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In the spring of 1865, after nearly 10 months of siege at Petersburg and Richmond, Ulysses S. Grant's army broke the last supply lines and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia fled west. This episode follows that retreat: trains at Amelia Court House on April 4 carrying ammunition but no food, a lost day of foraging, the disaster at Sailor's Creek on April 6 where nearly a fourth of the army and eight generals were captured, and George Armstrong Custer's cavalry burning the supply trains at Appomattox Station. On April 9, John B. Gordon's attack crested a ridge to find two Union infantry corps waiting.

Lee rejected Edward Porter Alexander's proposal to scatter into a guerrilla war and sent for Grant. They met in the parlor of Wilmer McLean, who had moved to Appomattox after a shell struck his house at the First Battle of Bull Run. Lee wore a full dress uniform and sword; Grant arrived in a mud-spattered sack coat. The terms paroled the men, let officers keep sidearms, allowed soldiers to take home horses and mules, and sent Union rations to the starving army. On April 12 about 28,000 Confederates stacked arms in a ceremony received by Joshua Chamberlain.

• Gordon reported that he had fought his corps to a frazzle, and Lee replied that he would rather die a thousand deaths than go see Grant.
• A truce was signaled with a white linen dish towel carried into Union lines.
• Grant said a blinding migraine vanished the moment he read Lee's letter about surrender.
• When Lee remarked on Ely S. Parker being a real American, Parker replied that they were all Americans.
• Grant ordered celebrating salutes stopped, saying the rebels were their countrymen again.

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Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was born in Maine in 1828, taught himself Greek in an attic to enter Bowdoin College, and became a professor there who taught nearly every subject except math and science. When war came he requested leave to study languages in Europe and instead joined the 20th Maine, turning down the colonelcy to serve as lieutenant colonel under West Point graduate Adelbert Ames. At Fredericksburg he spent a freezing night pinned on the field, sheltering behind the bodies of the dead. A botched smallpox vaccination kept the regiment out of Chancellorsville, and by Gettysburg he commanded it.

On July 2, 1863, holding the far left of the Union line on Little Round Top against William Oates's 15th Alabama, the 20th Maine ran out of ammunition, and Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge that swung like a door and swept the hill, earning him the Medal of Honor. At Petersburg in 1864 a bullet passed through both hips; newspapers printed his obituary and Grant promoted him on the field, but surgeon Abner Shaw saved him. He returned, was hit again at Quaker Road, and presided over the Confederate surrender ceremony at Appomattox, later serving four terms as governor of Maine and as president of Bowdoin.

• He had six horses shot from under him and was wounded six times himself.
• At Quaker Road a bullet was deflected by a framed photo of his wife and a Bible in his breast pocket.
• At Appomattox he ordered his men to carry arms in salute, and John B. Gordon answered by dropping his sword point.
• During a disputed 1880 election in Augusta, he faced an armed mob alone, opening his coat to show he was unarmed.
• Rejected at 70 for service in the Spanish-American War, he saw the command go to William Oates; he died in 1914 of an infection from his Petersburg wound.

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The July 3, 1863 assault at Gettysburg known as Pickett's Charge was largely a slow march across nearly a mile of open ground, under the overall command of James Longstreet, with George Pickett leading three of the 11 brigades. This episode lays out Robert E. Lee's plan to split George Meade's fishhook line in coordination with attacks at Culp's Hill and a cavalry strike by J.E.B. Stuart, both of which failed. It also covers newer scholarship arguing that the 10-foot Copse of Trees was too small to be the target and that Lee was aiming for Ziegler's Grove and the road network beyond it.

Between 150 and 170 Confederate guns opened fire around 1 p.m., but inconsistent fuses sent shells over the Union line into the rear. Henry Hunt let his batteries fall silent one by one, and Edward Porter Alexander took the silence as success. Longstreet, who believed no 15,000 men could take the position, answered Pickett's request to advance with a silent bow. About 12,500 men stepped off, compressed under flanking fire, and many stopped at the Emmitsburg Road. Within an hour the attack had cost roughly 6,555 casualties, and postwar Lost Cause writers built the name and myth around Pickett's Virginians.

