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Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in Maine in 1828, taught himself Greek in an attic to enter Bowdoin College, and became a professor there who taught nearly every subject except math and science. When war came he requested leave to study languages in Europe and instead joined the 20th Maine, turning down the colonelcy to serve as lieutenant colonel under West Point graduate Adelbert Ames. At F...

The July 3, 1863 assault at Gettysburg known as Pickett's Charge was largely a slow march across nearly a mile of open ground, under the overall command of James Longstreet, with George Pickett leading three of the 11 brigades. This episode lays out Robert E. Lee's plan to split George Meade's fishhook line in coordination with attacks at Culp's Hill and a cavalry strike by J.E.B. Stuart, both of...

In the autumn of 1861 the Confederacy was counting on King Cotton to pull Britain and France into the war, while William H. Seward worked to keep Europe out. Jefferson Davis sent envoys James Mason and John Slidell, who slipped out of Charleston to Cuba and boarded the British mail ship RMS Trent in Havana. On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto fired across the Trent's...

During the Siege of Petersburg in 1864, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, a Pennsylvania mining engineer leading the 48th Pennsylvania and its former coal miners, proposed tunneling under Elliott's Salient in the Confederate line. Grant and Meade saw it as busy work and denied supplies, so the men tore down a bridge and a sawmill for timber and hauled dirt in modified cracker boxes. Pleasants ve...

In 1968 Joseph and Barbara Jones were refused a home in St. Louis County by the Alfred H. Mayer Company because they were Black, and since the 14th Amendment binds only governments, their case rested on the 13th Amendment. This episode traces how that amendment came to be. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that left slavery in loyal border states, and Dred Scott's reading of the Fift...

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, drafted by Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, was written to close the gap left by the 1793 law after Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842 ruled that states could not be forced to spend local resources on recapture. This episode examines its mechanics: federal commissioners who could deputize any bystander, a $1,000 fine for refusing to help, six months in prison for givi...

Henry Wirz was born Hartmann Heinrich Wirz in Zurich in 1823, the son of a master tailor, and was convicted of fraud and embezzlement in 1847, a sentence commuted to 12 years of exile while his wife divorced him. This episode follows him to the United States in 1849, from a Massachusetts factory to work as a doctor's assistant in Kentucky, a homeopathic practice, a water cure clinic and a post as...

Christopher Spencer patented his lever-action rifle in 1860, the first military metallic cartridge repeater, built around a falling breech block and a tubular magazine hidden in the buttstock. This episode explains how it worked, why early nine-round magazines were cut to seven after dropped rifles risked setting off the stacked cartridges, and how Erastus Blakeslee's case of preloaded tubes let a...

George Henry Thomas was born in 1816 in Southampton County, Virginia, to a wealthy plantation family of Welsh and French Huguenot ancestry, and as a teenager fled into the woods with his mother and sisters during Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. This episode follows him from West Point, where he graduated 12th in a class of 42 in 1840, through artillery service under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-A...

Abner Doubleday was born in Ballston Spa, New York, in 1819 into a family of soldiers: both grandfathers fought in the Revolution and his father in the War of 1812. He worked two years as a surveyor and civil engineer before graduating from West Point in 1842. In April 1861, as second in command to Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter, he aimed the first Union return shot of the Civil War at the Confede...

Vicksburg sat on 200-foot bluffs above a hairpin bend of the Mississippi, the last major obstacle to Union control of the river under the Anaconda Plan. Its defender, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, was a Pennsylvanian with two brothers in the Union Army, caught between Joseph E. Johnston's advice to abandon the city and Jefferson Davis's order to hold it. He withdrew his roughly 18,000 men...

A 22-inch oak stump in the Smithsonian was cut down by rifle fire at Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864. After the Wilderness, Ulysses S. Grant, traveling with George Meade's Army of the Potomac, turned south instead of retreating, and his men cheered. The race to the Spotsylvania crossroads stalled in a night traffic jam behind sleeping Union cavalry, which led to a shouting match between Meade...

The USS Monitor existed for less than 11 months. Its story starts with Mary Louvestre, a freed woman working for a Confederate engineer in Norfolk, who brought proof to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles that the Confederates were armoring the scuttled Merrimack as the CSS Virginia. Congress authorized $1.5 million for ironclads, and John Ericsson proposed an iron ship with 18 inches of freeboard and a...

