Threads From The National Tapestry: Stories From The American Civil War

  About this episode:  Shots had been fired and mobilization in both North and South began. Many believed it would be over in six months.  Only a few anticipated a four-year struggle which would bring political, military and social change. Changes that few could even begin to imagine. In the first months of the conflict, the pieces on the military chessboard were being placed and opening moves cal...

  About this episode:  In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, the title character states that, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” That line resonates well with many during the opening months of the American Civil War. With war as their stage, many believed the struggle provided opportunity for personal acclaim a...

  About this episode:  In 1969 - 104 years after the fact - Canadian Robbie Robertson wrote a song for his group The Band. It was a first-person narrative relating economic and social distress for a poor white Southerner during the last year of the American Civil War. Robertson’s song was voiced by the band’s lone American, drummer and native Arkansan Levon Helm whose haunting rendition opened wit...

  About this episode:  In March of 1864, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to military heights only attained by one other - George Washington. On the 2nd day of that month, the US Senate confirmed Grant’s promotion to Lieutenant General. On the 9th, President Abraham Lincoln officially commissioned him and the next day he was given official authority to take command of the Armies of the United States....

  About this episode:  We begin Part II of our post-war story of R. E. Lee. It is early 1867 and, we remind you that in March of that year, there was to be a fund-raising event for Washington College in, of all places, New York City. 500 were to attend. Men of means and power - all potential donors - and much was expected from this highly anticipated gathering. And yet, a month before the gala, on...

  About this episode:  We begin a two part presentation that tells the story of a man who never truly sought fame and never wanted to be controversial, and yet his destiny casts such a long shadow that to this day, he may well be one of the most noted generals in American military history, and to more than a few, lurks as one who was and continues to be deemed a traitor. He began his military care...

    About this episode:  For this episode, we’ll take the American Civil War to places that far too many dismiss - west of the Mississippi. Sites and confrontations that may not be as well-known as eastern theater battlefields like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg or Chattanooga but, nevertheless at locations where national interests were just as great, passions of those involved just as deep and cons...

  About this episode:  In the aftermath of the great and bloody battle of Shiloh, we pick up with the life and career of William Tecumseh Sherman. His personal journey continues to be one that spans the vast spectrum that comprises life itself - ups and downs, triumphs and defeats. In this episode, we speak of his command of the Union’s Western Theater and its campaigns, his post-war rise to Gener...

  About this episode:  It was a Wednesday, August 11, 1880 and some 5000 Union veterans gathered at the Ohio State Fair. President Rutherford B. Hayes had just finished a speech when another was called for. The next speaker was tall, sinewy and long in the neck. His head was large and his face a regular nest of wrinkles. Often animated and mercurial in temperament, on this day, his features expres...

  About this episode:  The year was 1859 and future Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Florida Senator Stephen R. Mallory, trumpeted, “It is no more for this country to pause in its career than for the free and untrammeled eagle to cease its soar.” He had every reason to be optimistic, for the decade of the 1850s had brought the United States of America exceptional growth and prosperity. And, with...

      About this episode:  Sometime in 1861, the young Georgia poet Sidney Lanier, a recent Confederate Army enlistee, attended a mock medieval tournament in Kinston, NC. Watching mounted Confederate officers dressed as knights competing for the honor of a local belle, he was moved…even enraptured. To him, the scene was a metaphor for the war itself. The South was a gallant knight battling against...

      About this episode:  From June 18, 1864 until April 2, 1865, the Union Armies of the James and Potomac laid siege to Petersburg, Virginia - the all-important supply and communication center for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond itself. After 45 days of constant bloodletting in the Overland Campaign, the contesting forces began what would mirror warfare five decades later...

    About this episode:  GPS, drones, laser-guidance—all modern marvels that have served mankind in both peace and war. Nothing new, for there were creations and adaptations for a conflict contested in the 1860s; enough so that that confrontation has been called, by many, the first “modern war.”  This is the story of enterprising inventors and engineers and their ideas and machines—their taking th...

