pplpod

In the spring of 1862, the Army of the Potomac, more than 100,000 strong, halted on the Virginia Peninsula before logs painted black to look like cannon. This episode traces how George B. McClellan, its commander, came to that moment. Born into a Philadelphia medical family, he entered the University of Pennsylvania at 14 and West Point at 15, graduated second in his class, and learned slow, metho...

On the afternoon of November 30, 1864, about 20,000 Confederate soldiers stepped off across two miles of open ground toward Union earthworks at Franklin, Tennessee, twice the distance of Pickett's Charge. This episode explains how General John Bell Hood got there. With William T. Sherman marching to the sea, Hood invaded Tennessee hoping to crush John Schofield's force before it reached Nashville....

Ambrose Powell Hill Jr. was born in 1825 in Culpeper, Virginia, into a planter family whose wealth rested on enslaved labor. At West Point he clashed with his rigid classmate Thomas Jackson, and on an 1844 furlough he contracted gonorrhea, forcing him to repeat a year. The infection was never cured and left him with chronic prostatitis, urethral strictures and kidney damage that shadowed his caree...

This episode follows a single melody across more than two centuries. It began as a call and response tune at frontier camp meetings, built to be learned by ear and sung by huge crowds. In 1861, soldiers of the Tiger Battalion at Fort Warren in Massachusetts set it to morbid verses mocking a Scottish comrade named John Brown, who shared his name with the executed abolitionist. Officers hated the so...

By August 1864, Mobile, Alabama, was the last major Confederate port on the eastern Gulf. Its narrow entrance was covered by Fort Morgan's 46 guns, Forts Gaines and Powell, and 67 mines that left only a 500 yard gap beneath Fort Morgan. Rear Admiral David Farragut brought 14 wooden ships, lashed in pairs so a disabled ship could be towed, and four monitors. Admiral Franklin Buchanan waited with th...

In August 1846, during the Mexican-American War, President James K. Polk asked Congress for $2 million to negotiate with Mexico. Northern Democrats known as Barnburners, angry over lower tariffs, a vetoed internal improvements bill, and the Oregon compromise, had David Wilmot of Pennsylvania add a rider banning slavery in any territory taken from Mexico. The House passed it on a sectional vote tha...

Dorothea Dix was born in Maine in 1802 to an abusive, alcoholic preacher father and an ailing mother, and at 12 was sent to her wealthy grandmother in Boston. She began teaching at 14, ran a charity school in her grandmother's barn, and wrote children's books and a dictionary of flowers before a breakdown in 1836 sent her to England, where Quaker reformers introduced her to the data driven lunacy...

David Farragut was born James Glasgow Farragut in Tennessee in 1801, son of Jorge Farragut, a Menorcan who fought in the American Revolution. After his mother died of yellow fever in New Orleans, he was taken in by naval officer David Porter, adopted the name David, became a midshipman at nine, and at 11 served as prize master of a captured ship in the War of 1812. He fought in the Marquesas and w...

David Dixon Porter, born in 1813 into a naval family, grew up alongside his adoptive brother David Farragut. When his father, Commodore David Porter, left the U.S. Navy to command Mexico's navy, young David followed, survived yellow fever, and at 14 fought Spanish ships off Cuba, where his cousin was killed and he was held prisoner in Havana. Back in the U.S. Navy his arrogance nearly got him dism...

Clement Vallandigham, born in 1820 in New Lisbon, Ohio, left Jefferson College without a degree after a dispute over debate society rules, practiced law in Dayton with a $500 loan from his friend Edwin Stanton, and became a Democratic congressman opposed to abolition. He questioned John Brown after Harpers Ferry, proposed dividing the country into four sections with Senate vetoes, and coined the C...

Herman Haupt was born in Philadelphia in 1817, lost his father at 11, and won an appointment to West Point from Andrew Jackson, only to resign his commission soon after graduating in 1835. He patented the Haupt truss in 1839, taught at Pennsylvania College in Gettysburg, and rose to general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, before sinking his savings into the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachuse...

Robert Gould Shaw was born in 1837 to wealthy Boston abolitionists Francis and Sarah Shaw, who lived beside the Brook Farm commune. He was miserable at a Catholic prep school in New York, drifted through schools in Switzerland and Hanover, read Uncle Tom's Cabin repeatedly, dropped out of Harvard, and hated clerking at his uncle's firm. The Civil War gave him structure: he fought with the 2nd Mass...

