What transportation was there during the civil war period?

1. No air travel at all.

2. Steam driven railroads and ships were in use. The Northern States had a large system of railroads, but the West and South made do with only a few trunk lines. Steamboats plied most of the rivers of the United States, but large civilian sea-going steamships were still in their infancy. Log rafts to float down the major river systems could still be seen.

3. Sailing ships were still extremely common, and most people crossing seas moved by sailing ship. Oar-driven galleys were obsolete, and would have been a noveltie ... if they were seen at all.

3. Most land travel was powered by animal muscle. Horses, mules and donkeys both carried individual riders and pulled wheeled vehicles. Oxen were still used to pull heavy carts and wagons over long distances. Finally, men got to where they were going the same way they did 10,000 years before ... by walking.

Walking as much as five miles each way to work was common.

Armies moved at a rate considerably slower than that of a heavily-laden man moving down a bad road. Very, very few paved roads existed in the nation at that time, and only one existed in a militarily crucial area--the Valley Turnpike on the western side of Massanutten Mountain in the Valley of Virginia (known today as the Shenandoah valley). Almost all roads in the country outside cities were dirt, and turned to mud when it rained. Armies which could make twelves miles in a day were doing good--although officers expected an army to make twenty miles, they were never surprised when an army failed to move that far. In fact, bad roads and bad weather combined often to create situations in which the head of an army was setting up their camps for the night before the "tail" tail of the army had left the camp they had occupied the night before.

Thomas Jackson, a Confederate general officer often referred to as "Stonewall" Jackson, often got incredible marches out of his men. In the march around the flank of John Pope's Army of Virginia in August 1863, his troops (at least half of whom had no shoes) marched 35 miles and 33 miles on two consecutive days. The day after that, they marched about six miles, having plundered the huge Federal depot at Manassas Junction, and having eaten just about everything which could not be carried off and would otherwise have been burned. The Yankees missed Jackson's force entirely, because they were looking for him very much farther away than six miles--his troops were only found when General King's first division of the First Corps stumbled upon them near sunset.

Crucial to the success of Federal armies was the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps. These unheralded troops re-built the worn-out railroads of Tennessee and Virginia as the Fedearl armies occupied them, and kept the troops supplied and moving foward. Grant's campaign against Lee in 1864 could not have moved as rapidly as it did without the support of the railroads. It was a very closely run affair, too. Beginning in May, 1864, he had attacked Lee repeatedly, and forced him back, and south, from one position to another. While Lee attacked his marching columns (Grant plunged south, and only turned west to confront Lee's army when he was attacked--for more than a month, he continued to bludgeon his way south, and to hang on Lee's army inflicting all the damage he could do) in the Wilderness, and Stuart held off the Federal advance, Confederate troops set up a defensive line at Spotsylvania Courthouse. After Lee withdrew to this position, Grant arrived a little over a day later. The two armies faced each other for days, and then Grant attacked. The attack was a failure, in that it did not drive the Confederates out of their position, but the damage it did to Lee's army was irreparable. The famous Stonewall Brigade of Virginia regiments, which had begun the war more than 5,000 strong was reduced to a several hundred by the time of the attack, and afterward, had only slightly more than a hundred men left. Eventually, Grant began to move toward Lee's flank, and Lee had to move--he reached the South Anna River only about eight hours ahead of Grant's army, and, significantly, had no time to destroy the railroad bridge over the river before he was forced to retreat across the river. He reached Hanover Court house a few hours ahead of Grant.

Finally, in the first week of June, Grant rode into the yard of a farm house near Richmond, by the crossroads at Old Cold Harbor. The owner, a Justice of the Peace, responding to his own good breeding, offered them buttermilk, the only cold drink he had available. He reports that Grant took out his watch, stating: "If I don't hear the Old Fox's guns in fifteen minutes, I've got him!" (Grant frequently referred to Lee as "the Old Fox.") That witness says they heard canon fire about ten minutes later in the direction of the ridges behind Cold Harbor.

Later, when Grant transferred the bulk of his army over James River, Lee could no longer stay ahead of him. From then on, the Federal army called the tune, and the Confederates were obliged to dance that tune. Grant could never have hung on Lee's army the way he had done in May and June 1864 if he had been forced to rely upon "trains" consisting of horse- or mule-drawn wagons, or trains of pack animals. He was able to hunt his enemy down, bring him to bay and hem him in because he could rely upon the the military railroads, and the steamships of the United States Navy.