John Lawrence Burns was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1793, fought at Lundy's Lane in the War of 1812, and volunteered again for the Mexican War. Rejected for combat in 1861 at nearly 70, he drove Union supply wagons until the Army sent him home to Gettysburg, where he became constable. When Jubal Early's Confederates occupied the town in June 1863, Burns tried to arrest them and was jailed,...

Ely S. Parker, born Hasanoanda on the Tonawanda Reservation in New York in 1828, grew up translating between the Seneca and the white scholars who visited his family. After three years reading law in Ellicottville, he was barred from the bar exam because Native Americans were not considered U.S. citizens. He turned to engineering, helped by lawyer Lewis Henry Morgan, whose Grand Order of the Iroqu...

Joseph Hooker, born in Massachusetts in 1814, graduated 29th of 50 at West Point and won three brevets in the Mexican War, then alienated Winfield Scott by testifying for Gideon Pillow in 1848. In Gold Rush California he bought up hay and sold it to the Army at a 100 percent markup; prosecutor Henry Halleck had the evidence, but no rule forbade it, and Hooker resigned. Broke and failing at farming...

Julia Ward was born in New York City in 1819 to a wealthy Wall Street banker and strict Calvinist; her poet mother died when she was five. Books her brother Samuel brought from Europe, and meetings with Charles Dickens and Margaret Fuller, opened a wider world, and after a run of family deaths around 1839 she became a Unitarian. In 1843 she married reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perk...

Lew Wallace was born in Indiana in 1827, the son of a West Point graduate who became governor and cut him off at 16 for neglecting school. Fascinated by the French Zouaves, he modeled his militia on them, and in 1861 he raised the 11th Indiana. At Fort Donelson he sent reinforcements and counterattacked without orders while Grant was away, which made him the Union's youngest major general at 34. A...

On the night of December 30, 1862, two armies camped about 700 yards apart near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and their bands traded Yankee Doodle and Dixie before both played Home Sweet Home. William Rosecrans, with about 41,000 men, needed a victory for Lincoln two days before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect; Braxton Bragg had roughly 35,000. Both generals planned the same attack on the ene...

In April 1861 Maryland's legislature voted 53 to 13 against secession but refused to reopen rail links to the North, and on April 19 a Baltimore mob attacked Union troops passing through the city. John Merryman, a Baltimore County planter and militia lieutenant, followed what he believed were state orders and destroyed railroad bridges over the Bush and Gunpowder rivers. Lincoln had authorized Gen...

Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818 to a wealthy Richmond hardware merchant and educated at a Quaker school in Philadelphia, where she absorbed abolitionist views. When her father died in 1843, his will barred the family from freeing the people they enslaved, so Elizabeth and her mother quietly paid them wages instead. Once the war began, the two women brought food, books and clothing to Union offi...

George Armstrong Custer grew up in Ohio under a Jacksonian Democrat father who prized toughness, then compiled 726 demerits at West Point and graduated 34th of 34. The Civil War rescued his career: he rode into the Chickahominy to show George McClellan its depth, became a brigadier general at 23, designed a velvet and gold-lace uniform with a red necktie so his men could find him in the smoke, and...

On July 2, 1863, the hill now called Little Round Top had no settled name; soldiers called it Rock Hill or Sugarloaf. This episode starts with its geology, a boulder-strewn diabase spur about 150 feet above Plum Run, and then follows how it was left empty when Daniel Sickles moved the Third Corps forward to the Peach Orchard without orders. John Bell Hood's Confederate division drifted toward the...

Allan Pinkerton was born in 1819 in the Gorbals slum of Glasgow, left school at 10 after his policeman father died, and became a cooper and a member of the Scottish Chartist movement. In 1842 he and his wife Joan fled to North America, either to dodge arrest or, by a darker theory, to escape fellow Chartists who suspected him of informing. Shipwrecked on Sable Island, the couple settled in Dundee,...

In February 1862, after Fort Henry fell, Fort Donelson sat on a 100-foot bluff above the Cumberland River as the key to Confederate Tennessee. Albert Sidney Johnston left it to John B. Floyd, a former U.S. Secretary of War wanted in the North on corruption allegations, who handed operations to Gideon Pillow and Simon Bolivar Buckner, two generals who despised each other. Ulysses S. Grant, under su...