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Winfield Scott, born in Virginia in 1786 and standing six foot five, studied law and watched General James Wilkinson give self-serving testimony at the 1807 Aaron Burr treason trial. Commissioned an artillery captain in 1808, he was sent to New Orleans under Wilkinson, who camped troops in a disease-ridden swamp he owned. Scott's public criticism brought a court-martial, a one-year suspension, and...

The Zouaves began in French-occupied Algeria in 1830, named for the Zwawa, Berbers of the Djurdjura Mountains. The first recruits included Kabyles, Turks, Moors, and Arabs, but desertion was severe, with 46 percent leaving over one 15-month span. By 1842 the ranks were entirely European and Jewish, largely Algerian-born settlers, yet they kept the chechia cap, buttonless jacket, baggy sarouel trou...

James Longstreet, Robert E. Lee's old war horse, was born in South Carolina in 1821 and raised on the Georgia frontier by his uncle Augustus. He finished near the bottom of his West Point class but befriended William Rosecrans, George Pickett, and Ulysses S. Grant, whose wedding to Longstreet's cousin Julia Dent he attended. In January 1862 scarlet fever killed three of his children in a single we...

Cold Harbor was not a port but a rural Virginia crossroads about 10 miles northeast of Richmond, named for a Burnett family tavern that offered shelter but no hot meals. In the spring of 1864, during the Overland Campaign, Ulysses S. Grant kept sliding southeast around Robert E. Lee's flank, and both sides raced to the intersection. Grant pulled heavy artillerymen from the Washington forts to brin...

In late June 1862 the Union Army of the Potomac was close enough to Richmond to hear its church bells, yet within a week it was retreating to the James River. George B. McClellan had more than 100,000 men but believed Pinkerton reports that he faced 200,000. Robert E. Lee, in command only since June 1 after Joseph E. Johnston's wounding at Seven Pines and mocked as the King of Spades, had about 90...

George B. McClellan rebuilt the Army of the Potomac after First Bull Run, ringing Washington with 48 forts and 480 heavy guns, and in November 1861 told Lincoln he could do it all as general-in-chief. Instead of marching overland, he pushed his Urbanna Plan to move the army by water around the Confederates, defending it in a 22-page letter to the president. Joseph E. Johnston withdrew in March 186...

In 1863 a piece of sheet music was deposited in the Library of Congress under the name Louis Lambert, a pseudonym for the Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore. Published by Henry Tolman and Company in Boston, the lyrics were reportedly written for his sister Annie, who was waiting for Union light artillery captain John O'Rourke. The words describe church bells, cheering villages, and laurel w...

The Confederate battle cry known as the rebel yell sounded nothing like a cowboy's yee-haw. Soldiers and correspondents described a noise that began low in the diaphragm and climbed through rhythmic crescendos into a high, piercing shriek, comparing it to a dying rabbit, a cougar, or a wolf's howl. Regiments practiced it, and one Virginia cavalry battalion became so known for its coordinated cry t...

Before the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was selling firewood on a St. Louis street corner and had pawned his gold watch to buy his children Christmas presents. Born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Ohio in 1822, he hated his father's tannery, became known as a gifted horseman, and got his new name when a congressman wrote U.S. Grant on his West Point application. Assigned as an infantry quartermaster, he lea...

Thomas Nast was born in Bavaria in 1840, arrived in New York at age six, and was drawing in reverse onto woodblocks for illustrated newspapers by 15. After covering a boxing match in England and Garibaldi's campaign in Italy, he joined Harper's Weekly as a staff illustrator in 1862. His Civil War drawings, from the 1862 Christmas Eve wreaths to the 1864 cartoon Compromise with the South, reached m...

Mary Boykin Chesnut was born in 1823 at Mount Pleasant plantation in South Carolina, the daughter of governor and senator Stephen Decatur Miller, and educated in Charleston at a French school run by refugees from the Haitian Revolution. At 17 she married James Chesnut Jr. and moved to Mulberry Plantation in Camden, where her father-in-law held about 500 enslaved people. Childless and depressed, sh...

Sarah Emma Edmonds was born in December 1841 in New Brunswick, where an abusive father resented that she was not a boy. At 15 she fled an arranged marriage with her mother's help, opened a millinery shop, and when her father tracked her down, became Franklin Thompson, crossing into the United States and selling Bibles door to door from Hartford, Connecticut. Inspired by the novel Fanny Campbell, t...

