Sitnam
September 22, 2014, 5:03pm
1
in S4:E5 Sydney Snow recalls an incident during the war when he, Cullen and his fellow Rebs fell upon a train car full of wounded Union soldiers, massacring the lot, including the doctors.
Did anything like this actually occur in real life?
Sounds something like the Centralia massacre except that the soldiers taken off the train and shot weren’t (previously) wounded as far as I know.
Anderson blocked the rail line, and the engineer of an approaching train failed to realize it until too late, since the men he saw were wearing blue uniforms. The guerrillas swarmed over the train. The 125 passengers were divided between civilians and soldiers. A total of 23 Union soldiers were aboard, all on leave after the Battle of Atlanta and heading to their homes in northwest Missouri or southwest Iowa.
The Union soldiers were ordered at gunpoint to strip off their uniforms. Anderson called for an officer. Sergeant Thomas Goodman bravely stepped forward, expecting to be shot and the rest spared. Instead, Anderson’s men ignored Goodman and began shooting the others. The bodies were then maimed and scalped. The guerrillas then set fire to the train and sent it running down the tracks toward Sturgeon, Missouri.