pplpod

This episode follows a single three-letter word, tap, across medicine, engineering, espionage, gaming and science. It starts with the two physical meanings behind the word: drawing liquid out of a pressurized container, as with a faucet or beer tap, and a brief intentional strike, as in tap dancing, guitar tapping, a touchscreen tap, or the tap consonant, where the tongue flicks once against the a...

In July 1861, congressmen and Washington socialites rode out in carriages with picnic baskets to watch what they expected to be a quick Union victory at Bull Run, also called First Manassas. Lincoln's 90-day volunteers were nearing the end of their enlistments, and the press demanded a march on Richmond. Brigadier General Irvin McDowell protested that his roughly 35,000 men were too green, and Lin...

The Battle of Chickamauga in north Georgia, fought on September 19 and 20, 1863, followed one of the most efficient Union campaigns of the war. General William Rosecrans had pushed Braxton Bragg's Confederates out of Middle Tennessee in the Tullahoma Campaign at a cost of 569 casualties, then took Chattanooga without a fight after a brigade north of the city banged tubs, sawed boards and floated s...

Old Abe was a bald eagle taken from a nest near the Flambeau River in Wisconsin in the spring of 1861 by a young Ojibwe man known as Chief Sky, who cut down the pine tree to reach the fledglings. That summer he traded the eaglet to Daniel McCann for a bushel of corn, and McCann offered it to a new volunteer company, the Eau Claire Badgers, for $2.50. After soldiers surrounded civilian S. M. Jeffer...

In the summer of 1864, residents of Elmira, New York, could pay 10 or 15 cents to climb a wooden observation tower, buy snacks, and look down into a Union prison camp the inmates called Hellmira. This episode traces how Camp Rathbun, a Union training depot at the junction of the Erie Railroad and the Northern Central Railway, became one of the deadliest prisoner of war camps in the North after the...

Montgomery C. Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1816 and raised in Philadelphia, entering the University of Pennsylvania at 15 before West Point. In the Army Corps of Engineers he worked on the Mississippi River under Robert E. Lee, then in the 1850s built the Washington Aqueduct and oversaw the Capitol's new wings and cast iron dome. After he refused to steer contracts to allies of Secretary...

During the Civil War, guerrilla fighters known as bushwhackers turned rural Missouri into a war of neighbor against neighbor, rooted in the Bleeding Kansas clashes with Kansas Jayhawkers. Unlike John Singleton Mosby's partisan rangers under the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act, most Missouri bands operated outside the Confederate chain of command, carrying several Colt revolvers each and relying on networ...

Mary Todd was born in 1818 into a wealthy Lexington, Kentucky family, lost her mother at six, and studied French, classical drama and Whig politics at a finishing school. In Springfield she was courted by Stephen A. Douglas but chose Abraham Lincoln; their engagement broke on January 1, 1841, and they married abruptly in November 1842, moving into a single room in a tavern. Their son Eddie died as...

In December 1860, after South Carolina seceded, Major Robert Anderson, a Kentuckian, commanded 85 men at Fort Moultrie, a coastal fort with sand dunes piled against its landward walls. On December 26 he spiked its guns, burned the gun carriages and rowed his garrison to Fort Sumter without orders, angering South Carolina's governor while James Buchanan stayed passive. By March 1861 the Confederacy...

In September 1862 two Union soldiers resting in a Maryland meadow found three cigars wrapped in a copy of Robert E. Lee's Special Order 191, which showed his army divided to capture Harpers Ferry. Lee had invaded Maryland to feed his men and to win recognition from Britain and France. George McClellan, with about 87,000 men against Lee's 38,000 but trusting Allan Pinkerton's inflated estimates, wa...

In July 1864, with Ulysses S. Grant's armies concentrated around Petersburg, Jubal Early led 14,000 to 16,000 Confederate veterans into Maryland toward Washington. The only force in the way belonged to Major General Lew Wallace, blamed by Grant for arriving late at Shiloh and exiled to an administrative command in Baltimore with about 2,300 hundred-days men. Warned by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad p...

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln was asked by organizer David Wills only to offer a few appropriate remarks at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, where the July battle had produced more than 50,000 casualties. The main speaker, former Harvard president Edward Everett, spoke for two hours and more than 13,000 words. Lincoln, who felt weak and dizzy and developed fever and h...

Edwin Stanton, born in 1814 in Steubenville, Ohio, suffered severe asthma, left school at 13 when his physician father died, and passed the bar in 1835. After his wife Mary died of fever in 1844, he had her burial clothes altered to match their wedding day and wandered the house at night asking for her. In court he had a steamboat ram its smokestack into the Wheeling Bridge, used a reaper part rus...