Winfield Scott Hancock, born in Pennsylvania in 1824 and named for the War of 1812 hero, graduated 18th of 25 at West Point and missed the assault on Mexico City while sick with fever. Before the Civil War he served in California, where his close friend Lewis Armistead wept at their parting before leaving to fight for the Confederacy. George McClellan's dispatch after Williamsburg earned him the n...

William Clarke Quantrill was born in Ohio in 1837, began teaching school at 16 to pay off his late father's debts, and drifted west to Kansas in 1857. There he sued and then stole from the neighbors who had offered to pay for his land, was expelled from a settlement for robbing cabins, won and lost a fortune at poker as an Army teamster, and switched from anti-slavery letters in 1858 to defending...

In April 1861 Abraham Lincoln declared a blockade of 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline when the U.S. Navy had only three ships able to enforce it, one vessel stuck on Lake Erie and another off Hawaii. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles bought ferries and merchant steamers, armed them, and built the fleet to 671 ships. The episode explains why declaring a blockade risked treating the Confederacy as a...

Braxton Bragg was born in 1817 in Warrenton, North Carolina, the son of a carpenter who grew wealthy, and grew up amid unproven local rumors that his mother had been jailed for killing a free Black man. He graduated fifth in his West Point class of 1837 largely through memorization. In the Second Seminole War he wrote anonymous articles attacking Winfield Scott and was court-martialed, and in 1847...

Robert E. Lee was born in 1807 to Revolutionary War hero Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, who was jailed twice for debt and fled to the West Indies, leaving young Robert to care for his invalid mother and ill sister. Lee graduated second at West Point in 1829 without a single demerit, married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, and spent decades in the Corps of E...

Thomas Corbett was born in London in 1832, grew up in New York, and trained as a hat maker, inhaling mercury nitrate vapors linked to the condition behind the phrase "mad as a hatter." After his wife Susan died at sea as the couple left Virginia, he fell into homelessness and drinking in Boston, where street preachers took him in. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, renamed himself Boston, g...

Richard Jordan Gatling, a North Carolina inventor of seed planters and wheat drills, patented his battery gun in 1862 believing that one machine doing the work of a hundred riflemen would shrink armies and spare soldiers from camp diseases like cholera and dysentery. This episode explains how the hand-cranked weapon worked: six to ten barrels rotating around a central axis, gravity feeding cartrid...

Stand Watie, born Degataga in 1806 in the Cherokee Nation in what is now Georgia, was the last Confederate general to surrender in the field, signing a ceasefire at Doaksville in Indian Territory on June 23, 1865. This episode traces his family's wealth as slaveholding planters, his work helping his brother Elias Boudinot edit the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix, and the Georgia gold rush and Indian Re...

Ambrose Burnside was born in Indiana in 1824, apprenticed as a tailor, and reached West Point through his father's political connections, where he piled up demerits and was court-martialed for beating cadet George Derby. After an Apache arrow wound to the neck in New Mexico, he resigned in 1853 to build the Burnside Carbine with its sealing brass cartridge, only to lose the government contract, hi...

Dr. Samuel Mudd was born in December 1833 in Charles County, Maryland, and raised on Oak Hill, his father's tobacco plantation worked by 89 enslaved people. Educated at Georgetown College and the University of Maryland, he settled at St. Catherine with his wife Sarah Frances Dyer. This episode follows how emancipation in Maryland in 1864, the nearby Camp Stanton training Black Union soldiers, and...

John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838 in a log house in Bel Air, Maryland, the ninth of ten children of a famous British Shakespearean actor, and as a schoolboy kept a fortune teller's prediction that he would have a grand but short life and a bad end. This episode follows him from a disastrous stage debut in Baltimore at 17, through performing as J.B. Wilkes to escape comparison with his brother Edw...

Benjamin Franklin Butler was born in New Hampshire in 1818 to a privateer father who died of yellow fever, grew up in his mother's boarding house for mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, and turned to law after West Point rejected him. This episode traces a combative lawyer who backed Jefferson Davis at the 1860 Democratic convention, then pressured the Massachusetts governor through banking con...

In 1866 Congress authorized the first peacetime all-Black regiments, the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, with Black enlisted men under white officers. This episode covers competing origin stories for the name Buffalo Soldiers, from Cheyenne, Comanche and Apache accounts to the bison coats worn on winter patrols. They made up about 20 percent of the cavalry and 10 percent of th...