e 21st.( 1)
This party started from Shelbyville, Monday night, April 7, 1862,
disguised as citizens, professing to be driven from their homes in
Kentucky by the Union Army and going South to join the Confederate
Army. They were to travel singly or in couples over roads not
frequented by either army, but such as were usually taken by real
Kentucky refugees to Chattanooga or some station where passage on
cars could be taken to Marietta, Georgia, where the whole party
were to assemble in four days ready to take a train northward the
following (Friday) morning. Each man was furnished by Andrews with
an abundance of Confederate money to pay bills. It was understood
that if any were suspected and in danger of capture they were to
enlist in the Southern army until an opportunity for escape presented.
Mitchel, it was known to Andrews and his party, was to start for
Huntsville, Alabama, in a day or two, and Andrews hoped to be able
to escape with his captured train through Chattanooga, thence west
over the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, and join Mitchel at some
point east of Huntsville.

The distance was too great for all the party to reach their
destination before Friday, and on the way Andrews managed to notify
most of his men that the enterprise would not be undertaken until
Saturday. About midnight of the 11th of April the members reached
Marietta, and, with two exceptions, spent the night at a small
hotel near the depot. Big Shanty (where passengers on the early
morning train were allowed to take breakfast), north of Marietta,
was the place where the party proposed to seize the locomotive and
such part of the train as might seem practicable, the engineer
(Brown) of the party to run it north, stopping at intervals only
long enough to cut telegraph wires, to prevent information being
sent ahead, tear up short portions of the track to prevent pursuit,
and to burn bridges, the latter being the principal object of the
raid. Porter and Hawkins of the party, who had lodging at a
different hotel from the others, were not awakened in time, and
consequently did not participate in the daring act for which the
party was organized.

During the night Andrews carefully instructed those at his hotel,
each man being told what was expected of him. The party were almost
to a man strangers to him until five days before, and hardly two
of them, though of the same regiment, until then knew each other.
Never before, for so extraordin