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Henry Wager Halleck, born in 1815 on a farm in Westernville, New York, ran away to an uncle in Utica to escape farm work and became a prodigy at West Point, teaching classes while still a cadet. He studied French fortifications in Europe, wrote an 1846 textbook on military tactics shaped by Antoine-Henri Jomini, helped write California's constitution, and grew rich in San Francisco as a lawyer, ra...

Philip Sheridan, a son of Irish Catholic immigrants raised in Somerset, Ohio, stood about five foot five and began as a dry goods clerk. At West Point he was suspended for a year after threatening classmate William Terrill with a bayonet, then served on the Pacific Northwest frontier. This episode shows how his bookkeeping mattered early in the Civil War, when Henry Halleck had him untangle a $12...

On July 18, 1863, Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore sent Union infantry against Fort Wagner on Morris Island, which guarded the southern approach to Charleston Harbor. The only approach was a strip of beach about 60 yards wide between the Atlantic and the marsh of Vincent's Creek. An eight-hour land and naval bombardment, including six ironclad monitors within about 300 yards, did little damage be...

In 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas, seeking to organize territory for a transcontinental railroad, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, replacing the Missouri Compromise line with popular sovereignty. Settlers would vote on slavery themselves, and both sides raced to fill Kansas: border ruffians from Missouri and Free Staters backed by groups such as the New England Emigrant Aid Company. This e...

Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born in 1824 in Clarksburg, in present-day West Virginia, lost his sister and father to typhoid as a toddler, and was orphaned by age seven. Raised by bachelor uncles at Jackson's Mill, he traded reading lessons to an enslaved man in exchange for pine knots to read by, and that man later escaped to Canada. Jackson entered West Point at the bottom of his class in 1842 an...

Traveller was foaled in 1857 in Greenbrier County, Virginia, sired by the racehorse Grey Eagle out of a mare named Flora, and first named Jeff Davis. Trained by an enslaved boy named Frank Winfield Page, the iron gray American Saddlebred grew to 16 hands and about 1,100 pounds and won ribbons at the Lewisburg fair. Captain Joseph M. Brown bought him for $175 and renamed him Greenbrier, and in Febr...

After David Farragut's fleet ran past Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip in late April 1862, New Orleans, the Confederacy's richest port, fell almost without a fight. On May 1, Major General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts lawyer and Democratic politician, arrived as military governor with about 5,000 troops to hold a hostile city of 150,000. This episode explains his background, including the cont...

In early 1862, Confederate Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley persuaded Jefferson Davis to back an invasion up the Rio Grande from the Confederate Arizona Territory, with plans to seize the Colorado gold fields and then Pacific ports in Southern California. After occupying Santa Fe in March 1862, his Texans needed Fort Union, and the road there ran through Glorieta Pass in the Sangre de Cristo...

John Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Hudson, Ohio, where his father Owen ran a tannery, sheltered escaped slaves, and employed Jesse Grant, father of Ulysses S. Grant. At 12, Brown watched a man beat an enslaved boy with an iron shovel, and his strict Calvinist faith turned that memory into a sense of divine mandate. This episode traces his adult life as a father of 20 children...

Fitz John Porter was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1822 into a naval family that included David Farragut and David Dixon Porter, but chose West Point, graduating eighth in 1845 and earning brevet promotions in Mexico. Commanding the Fifth Corps under George McClellan in 1862, he fought skillfully at Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill. This episode opens with April 1862 at Yorktown, when Porter...

Pauline Cushman was born Harriet Wood in New Orleans in 1833 to a Spanish merchant father and a French mother, and grew up at a family trading post in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After her 1862 stage debut in Louisville, Kentucky, two Confederate sympathizers paid her to toast Jefferson Davis in public. She did, was fired by her theater company, and used the resulting reputation as cover while offerin...

On April 1, 1865, after nearly 10 months of siege at Petersburg, the dirt crossroads of Five Forks guarded the South Side Railroad, Robert E. Lee's last supply line. Lee ordered George Pickett to hold it at all hazards, but Pickett's exhausted men, fresh from fighting at Dinwiddie Court House, built a thin line of shallow ditches and pine logs about a mile and three quarters long, ending in a vuln...