• Union troops on Cemetery Ridge chanted Fredericksburg as the Confederate lines advanced.
• 160 men of the 8th Ohio wheeled and fired into the flank of Brockenbrough's brigade, triggering a collapse on the Confederate left.
• Mortally wounded, Lieutenant Alonzo Cushing pushed his last gun to the wall and fired double canister at about 10 yards.
• Lewis Armistead crossed the wall at the Angle with his hat on his sword and was mortally wounded opposite his friend Winfield S. Hancock's troops.
• North Carolina troops suffered more casualties than the Virginians yet were often blamed for the failure in postwar accounts.

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In the autumn of 1861 the Confederacy was counting on King Cotton to pull Britain and France into the war, while William H. Seward worked to keep Europe out. Jefferson Davis sent envoys James Mason and John Slidell, who slipped out of Charleston to Cuba and boarded the British mail ship RMS Trent in Havana. On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto fired across the Trent's bow in the Bahama Channel, sent a boarding party, declared the two men contraband of war and took them, letting the ship sail on rather than sending it to a prize court.

Wilkes was hailed in the North, but Lincoln called the prisoners white elephants as the stock market fell and New York banks suspended gold payments. In London, Lord Palmerston's government halted saltpeter exports, planned a blockade and sent over 11,000 troops to Canada, and drafted an ultimatum with a seven-day deadline. Prince Albert, dying of typhoid, softened it to suggest Wilkes had acted without instructions. At a Christmas Day cabinet meeting, Seward built a reply on Wilkes's procedural error and America's own stance from the War of 1812, and the envoys were released in January 1862.

• Britain's declared neutrality gave the Confederacy belligerent status, allowing its ships to use neutral ports.
• Seizing people from a neutral ship was the practice the United States had opposed in the lead-up to the War of 1812.
• Congress proposed striking a gold medal for Wilkes after he returned with the envoys.
• France backed Britain's position, leaving the United States isolated as the deadline approached.
• The crisis contributed to the U.S. government issuing greenbacks to keep the wartime economy running.

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During the Siege of Petersburg in 1864, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, a Pennsylvania mining engineer leading the 48th Pennsylvania and its former coal miners, proposed tunneling under Elliott's Salient in the Confederate line. Grant and Meade saw it as busy work and denied supplies, so the men tore down a bridge and a sawmill for timber and hauled dirt in modified cracker boxes. Pleasants ventilated the 511-foot shaft with a fire-driven exhaust and a wooden duct, dipped beneath Confederate countermines, and packed the T-shaped end with 320 kegs, about 8,000 pounds, of powder. Ambrose Burnside trained a United States Colored Troops division under Edward Ferrero to lead the assault.

The day before the attack, Meade, backed by Grant, barred the USCT division from leading, and Burnside had three white commanders draw lots; James H. Ledlie won. On July 30 the fuse failed, two volunteers relit it, and at 4:44 a.m. the blast killed 278 Confederates and left a crater about 170 feet long and 30 feet deep. Untrained troops poured into the pit, William Mahone's men surrounded the rim, and the Union lost nearly 3,800 men to about 1,500 Confederate casualties. Burnside was relieved, Ledlie and Ferrero were dismissed, and the siege went on for eight more months.

• Lieutenant Jacob Douty and Sergeant Harry Reese crawled into the dark tunnel to splice and relight the failed fuse.
• Union troops lost about ten minutes climbing over their own parapets because no footbridges had been prepared.
• Ledlie and Ferrero were reported to be sharing rum in a bombproof behind the lines during the fighting.
• Native American soldiers of the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters sang death songs as they were overrun near the earthworks.
• USCT casualties ran close to one killed for every wounded man, amid documented killings of Black soldiers trying to surrender.