Before 1865 the Constitution gave a president no power to abolish slavery in peacetime, with the three-fifths compromise, the fugitive slave clause and the Dred Scott decision treating enslaved people as property. Early in the war General Benjamin Butler declared escaped slaves contraband of war, a wartime seizure the administration backed. In the summer of 1862 Lincoln read a draft proclamation t...

Elmer E. Ellsworth, born in 1837 in Malta, New York, the son of a tailor, swapped his first and middle names as a teenager. After the wealthy father of his fiancee Carrie Spafford demanded he find respectable work, he studied law in Chicago and built the Zouave Cadets of Chicago, a drill team in baggy trousers, sashes and fezzes modeled on French colonial troops, which toured the country. In 1860...

In June 1864 Robert E. Lee sent Jubal Early's Second Corps, more than 10,000 veterans, north through the Shenandoah Valley to threaten Washington and draw Ulysses S. Grant's troops away from Richmond. Early's men marched through a 47-day drought with temperatures above 90 degrees, lost a day fighting Lew Wallace at Monocacy on July 9, and reached Fort Stevens near Silver Spring on July 11. The cap...

Libby Prison began as a three-story brick warehouse on the James River in Richmond, leased by Captain Luther Libby and his son for a ship grocery and supply business. The Confederacy requisitioned it, and by 1862 it held captured Union officers in eight rooms about 100 by 40 feet, with barred windows that had no glass. Meant for about 700, it held well over 1,000 by 1863, as men from battles like...

In early 1863 Joseph Hooker took over a demoralized Army of the Potomac after Fredericksburg, fixed its supply and hospital systems, introduced furloughs, and created the Bureau of Military Information under George H. Sharpe, which used spies, signal stations and telegraph-equipped balloons. His plan sent cavalry to cut Lee's railroad, left a force at Fredericksburg, and marched more than 70,000 m...

Major General John Sedgwick, born in 1813 in Cornwall, Connecticut, taught school before graduating 24th of 50 from West Point in 1837. He fought in the Seminole Wars, earned brevet promotions at Contreras, Churubusco and Chapultepec in Mexico, and in 1860 kept his men alive on the Colorado frontier by having them quarry stone and build shelters when supplies never arrived. His troops called him U...

John Ericsson, born in Sweden in 1803, was a teenage surveyor on the Gota Canal project who carried a footstool to reach his instruments. After building a heat engine that ran on birch wood fumes, he left the Swedish army in 1826 for England, where the engine failed on coal, his locomotive Novelty lost the 1829 Rainhill Trials to George Stephenson's Rocket, and London fire crews rejected the steam...

John Buford was born in March 1826 in Woodford County, Kentucky, raised in Rock Island, Illinois, and graduated 16th of 38 from West Point, where his classmates included A.P. Hill and Henry Heth. Commissioned into the Dragoons, he spent the 1850s on the frontier in Texas, the Utah War and Bleeding Kansas, fought the Sioux at Ash Hollow alongside Heth, and adopted John Watts de Peyster's ideas abou...

John C. Breckinridge was born in Kentucky in 1821, grandson of Thomas Jefferson's attorney general, who introduced the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and the theory of nullification. His father died when he was a toddler, and after law school he left a crowded Lexington bar for Burlington in the Iowa Territory in 1841. A bout of influenza on a visit home in 1843 kept him in Kentucky, where he met an...

John Bell Hood grew up in Kentucky, the son of a doctor who opposed a military career, and reached West Point through an uncle, finishing near the bottom of his class with 196 demerits in his final year against a limit of 200. A Comanche arrow pierced his left hand in Texas in the late 1850s. Joining the Confederacy for Texas, he broke a Union line during the Seven Days Battles and wept at his cas...

James Ewell Brown Stuart, born in Virginia in 1833, was nicknamed Beauty at West Point for his short chin and grew a full beard as soon as regulations allowed. He graduated 13th, his rank hurt by poor drawing, and served in Texas and Bleeding Kansas, where in 1857 a Cheyenne warrior's pepperbox pistol fired point-blank into his chest barely broke the skin. In 1859 he sold rights to his patented sa...

This episode examines how the defeated Confederacy shaped American memory of the Civil War. The phrase Lost Cause came from Virginia journalist Edward A. Pollard's 1866 book, which he wanted to call History of the War until his New York publisher chose a more marketable title. The narrative cast slavery as benevolent and recast the war as a defense of states' rights, despite secession declarations...