The 54th Massachusetts Infantry was raised in early 1863 under the shadow of Jefferson Davis's December 1862 proclamation that captured Black soldiers and their officers would be put to death. Governor John A. Andrew built the regiment through abolitionist networks, with Frederick Douglass recruiting and sending his own sons, and appointed Robert Gould Shaw as colonel and Norwood Penrose Hallowell...

In May 1865, one month after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Washington was still draped in black bunting when President Andrew Johnson declared on May 10 that armed resistance was virtually at an end. Government authorities ordered a formal review of the troops, and about 145,000 soldiers converged on the capital: the Army of the Potomac arriving on May 12, the Army of the Tennessee by train, an...

Before dawn on Friday, August 21, 1863, about 450 Missouri guerrillas under William Quantrill, many of them teenagers lashed to their saddles after a 24-hour ride, entered Lawrence, Kansas. The town was the center of the free-state movement from the Bleeding Kansas years and the base of Jayhawkers and Red Legs led by men such as Senator James H. Lane, Charles Doc Jennison and James Montgomery, who...

On December 18, 1860, after Abraham Lincoln's election and as Southern states threatened secession, Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden, a Constitutional Unionist and political heir to Henry Clay, introduced a package of six constitutional amendments and four congressional resolutions. The central amendment revived the Missouri Compromise line at 36 degrees 30 minutes and extended it to the Pacifi...

On June 16, 1861, meteorologist Thaddeus Lowe floated 500 feet above the Columbian Armory in Washington and sent the first telegraph message from an aerial station to President Lincoln over a wire running into the White House. Backed by Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian, Lowe went around the usual procurement channels, and Lincoln personally took him to General Winfield Scott. His appointment angere...

Thaddeus Lowe was born in 1832 in Jefferson, New Hampshire, to a poor farming family and got only three months of winter schooling a year. At 18 he volunteered at a traveling chemistry lecture on lighter-than-air gases, became the lecturer's assistant, then bought the show and billed himself as Professor Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe. He married Parisian actress Leontine Gachon in 1855 and, w...

Sullivan Ballou was born in March 1829 in Smithfield, Rhode Island, into a Huguenot family, and lost his father as a young boy. He went on to Phillips Academy, Brown University and the National Law School in New York, was admitted to the Rhode Island bar in 1853, and was elected to the state House of Representatives the same year, rising to clerk and then Speaker. He married Sarah Hart Shumway in...

In the spring of 1862, with George B. McClellan's army moving up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson commanded the Valley District with as few as 5,000 men and at most about 17,000. The Shenandoah Valley, 140 miles long and producing about 19 percent of Virginia's wheat, was split down the middle by Massanutten Mountain, and Jackson used its gaps as interior lines t...

Before dawn on October 19, 1864, Union soldiers camped along Cedar Creek in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley were asleep in heavy fog, believing the campaign was over. Ulysses S. Grant had ordered Philip Sheridan to shut down the valley that fed Robert E. Lee's army, and Sheridan's cavalry burned crops, barns and mills along a 92-mile stretch, with Sheridan writing that a crow crossing the valley woul...

George Edward Pickett was born in 1825 into a Richmond planting family whose Turkey Island estate relied on enslaved labor. A popular story says Abraham Lincoln secured his West Point appointment, but Lincoln was then a state legislator with no such power, and the appointment came from Illinois congressman John T. Stuart, an associate of Pickett's uncle. Pickett graduated 59th of 59 in 1846, then...

Robert Smalls was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839, enslaved by Henry McKee and raised by his mother Lydia Polite, who asked that her favored son be sent to the fields so he would see the system's brutality. At 12 he was hired out in Charleston, earning $16 a week and keeping one dollar, and he learned the harbor as a rigger, sailmaker and wheelman. After marrying Hannah Jone...

Richard Stoddert Ewell was a bald, bird-like, profane general who lived on hulled wheat boiled in milk and slept curled around a camp stool. Born in 1817 in Georgetown and raised on a Virginia estate called Stony Lonesome, he was the grandson of Benjamin Stoddert, the first Secretary of the Navy. He graduated 13th of 43 at West Point in 1840, served with the 1st U.S. Dragoons on the Santa Fe and O...

This episode argues that Reconstruction began well before Appomattox, with the Port Royal experiment of 1861, when Union forces took the Sea Islands of South Carolina, planters fled, and thousands of Gullah people began organizing schools, land and free labor. After the war, a quarter of white Southern men of military age were dead, white Southern per capita income fell from $125 in 1857 to $80 by...