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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 that it was nicknamed the Comanches.

The only audio comes from elderly veterans filmed at reunions, including the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg in 1938, and a North Carolina infantryman and a Virginia cavalryman produced nearly identical yells. The episode examines theories that the cry blended Scots-Irish Highland charges, Comanche war whoops, Moorish-influenced ululation, and fox hunters' calls, and that it was heard in Bleeding Kansas before 1861. It also looks at why officers ordered men to holler during charges, and how the name later landed on a bourbon and a Billy Idol song.

• One early written account spelled the yell as a low whoa followed by a long, vibrating hooey.
• A veteran asked to demonstrate it at a society dinner refused, saying it could not be done standing still with false teeth.
• A writer who fought at Chickamauga called it the ugliest sound any mortal ever heard.
• One general ordered his men to yell because they had run out of ammunition.
• A former Confederate surgeon would leap up and give the yell at the opera when the orchestra played Dixie.

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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 learned the supply work that later shaped his generalship, and in Mexico he hauled a mountain howitzer into a church belfry despite opposing the war.

After resigning in 1854, failing at farming at Hardscrabble, and clerking for his younger brothers in Galena, Grant rose from militia organizer to Union commander through river operations at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. As president he created the Department of Justice and used it with the Enforcement Acts against the Ku Klux Klan. The episode follows his bankruptcy, his race to finish his memoirs on Mount McGregor while dying of throat cancer, and how the Lost Cause movement recast him as a drunken butcher.

• In 1859 Grant freed William Jones, a man his father-in-law had given him, instead of selling him for a sum worth about $36,000 today.
• At Monterrey he carried a message through sniper fire while hanging off the side of his horse.
• James Longstreet, later a leading Confederate general, had been in Grant's wedding party.
• Mark Twain offered Grant a 70 percent royalty in place of a magazine's standard 10 percent.
• The finished memoirs earned his widow Julia more than $400,000.

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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 millions through electrotyped plates, and Lincoln called him his best recruiting sergeant.

In 1870 and 1871 Nast turned on William M. Tweed and the Tammany Hall ring, switching from ink wash to bold crosshatching so his images survived mass printing. Tweed's camp offered him up to $500,000 to leave for Europe, and he refused. The episode also covers Nast's anti-Irish and anti-Catholic cartoons, his split with editor George William Curtis after Fletcher Harper's death, the loss of his fortune to Ferdinand Ward in 1884, and his death from yellow fever in Ecuador in 1902.

• Tweed was captured in Spain after a local official recognized his face from a Nast cartoon.
• Grant credited his 1868 victory to the sword of Sheridan and the pencil of Thomas Nast.
• The Tweed courthouse, budgeted at around $250,000, ended up costing taxpayers about $13 million.
• Nast invented the Republican elephant and the Tammany tiger and drew the first modern Santa Claus.
• In 2018 the Overseas Press Club removed Nast's name from its award for editorial cartooning.

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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, she used opium and privately condemned the sexual abuse of enslaved women and the silence of white wives about it.

She began her diary on February 18, 1861, and from Charleston, Montgomery, Richmond and Columbia recorded life among Jefferson Davis, Varina Howell Davis, Wade Hampton and John Bell Hood as Confederate confidence wore away. Emancipation and debt left her nearly destitute after James died in 1885. Between 1881 and 1884, after translating French poetry and writing three unpublished novels, she reworked the diary into a narrative. C. Vann Woodward's 1981 edition won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize, while Kenneth Lynn called it a hoax.

• Her father left politics and moved the family to three cotton plantations in Mississippi.
• Her unpublished novels included The Captain and the Colonel and Manassas.
• She entrusted the diary to her friend Isabella D. Martin, leading to a 1905 edition and a 1949 version by Ben Ames Williams.
• Her revisions added people to scenes, invented conversations, and inserted reflections written with hindsight.
• Mulberry Plantation is now a national historic landmark, its status tied in part to her diary.

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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, the Female Pirate Captain, she enlisted in the 2nd Michigan Volunteer Infantry in May 1861, passing a physical that checked little beyond teeth and a trigger finger.

As Thompson she served as a field nurse and soldier through First and Second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg. Her 1864 memoir, later titled Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, sold over 175,000 copies with tales of disguises as an enslaved man named Cuff and an Irish peddler, claims no military record supports. Malaria in 1863 drove her to a private hospital to avoid examination, and she left the hospital to find Frank Thompson listed as a deserter. In the 1880s her old comrades signed affidavits, Congress granted a $12 monthly pension in 1884, and the desertion charge was cleared in 1886.

• Her publisher said she was the best salesman he had seen in 30 years of business.
• She said she became a spy after the death of her friend James Vesey.
• Asked in 1883 whether her book was authentic, she replied, "Not strictly so."
• A fall from a mule while carrying mail before Second Bull Run left her with internal injuries.
• In 1897 she became only the second woman admitted to the Grand Army of the Republic.

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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 name "Hancock the Superb," and on the first day at Gettysburg George Meade sent him ahead to take command and anchor the Union line on Cemetery Hill.