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In 1968 Joseph and Barbara Jones were refused a home in St. Louis County by the Alfred H. Mayer Company because they were Black, and since the 14th Amendment binds only governments, their case rested on the 13th Amendment. This episode traces how that amendment came to be. The Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that left slavery in loyal border states, and Dred Scott's reading of the Fifth Amendment meant an ordinary statute could be struck down, so supporters turned to the Constitution. Charles Sumner proposed that all persons are equal before the law, but Lyman Trumbull's Judiciary Committee borrowed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its exception for punishment for crime.

The Senate passed the amendment in April 1864, the House fell 13 votes short in June, and Lincoln pushed it through the lame duck session to passage on January 31, 1865, signing it the next day though no signature was required. Southern legislatures used the crime exception through Black Codes, peonage and convict leasing. Hodges v. United States in 1906 narrowed the amendment to physical bondage, until Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. held that Congress could remove the badges and incidents of slavery, a basis later used against human trafficking.

• The punishment for crime clause traces to Cesare Beccaria, who proposed forced labor as a humane alternative to execution.
• Black Codes made it a crime to be without a labor contract, walk beside a railroad track or sell farm products after dark.
• Convict leasing supplied prisoners to coal mines, railroads and logging camps, where companies treated workers as replaceable.
• Abolishing the three-fifths clause stood to increase Southern representation in Congress, which helped drive the 14th and 15th Amendments.
• Courts have held that jury duty and the military draft are civic obligations, not involuntary servitude.

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The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, drafted by Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, was written to close the gap left by the 1793 law after Prigg v. Pennsylvania in 1842 ruled that states could not be forced to spend local resources on recapture. This episode examines its mechanics: federal commissioners who could deputize any bystander, a $1,000 fine for refusing to help, six months in prison for giving food or shelter, no jury, no testimony from the accused and suspended habeas corpus. Commissioners received $10 for certifying a person as a slave and $5 for releasing them, and slave prices in border states rose 15 to 30 percent after passage.

Instead of compliance, the law produced resistance. Reverend Luther Lee of Syracuse published his address and admitted smuggling 30 people to Canada, Boston juries refused to convict the rescuers of Shadrach Minkins, and Vermont passed a personal liberty law. In the Joshua Glover case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court freed abolitionist Sherman Booth and declared the act unconstitutional before Roger Taney's Supreme Court overruled it. The episode ends with Benjamin Butler's contraband ruling at Fort Monroe, the Confiscation Acts of 1861 and 1862, and the act's formal repeal in 1864.

• Before 1850, armed posses from the South were driven out of places like Cass County, Michigan, while local officials looked away.
• The federal government deployed troops, marines and artillery in Boston in 1854 to march Anthony Burns to a ship.
• Northern states argued states' rights against the federal law while Southern leaders demanded federal supremacy, a reversal of their usual positions.
• Canada's Black population grew from about 40,000 to 60,000 between 1850 and 1860, and New York City lost nearly 2,000 Black residents in five years.
• In Pittsburgh, hundreds of men formed armed vigilance units sworn to fight rather than be taken.

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Henry Wirz was born Hartmann Heinrich Wirz in Zurich in 1823, the son of a master tailor, and was convicted of fraud and embezzlement in 1847, a sentence commuted to 12 years of exile while his wife divorced him. This episode follows him to the United States in 1849, from a Massachusetts factory to work as a doctor's assistant in Kentucky, a homeopathic practice, a water cure clinic and a post as overseer on a Louisiana plantation. He enlisted as a Confederate private in 1861, later claimed a Seven Pines wound that historians doubt, and became adjutant to General John H. Winder before taking charge of the interior of Camp Sumter, known as Andersonville, in April 1864.

Andersonville was an open stockade of 16.5 and later 26 acres with no barracks, holding about 33,000 prisoners at its peak; of 45,000 men who passed through, nearly 13,000 died. Wirz requested supplies and let five prisoners carry a petition for exchange north, but he also enforced the deadline. Tried by a military commission under Lew Wallace from August to October 1865 while lying on a sofa with gangrene, he was convicted and hanged on November 10, 1865, after refusing a deal to implicate Jefferson Davis. His trial's rejection of the following orders defense later echoed at Nuremberg.