On March 21, 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens addressed a crowd at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia, weeks before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Seven states had seceded, Lincoln had been in office less than three weeks, and Stephens boasted that the revolution had been bloodless. This episode examines what he said: that the founders, including Jefferson, had been wrong to...

Alexander H. Stephens never weighed more than 100 pounds, suffered chronic illness from childhood, and was orphaned at 14 after losing his mother as an infant and his father and stepmother to pneumonia. This episode follows him from his uncle's library to Franklin College, a brief career as a strict schoolteacher, and a law practice in Crawfordville where he never lost a client to the death penalt...

Alexander Gardner, born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1821, trained for seven years as a jeweler, edited the Glasgow Sentinel to fund a cooperative commune in Iowa inspired by Robert Owen, and then fell for photography after seeing Mathew Brady's work at London's Great Exhibition of 1851. Arriving in America in 1856 to find the commune ravaged by tuberculosis, he joined Brady, mastered large imperial p...

Albert Sidney Johnston served in the armies of three nations: the United States, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederacy. Born in Kentucky in 1803, he befriended a younger Jefferson Davis at Transylvania University, graduated eighth in his West Point class of 1826, resigned to care for his dying wife Henrietta, then enlisted as a private in Texas, rose to senior brigadier general, and took a bu...

The Springfield Model 1861 was a 56 inch, 9 pound rifled musket that put sharpshooter accuracy in the hands of ordinary infantry. This episode explains how the .58 caliber Minie ball made rifles as fast to load as smoothbores, why percussion caps replaced flintlocks, and why the Ordnance Department abandoned the gummy, jam prone Maynard tape primer of the Model 1855 in favor of simple copper caps...

On October 8, 1862, the largest Civil War battle in Kentucky began in the village of Perryville as thirsty armies converged on the last stagnant pools of Doctors Creek during a severe drought. The episode explains why Lincoln considered Kentucky essential, how the state's declared neutrality collapsed by September 1861, and how the divided Confederate command of Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smit...

More than 178,000 men enlisted in the United States Colored Troops knowing the Confederacy had promised to treat them not as prisoners of war but as armed insurrectionists. This episode traces how a reluctant Union government came to arm Black soldiers, from General Benjamin Butler declaring escaped slaves contraband of war at Fort Monroe, through Lincoln's fear of losing the border states, to the...

Zell Miller was born in 1932 in Young Harris, Georgia. His father, a teacher, died of cerebral meningitis when Miller was 17 days old, and his mother raised him alone through the Great Depression. After an associate's degree and time at Emory University, he landed in a North Georgia drunk tank after the Korean War armistice, a moment he called his rock bottom, and on release enlisted in the Marine...

The Constitution sets 30 as the minimum age for a senator, yet the early Senate seated 28 year olds Armistead Thomson Mason and John Eaton and 29 year old Henry Clay, because it judged its own members and did not check. The chamber itself nearly broke the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when small states threatened to leave rather than accept representation by population. The Connecticut Compro...

Robert Torricelli was born in 1951 in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of a school librarian and a lawyer, and earned the nickname The Torch for his aggressive campaigning at New York's Storm King School. He graduated from Rutgers and Rutgers Law School, earned a master's at Harvard's Kennedy School by 1980, worked for Governor Brendan Byrne, served as associate counsel to Vice President Walter Monda...

Paul Simon, the Illinois senator, was born in 1928 in Eugene, Oregon, to Martin and Ruth Simon, Lutheran missionaries who had served in China. His brother Arthur later founded Bread for the World. After attending several colleges without graduating, the 19 year old borrowed $3,600 from a Lions Club in 1948, bought the defunct Troy Call in Troy, Illinois, renamed it the Troy Tribune, and became the...

Mark Hatfield was born in 1922 in Dallas, Oregon, the son of a railroad blacksmith and a schoolteacher. As a teenage tour guide at the Oregon State Capitol he slipped into the governor's office, sat in the governor's chair, and wrote out a life plan: legislature, Senate, then a blank space for the presidency. In 1940, at 17, he struck and killed a six year old girl while driving his mother's car a...

Lincoln Chafee comes from a family that reached Massachusetts in the 1630s and gave Rhode Island a governor in his great-great-grandfather and a governor, Navy secretary and senator in his father, John Chafee. After Phillips Academy and Brown University, where he studied classics and captained the wrestling team, he attended a 16 week farrier school in Bozeman, Montana, and spent seven years shoei...