On the second day he sent the 1st Minnesota, about 262 men, against a far larger force to close a gap, and they suffered 87 percent casualties. During Pickett's Charge he rode the line under bombardment, was struck in the thigh, and pulled out a bent saddle nail while Armistead fell mortally wounded nearby. After the war he oversaw the hanging of Mary Surratt, burned an abandoned Cheyenne village on the Plains, and issued General Order No. 40 in Texas and Louisiana returning power to civilian courts. As the 1880 Democratic nominee he lost to James Garfield by fewer than 40,000 votes.

• He joked that the Confederates must be running short of ammunition if they were firing scrap metal at him.
• Told to dismount under fire, he answered that there are times when a corps commander's life does not count.
• The Indian Peace Commission later found that faulty reports, including George Custer's, had misled him on the Plains.
• Republicans attacked his party's "tariff for revenue only" plank as a threat to Northern factory jobs.
• Leading Ulysses S. Grant's funeral procession in 1885, he silenced the crowd that began applauding him.

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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 slavery and celebrating John Brown's execution in 1860. In Texas he learned ambush tactics from Cherokee leader Joel B. Mayes.

Back in Missouri he built an irregular pro-Confederate force that included Bloody Bill Anderson, Cole Younger, and Frank and Jesse James. After the collapse of a Kansas City building holding guerrillas' female relatives killed four young women in August 1863, Quantrill led about 450 men into Lawrence, Kansas, on August 21, killing roughly 150 men and boys while Senator James Lane escaped through a cornfield. General Order No. 11 then emptied the Missouri border counties. Shot and paralyzed in a Kentucky ambush in May 1865, he died in Louisville on June 6 at 27.

• He hid stolen blankets from his former partner so long that they rotted.
• Quantrill's success raiding Kansas towns earned him a captain's commission in the Confederate Army.
• By late 1864 his force splintered, and Anderson broke away to lead his own raids.
• A childhood friend dug up his remains in 1887, and he now has grave markers in Louisville, Dover and Higginsville.
• In 1907 a British Columbia mine caretaker named John Sharp claimed to be Quantrill and was soon found beaten to death.

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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 nation, and how Richard Henry Dana Jr. won the 1863 Prize Cases at the Supreme Court.

Prize money kept bored crews alert: an infantry private earned $13 a month, while one capture paid a captain $13,000 and a cabin boy $533. British investors built fast, low paddle steamers burning smokeless anthracite and ran them from Nassau, Bermuda and Havana. Five of six runs succeeded, yet Southern shipments fell from over 20,000 to about 8,000 and cotton exports dropped 95 percent. Britain turned to Egypt, whose cotton boom paid for new boulevards in Cairo and Alexandria until prices collapsed after 1865 and Egypt declared bankruptcy in 1876.

• The capture of the Memphis brought $510,000 at auction for its captors.
• The British-owned runner Banshee returned a 700 percent profit before its capture on its seventh run.
• A Wilmington wholesaler asked his Bahamas agent to send cognac instead of chloroform.
• The H.L. Hunley sank the USS Housatonic off Charleston in 1864 and went down with its crew of eight.
• The loss of coastal shipping and imported salt fed a meat shortage, inflation and bread riots in Richmond.

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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 one of his own soldiers lit a 12-pound artillery shell under his cot. Bragg walked out of the wreckage unhurt.

His artillery at Buena Vista made him a national hero through a quote Zachary Taylor's staff said was never spoken. He left the Army in 1856 to run a Louisiana sugar plantation with more than 100 enslaved people, opposed secession, then organized Louisiana's troops in 1861. At Shiloh he ordered repeated frontal assaults on the Hornet's Nest, and he took command of the western army when P.G.T. Beauregard left on unapproved sick leave. Retreats from Perryville and Stones River turned his generals against him, and after Chickamauga they petitioned for his removal before Grant routed him at Chattanooga.

• A widely told story has Bragg, as company commander, requesting supplies and then refusing them as quartermaster.
• After Stones River he asked his generals to confirm in writing that they backed the retreat, and they called for his resignation.
• Joseph E. Johnston, sent to investigate, found the army well organized and declined to replace him.
• Jefferson Davis traveled to the front to quell the generals' revolt after Chickamauga.
• After the war he lost a string of jobs and died suddenly on a street in Galveston in 1876 at age 59.

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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 Engineers draining marshes and building Fort Pulaski and Fort Monroe before scouting routes through lava fields for Winfield Scott in Mexico.

After 32 years in the U.S. Army, Lee turned down a Union command when Virginia seceded. The episode sets his written view of slavery as an evil beside his management of hundreds of enslaved people at Arlington. Mocked as "Granny Lee" after Cheat Mountain, he took over the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, drove McClellan from Richmond, and won at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville before Antietam and Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. After Appomattox he led Washington College, opposed Black voting rights, and became the central figure of the Lost Cause.

• Mary Custis's father first objected to the match because of the Lee family's disgraced name.
• Wesley Norris described whippings ordered by Lee after a failed escape from Arlington.
• Lee told the survivors of Pickett's Charge, "All this has been my fault," and offered his resignation.
• At Washington College he created a student honor system and recruited Northern students.
• Historians now point to his high casualty rates, and statues have been melted down and Army bases renamed.