The Army Medal of Honor: The First Fifty-five Years
By Mark C. Mollan
Army Medal of Honor The original design of the army Medal of Honor shows the goddess Minerva fending off a symbol of discord. The thirty-four stars surrounding the figures represent the number of states in the Union. (NARA, Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780's - 1917, RG 94)
"It was a painfully thrilling moment," William Pittenger recalled of the beginning of the heist. "We were but twenty, with an army about us, and a long difficult road before us, crowded with enemies." 1 On the morning of April 11, 1862, Private Pittenger and his comrades from the Ohio Volunteer Infantry units of Brig. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel traveled aboard the train General disguised as a rag-tag group of new recruits headed north from Marietta, Georgia, to join the Confederate army. Tension mounted among the incognito Union troops as the white tents of Confederate Camp MacDonald loomed ever larger in the train's rain-spattered windows. When the General pulled into the station at Big Shanty, James J. Andrews gave the signal that started one of the most dramatic episodes of the Civil War.
While the other passengers disembarked for a twenty-minute breakfast stop, the Buckeye band followed their leader's instruction and made their way toward the head of the train. Andrews, a civilian Union spy employed by Mitchel, enjoyed an authoritative air that left those in his presence hesitant to question him. So when he commanded three of his men to uncouple the passenger cars— leaving only three empty baggage cars and the tender still attached to the locomotive— the Confederate soldiers milling about the train did not dare interfere.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/summer/medal-of-honor-1.html
