Tag: McCallum (Daniel C.)

Wikipedia says: Daniel Craig McCallum (21 January 1815 – 27 December 1878) was a Scottish-born American railroad engineer, general manager of the New York and Erie Railroad and Union Major General during the American Civil War, known as one of the early pioneers of management. He set down a set of general principles of management, and is credited for having developed the first modern organizational chart.

…On February 11, 1862, weeks after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Railways and Telegraph Act of January 31, 1862 (which authorized the President to seize and operate any railroad or telegraph company’s equipment for use during the American Civil War), the new Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton appointed McCallum as Military Director and Superintendent of the United States Military Railroad with the staff rank of colonel. The USMRR’s primary mission was to repair and operate captured Southern lines to support the Union army.

The previous Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, had called on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Vice President Thomas A. Scott to coordinate railroads and Scott had been promoted to Assistant Secretary of War. However, President Lincoln replaced Cameron in January after newspapers reported he unduly favored the North Central Railroad in which he was a stockholder, at the expense of rival railroads including the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, including allowing removed B&O track and telegraph wire to be shipped to repair damaged Virginia lines. On April 22, 1862, Stanton summoned West Point graduate Herman Haupt, who had become a leading railway engineer after resigning his U.S. Army commission and who had applied for Scott’s job, to evaluate the engineering required to rebuild the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac line in Virginia. On May 28 Haupt was also appointed a colonel, but he twice refused military rank (including a promotion to brigadier general on September 5, 1862), instead of becoming the civilian Chief of Construction and Transportation in the Department of the Rappahannock. Although Haupt would have difficulties dealing with some military men, he worked well with McCallum.

McCallum remained in Washington during the war to oversee the “big picture” of USMRR operations, and especially coordinate deliveries of locomotives and other equipment with manufacturers. He received a brevet promotion to brigadier-general of volunteers for faithful and meritorious services on September 24, 1864, and his authority was extended to the Western Theater and to support Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign. He received another promotion to major general in 1865. In July 1866 McCallum was mustered out of the service and published a report on the military railroads during the war.

MacCallum also wrote a set of poems. The most famous was called ‘Lights on the Bridge’, which he wrote shortly before his death, memorializing his friend, Sam Campbell, a railroad engineer killed in 1842. McCallum himself died in Brooklyn, New York, on December 27, 1878.