pplpod

Born Mary Jenkins in Maryland in the 1820s, Mary Surratt converted to Catholicism at a girls' academy in Virginia and married John Surratt, a man with heavy debts, a violent temper and a drinking problem. After a fire destroyed their farmhouse they built a tavern at the crossroads that became Surrattsville, which during the Civil War served as a way station for Confederate couriers, one of her son...

In the spring of 1862 civilian spy James J. Andrews proposed to cut the Western and Atlantic Railroad, the line that could rush Confederate reinforcements from Atlanta to Chattanooga. A first attempt in March collapsed when the sympathetic engineer he was counting on in Marietta had been drafted onto another line and none of his eight volunteers could run a locomotive. In April Andrews returned wi...

Born Jennie Irene Hodgers in Clogherhead, Ireland, on December 25, 1843, Albert Cashier crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway and reached Belvidere, Illinois, where a relative dressed him in boys' clothing to work in a shoe factory. He kept that identity. In August 1862, at 19, five foot three and 110 pounds, he signed with an X to join Company G of the 95th Illinois Infantry. The regiment marched ab...

In May 1864 Ulysses S. Grant's coordinated offensive sent Franz Sigel south up the Shenandoah Valley toward Staunton, aiming to cut the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad and the farms feeding Robert E. Lee's army. John C. Breckinridge could gather only about 4,100 men against roughly 6,300, so he called up the Virginia Military Institute Cadet Corps: 247 students under Lieutenant Colonel Scott Shipp...

In 1861 a wounded soldier could lie in the mud for days while quartermaster wagons rolled past carrying rations and powder. Jonathan Letterman, born in Pennsylvania in 1824 and a graduate of Jefferson Medical College in 1849, spent more than a decade as an Army surgeon in Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico and California learning how supply lines fail. After the Seven Days Battles left the wounded str...

In the spring of 1861 Captain Nathaniel Lyon allegedly slipped through a Missouri militia camp disguised as an old blind woman in a bonnet. Missouri was a slaveholding border state whose governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, preached armed neutrality while secretly working with Richmond. Lyon surrounded the militia at Camp Jackson, marched the prisoners through St. Louis, and the shooting that followed...

In 1842 a frustrated Washington, D.C. constable named John Zell complained that escaping enslaved people must be using steam balloons or some hidden underground railroad. Free Black abolitionist Thomas Smallwood printed the remark in an abolitionist newspaper, and the joke gave a dangerous movement its code: stations, conductors, passengers, cargo and stockholders. This episode examines how the ne...

Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard was born outside New Orleans into an aristocratic Louisiana Creole family and spoke only French until about age 12. Largely raised by an enslaved caretaker from the Caribbean who decades later called him her son, he was mocked at West Point for his accent and height, and dropped the hyphen from his name. Passed over for top brevets after strong reconnaissance work...

Camp Sumter, known as Andersonville, opened in Georgia in February 1864 as a 16.5-acre stockade of pine logs about 15 feet high, expanded to 26.5 acres by June. Nineteen feet inside the wall stood a light inner fence called the deadline, and guards in platforms called pigeon roosts were ordered to shoot without warning any prisoner who touched or crossed it. At its peak each man had roughly five b...

A sutler, or victualler, was a civilian merchant who followed an army and sold provisions from a wagon or canvas tent, often close to the front lines. This episode traces the trade from the Dutch word soetelaar, meaning a drudge or scullion, related to a root meaning to foul or sully, to its role in the American Civil War and beyond. Sutlers needed a license from the post or army commander, set up...

Rose Greenhow, born Maria Rosetta O'Neal around 1813 on a Maryland plantation, lost her father in 1817 when his valet killed him. Around 1830 she and her sister Ellen moved to Washington to live with their aunt, Maria Ann Hill, who ran a fashionable boarding house in the Old Capitol building where congressmen lived in mess groups. In 1835 she married State Department official Dr. Robert Greenhow J...

The Confederate States of America drafted a constitution, printed currency and fought a four-year war, yet no foreign government ever recognized it. This episode examines how it was built and why it failed. Secession followed Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election on a platform to stop slavery's expansion into the territories. The Deep South left before his March 1861 inauguration, while Virginia, Arkans...