• Of 158 prosecution witnesses, 145 testified they never saw Wirz kill anyone.
• Witness Felix de la Baume claimed to be a French nobleman descended from Lafayette but was Felix Oeser, a deserter from the 7th New York.
• Defense witness James Duncan, a former camp guard, was arrested on arrival and accused of causing a death himself.
• The drop at his execution failed to break his neck, and two of his vertebrae were kept by a medical museum.
• An obelisk to Wirz stands in Andersonville, Georgia, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans gave him their Confederate Medal of Honor in the 1970s.

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Christopher Spencer patented his lever-action rifle in 1860, the first military metallic cartridge repeater, built around a falling breech block and a tubular magazine hidden in the buttstock. This episode explains how it worked, why early nine-round magazines were cut to seven after dropped rifles risked setting off the stacked cartridges, and how Erastus Blakeslee's case of preloaded tubes let a soldier reload in seconds. The copper .56-56 rimfire cartridge was waterproof and crush-proof, but General James Wolfe Ripley of the Ordnance Department refused the weapon, fearing soldiers would burn through ammunition and noting it cost about $40 against $13 for a Springfield.

In July 1863 Spencer bypassed Ripley and met Abraham Lincoln, who test fired the rifle at a target on the White House grounds and ordered it adopted; Ripley resisted and was replaced later that year. Spencers armed John T. Wilder's Lightning Brigade at Hoover's Gap, George Armstrong Custer's troopers at Gettysburg and James H. Wilson's 9,000 mounted infantry at Nashville, though rapid fire blinded troops in black powder smoke and the Confederacy could not make the copper ammunition. After the war the rifle went west and abroad, while the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company was out of business by 1869 and its assets ended up with Oliver Winchester.

• When John Wilkes Booth was killed in a Virginia tobacco barn, he was carrying a Spencer carbine.
• Captured Spencers were of little use to Confederate forces, who lacked the industry to draw and stamp copper cartridges.
• At Beecher Island in 1868, about 50 scouts under Frederick Forsyth held off a far larger Cheyenne and Arapaho force with Spencer carbines and over 150 rounds each.
• Brazil formed special sharpshooter units armed with Spencers during the Paraguayan War, and France bought thousands in 1870.
• In an 1871 fight, Chilean cavalry with Spencers fired repeated volleys at Mapuche warriors who had timed their charges to the reload window of single-shot guns.

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George Henry Thomas was born in 1816 in Southampton County, Virginia, to a wealthy plantation family of Welsh and French Huguenot ancestry, and as a teenager fled into the woods with his mother and sisters during Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. This episode follows him from West Point, where he graduated 12th in a class of 42 in 1840, through artillery service under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War and a cavalry posting where his refusal to overwork the academy's aging horses earned him the nickname Slow Trot Thomas. When secession came in 1861, he held to his oath to the United States while 19 of the 36 officers in his regiment, including Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, went south, and his family responded by erasing him.

At Chickamauga in September 1863, after William Rosecrans fled the field, Thomas anchored a defense on Horseshoe Ridge and became the Rock of Chickamauga. In late 1864 he rebuilt an army at Nashville from clerks, recruits and Black regiments, waited out an ice storm while Ulysses S. Grant drafted orders to relieve him, and then destroyed John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee on December 15. During Reconstruction he used military commissions against biased local courts, deployed troops against the Ku Klux Klan and condemned the Lost Cause narrative in an 1868 report, before dying of a stroke in 1870 with his private papers already destroyed.

• A Comanche arrow passed through his chin and into his chest in Texas in 1860; he pulled it out himself and kept directing the mission.
• He had instructed and recommended J.E.B. Stuart and Fitzhugh Lee for cavalry posts, and Stuart later wrote that he wished to see Thomas hanged as a traitor.
• His family returned the money he later sent them and declared they had no brother.
• He asked the Senate to withdraw his name when Andrew Johnson offered him a promotion to lieutenant general as a rival to Grant.
• Grant's popular memoirs described him as sluggish, and with no autobiography of his own, that portrait endured.