    About this episode:  Revolution and civil war require explosive issues and impassioned men more than willing to make change and, if necessary, to do so violently. This is the story of two such Southern men. This is the story of fire eaters Louis T. Wigfall and Edmund Ruffin.     ----more---- Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode: Nathaniel Macon Roger A. Pryor John Brown Sam Houston P. G....

About this episode:  It takes a cast to put on a play and our story this day is filled with characters that emoted passions raging from reasoned deliberation to knee-jerk and violent. And not only for the chain of events that led to the first confrontation of the American Civil War but throughout and  even beyond the four-year long conflict. Men and women caught in the cross-hairs of history or th...

About this episode:    Some six years ago, we chronicled the Confederacy’s Gibraltar that allowed Wilmington, NC to be the last major Confederate port open to the outside world. 72 episodes later and in the 160th year of its capture, we, again, turn our attention to the massive earthen fort and those that took part in the campaign to either storm or defend the Confederate Goliath. This is the expa...

About this episode:    She stood only about 5’, yet, in terms of achievement and historical significance, she remains a giant. This is the story of not only a remarkable woman, but human being. This is the story of Harriet Tubman.   ----more---- Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode: Charles Nalle Frederick Douglass Thomas Garrett William Seward John Brown   Subscribe to the Threads from the N...

About this episode:    Its mission and those who willingly took part in it dared to defy the highest law in the land. And in their desire to do what was right, they wrote, spoke and acted out against a hateful institution that remains to this day, a cross this country must bear. This is the story of brave crusaders who risked much and an organization that sought to right a moral evil. This is the...

About this episode:  This is an episode about a phenomenon as old as time itself. Something that, throughout the ages, has brought laughter, reflection, made and rekindled memories and even moved men and women to tears. From stirring airs to ballads and everything in between, this is the story of that which has been described as a salve for the soul. This is the story of Music during the American...

About this episode:  Presidential elections essentially boil down to a popular mandate, either supporting an incumbent’s administration or repudiating it. Never was that clearer than in 1864 when some four million people went to the polls to either re-elect Abraham Lincoln or oust him. At the election’s core: to stay the course and finish the war or admit it a failure and call for a cessation of h...

About this episode:  For millennia humans have reflected on historical events. Quite often, one poses the timeless question: what if - had a life been spared or taken, had a candidate won rather than lost and, as it relates to this episode, what if a battle or war ended differently? So, with a degree of trepidation, we address that last question and will do so through the works of a Pulitzer Prize...

About this episode:  Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant understood numbers. And, in the spring of 1864, he intended to use the North’s advantage in men and materiel to pressure, stretch and snap the Confederacy at multiple points.  And so, he ordered simultaneous campaigns. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “those not skinning can hold a leg.” Three were to begin in Virginia: at Bermuda Hundred, into th...

About this episode:  Too often, we think only of wild assaults, the terrible collision of armed men, the desperate fighting of soldiers - often, hand to hand - and the killed and wounded but, in the American Civil War, we tend to overlook what happened to another element that comprised battle casualties: Those captured. This is the story about the American Civil War’s prisoners of war. This is als...

About this episode:  As we’ve seen in the one presidential debate this election year, a performance has consequences.  Although it was not for the office of chief executive, we turn over time’s shoulder to speak of another storied debate - in 1858 and for the office of U.S. senator.  This is the story of a series of face-to-face confrontations that may not have had immediate ramifications but most...

About this episode:  Washington City was buzzing with anxiety. It was the middle of May 1864 and no news had arrived from Virginia for days. Then, finally, in flurries, it came - word from the front and it was most welcome. Grant was posed to strike a mortal blow. Readers clutched papers that, in bold print, screamed “Extra.” Unable to concentrate, Congress adjourned for three days. At 10 pm on th...