Maria Isabella Boyd was born in 1844 in Martinsburg, Virginia, now West Virginia, and sent to a Baltimore finishing school at 12. On July 4, 1861, when Union soldiers came to raise a flag at her family's home and one insulted her mother, the 17-year-old shot and killed him. A military board cleared her, but sentries watched the house. She charmed the officers posted there, including Captain Daniel...

In 1862 the Confederacy, lacking shipyards, sent agent James Bulloch to Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, where John Laird Sons & Company built hull number 290, also called the Enrica. Britain's Foreign Enlistment Act barred arming a warship for a belligerent in British waters, so the ship was built with reinforced decks, bulwarks and deep magazines but no guns. On July 29, 1862, i...

Patrick Cleburne was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1828, the son of a doctor. Orphaned at 15, he failed the entrance exam for Trinity College of Medicine in Dublin in 1846 and enlisted as a private in the British Army's 41st Regiment of Foot, guarding starving prisoners on Spike Island during the Great Famine. He bought his discharge, emigrated with three siblings to Helena, Arkansas, and worke...

The Grand Army of the Republic began in Decatur, Illinois, on April 6, 1866, when Dr. Benjamin Franklin Stephenson formed a fraternal group for veterans of the Union Army, Navy and Marines, built on fraternity, charity and loyalty. Its local posts nearly collapsed by the early 1870s. As veterans aged and old wounds and illnesses caught up with them, new leaders turned the GAR into a pension lobby,...

On May 12 and 13, 1865, more than a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Union and Confederate troops fought at Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, Texas. Commanders in South Texas knew of Lee's surrender, but Edmund Kirby Smith's Trans-Mississippi Department had rejected John Pope's surrender terms. The two sides had kept an unofficial truce, with Union troops at Brazos Santiago and Confederate...

Samuel Rush Watkins was born in June 1839 in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, and was educated at Jackson College. When Tennessee seceded in May 1861, the 21-year-old enlisted in Company H of the 1st Tennessee Infantry, the unit he later spelled out as Co. Aytch. As a corporal in the Western Theater he fought at Shiloh, the siege of Corinth, Perryville, Chickamauga, the Atlanta campaign at Rocky Face Ri...

Oliver Otis Howard, born in Leeds, Maine, in 1830, lost his father at nine, graduated from Bowdoin College and finished fourth in the West Point class of 1854. While stationed in Florida during the Seminole Wars he underwent an evangelical conversion and nearly resigned to become a minister, but the Civil War intervened and he became known as the Christian General. After losing his right arm at Fa...

Sally Louisa Tompkins was born on November 9, 1833, at Poplar Grove, a Virginia tidewater estate. Her father died before she turned five, and in 1842 an epidemic killed three of her sisters, Martha, Harriet and Elizabeth, within weeks. She began nursing the sick in her community, and in 1854 moved with her family to Richmond. When trains brought hundreds of wounded men into the city after the Firs...

Joseph Eggleston Johnston, born in 1807 into a prominent Virginia family whose mother was a niece of Patrick Henry, graduated from West Point in 1829, 13th in the class in which Robert E. Lee finished second. Trained as a civil engineer, he was ambushed as a civilian topographic engineer in the Second Seminole War, reportedly with some 30 bullet holes through his clothing and a scar across his sca...

In August 1862, Major General John Pope took command of the new Union Army of Virginia with orders to take the fight to the enemy, while George McClellan's army moved by water to join him. Robert E. Lee had to strike before the two armies combined. This episode follows the Second Battle of Bull Run as a study in confirmation bias, beginning with Lee splitting his army and sending Stonewall Jackson...

In May 1864, after two days of fighting in the burning thickets of the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac expected the usual order to fall back toward Washington. Instead, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant marched it south. This episode follows the eight-week Overland Campaign between Grant and Robert E. Lee, starting with Grant's plan to advance five Union armies on the same day, including She...

Fort Pillow stood on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Tennessee, held in April 1864 by about 600 Union men, roughly half white West Tennessee Unionists and half United States Colored Troops. A May 1863 Confederate law meant captured Black soldiers faced state slave codes rather than prisoner of war camps. The fort's parapet was so thick that defenders could not fire down at its base without...

By the 1860s New York City's merchants and bankers depended on Southern cotton, Mayor Fernando Wood had proposed in January 1861 that the city declare independence, and Tammany Hall was fast-tracking new Irish and German immigrants into citizenship. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 created the first national draft, with a $300 commutation fee roughly equal to a year's wages for a dockworker. This...