pplpod

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...

Mathew Brady gave conflicting accounts of his birth, in Warren County, New York, or in Ireland. As a teenager in Saratoga he studied under portrait painter William Page, who introduced him in New York City to Samuel Morse, then promoting Louis Daguerre's process. Brady started by making cases for daguerreotypes, opened a Broadway studio in 1844, exhibited a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, and opened...

George Washington Parke Custis, Washington's step-grandson, began building Arlington House in 1802 as a memorial to the first president. His daughter Mary married Robert E. Lee, and when Lee joined the Confederacy in 1861, Union troops seized the hill overlooking Washington. Under an 1862 law on direct taxes in insurrectionary districts, the estate was assessed $92.07, and commissioners refused pa...

Mary Virginia Wade, known as Jenny though her signatures show she preferred Ginnie, was 20 in July 1863 and lived on Breckenridge Street in Gettysburg with her mother, both working as seamstresses while her father was confined to an asylum. Popular accounts call her engaged to childhood friend Corporal Johnston Hastings Jack Skelly of the 87th Pennsylvania, wounded at Winchester, but the only surv...

Philip Kearny was born in New York City in 1815 into great wealth: his grandfather John Watts was the last royal recorder of New York and his father helped found the New York Stock Exchange. The family insisted on spelling the name without a second E and rhyming it with Killarney. Barred from the Army by his grandfather, he earned a law degree from Columbia in 1833, then inherited over $1 million...

Andrew Johnson, a self-taught former tailor from Tennessee, was the only Southern senator to stay loyal to the Union, served as military governor of Tennessee and joined Lincoln's 1864 ticket. After the assassination he issued broad amnesty, let former Confederates form new state governments, and vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau expansion and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Congress passed over hi...

In April 1861 two live copperhead snakes tumbled out of a mailbag at a Washington post office, and Republicans soon used the name as a slur for Northern Democrats who opposed the war. The Peace Democrats answered by cutting Lady Liberty's head out of copper pennies and wearing them as pins. Their base lay in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and among Irish and German Catholic immigrants and Midwestern m...

After about 50,000 Union casualties in the Overland Campaign, Ulysses S. Grant crossed the James River on a 2,000-foot pontoon bridge in mid-June 1864 and moved on Petersburg, the hub of five railroads feeding Richmond. On June 15, General William F. Baldy Smith broke through the Dimmock Line, where P.G.T. Beauregard's men stood about 10 feet apart, then halted for the night, and Winfield Scott Ha...

One August night in 1864, a rifle shot startled Abraham Lincoln's horse as he rode alone toward his summer cottage; guards later found his stovepipe hat with a bullet hole through the crown, and Lincoln asked them to keep it quiet. In April 1865 he described recurring dreams of a fast vessel heading for a dark shore and a dream of a corpse lying in the East Room. John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor,...

During the so-called Era of Good Feelings under President James Monroe, Missouri applied for statehood in 1819 with roughly 10,000 enslaved people already brought into the territory, largely to grow hemp. New York Representative James Tallmadge Jr. proposed an amendment barring further enslaved people from entering Missouri and gradually freeing enslaved children at age 25. The North held the Hous...

Commanding General Winfield Scott opposed military medals as a European monarchical custom, but after his retirement Navy Secretary Gideon Welles pushed through a Navy medal that Lincoln signed in December 1861, with an Army version following in July 1862. As the only U.S. military decoration, it was awarded loosely for gallantry and other soldier-like qualities, including saving the flag and peac...

The building on 10th Street began in 1833 as the second meeting house of the First Baptist Church of Washington, led for nearly 30 years by Pastor Obadiah Bruen Brown. John T. Ford bought it in 1861 and opened Ford's Athenaeum, which burned in 1862 and was rebuilt as a modern theater. On April 14, 1865, five days after Appomattox, about 1,700 people watched Our American Cousin when John Wilkes Boo...

Wilmer McLean was a 47-year-old retired Virginia militia major and wholesale grocer living on the Yorkshire Plantation near Manassas Junction, where the Orange and Alexandria and Manassas Gap railroads met. In July 1861 the opening fighting of the war's first major land battle reached his property, and General P.G.T. Beauregard used his house as headquarters. A Union shell came down the kitchen ch...

George Gordon Meade was born in 1815 in Cadiz, Spain, to a merchant family ruined by its support of the Spanish government during the Peninsular War. Sent to West Point because it was free, he collected 168 demerits, graduated 19th of 56 in 1835, served in the Second Seminole War and resigned to work as a civil engineer. An 1842 law pushed him back into the Army's topographical engineers, where he...

Black powder fouled rifled barrels so quickly that soldiers sometimes carried wooden mallets to hammer bullets down the bore, which is why most infantry kept fast but inaccurate smoothbore muskets. Henri-Gustave Delvigne and others tried bullets that were rammed until they deformed into the rifling, but the effort ruined their shape. In 1849 Claude-Étienne Minié introduced an undersized conical bu...

On May 24, 1861, Frank Baker, Shepherd Mallory and James Townsend escaped from Norfolk County, where they had been forced to build a Confederate battery at Sewell's Point, and crossed to Fort Monroe. When a Confederate agent demanded their return under the Fugitive Slave Act, Major General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts trial lawyer, argued that Virginia could not claim to be a foreign nation an...

Raphael Semmes, born in Maryland in 1809, entered the U.S. Navy as a midshipman in 1826 and studied law on the side until he was admitted to the bar. During the Mexican-American War his ship, the USS Somers, capsized in a squall off Veracruz and 37 sailors drowned, so he joined the landing forces and marched inland to Mexico City. When Alabama seceded in 1861 he joined the Confederate Navy, turned...

Albert Woolson was born in Antwerp, New York, to Willard and Caroline Woolson. His father was badly wounded at Shiloh and taken to an Army hospital in Windom, Minnesota, where Albert and his mother followed and stayed until he died. On October 10, 1864, Albert enlisted as a drummer for Company C of the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery. His company never saw combat, and he was discharged on September...

In October 1864 the Scottish-built tea clipper Sea King left London listed for Bombay while the steamer Laurel slipped out of Liverpool carrying guns and Confederate officers. Off Madeira, Commander James Iredell Waddell, a North Carolinian with decades in the U.S. Navy, mounted 8-inch smoothbores and Whitworth rifles and commissioned the ship as the CSS Shenandoah on October 19. With fewer than h...

On June 9, 1863, near Brandy Station in Culpeper County, Virginia, about 20,500 men fought for ten hours in the largest cavalry battle on American soil. Robert E. Lee was preparing to invade the North, and J.E.B. Stuart's 9,500 troopers were screening the army. Stuart staged a grand review on June 5 and repeated it on June 8 because Lee had missed the first. Across the Rappahannock, Alfred Pleason...

Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in March 1865 under the War Department, gave it no initial funding, and expected it to last one year after the war. Commissioner Oliver O. Howard organized it into lands, records, financial affairs and medical branches, but agents soon faced the Black Codes and President Andrew Johnson, who vetoed its renewal in 1866 before Con...

In May 1988 Ken Deardorff received the last land patent issued under a law Abraham Lincoln signed in 1862. This episode traces how the Homestead Acts moved about 160 million acres, nearly 10 percent of the country, to 1.6 million claimants. Earlier laws such as the Preemption Act of 1841 and Oregon's Donation Land Claim Act of 1850 set the stage, but Southern Democrats blocked a general homestead...