
By the next setting sun, he added, he and his comrades might be hanging from the limbs of trees along the railroad — or they might, having left behind them a trail of fire and destruction, be triumphantly rolling their stolen locomotive back behind Union lines.
On the morning of April 12, 1862, the men bought tickets north. The train was called The General. Seated on board, one of the men later recalled, the conspirators appeared "pale but steady."
Big Shanty — modern day Kennesaw, Georgia — was a meal stop. Participants recalled that the hijackers walked leisurely to the head of the train. They got on the engine and a few box cars, unattached them, threw open a valve, and the train was off.
It did not initially make it far. The steam engine wasn't hot, and the train soon slowed to a stop, participants recalled. But just as pursuers on foot approached, the hijackers, who had been feeding in fuel, got the train going again.
As they rolled slowly North, the men pulled into stations as if nothing was amiss, talking their way through skeptical local operators, or the conductors of other trains, which they inconvenienced or nearly collided with.
Heading North past Dalton, the hijackers cut more telegraph wire, but historians say they struggled to fundamentally sabotage the railway as planned. With others in pursuit, they could not stop long to damage the rail — and rain, survivors recalled, undermined efforts to burn infrastructure such as bridges.
(READ MORE: VA buys site in Meigs County to expand Chattanooga National Cemetery)
Around Ringgold, The General ran out of fuel, and the men jumped off and scattered.
They were taken prisoner within days. Some were later taken to Atlanta. Many were hanged — Shadrach and Wilson among them (their remains were later moved to Chattanooga National Cemetery). Others escaped or were traded as prisoners of war.
In a statement, a White House official called the effort one of the earliest special operations in U.S. Army history. It said several participants became the U.S. Army's first recipients of the then-newly created Medal of Honor.
Why Shadrach and Wilson did not at the time or later receive the medal is not entirely clear; in a call with reporters, historian Brad Quinlin said there is no evidence they acted with any less bravery than their comrades. It was a hectic time in the war, he said, and the officers above the men apparently did not see the awards in their case through.
The effort to rectify this has long been underway, and in 2008, U.S. lawmakers passed legislation to authorize granting the men the Medal of Honor.
Multiple presidential administrations later, however, this still had not happened. A website was created — hadrachandwilsonmoh.com — to bolster the cause as advocates, some in the Chattanooga area, lobbied to get the effort across the finish line.
In some ways, the push to get Shadrach and Wilson posthumous medals resembled the effort to get Chattanooga-area man Larry Taylor the medal for his daring helicopter rescue during the Vietnam War, decades after it took place.
Biden awarded him the medal last year. Taylor died in January.
On Wednesday, before he ended the ceremony by giving the awards to two descendants of Shadrach and Wilson, Biden invoked the Fourth of July, and the aspirational vision of American democracy he said the men upheld.
"Their heroic deeds went unacknowledged for over a century," Biden said. "But time did not erase their valor."
Contact Andrew Schwartz at aschwartz@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6431.