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In April 1861 Maryland's legislature voted 53 to 13 against secession but refused to reopen rail links to the North, and on April 19 a Baltimore mob attacked Union troops passing through the city. John Merryman, a Baltimore County planter and militia lieutenant, followed what he believed were state orders and destroyed railroad bridges over the Bush and Gunpowder rivers. Lincoln had authorized General Winfield Scott to suspend habeas corpus along the military route, and on May 25 soldiers arrested Merryman at his home and locked him in Fort McHenry, soon nicknamed the Baltimore Bastille.

His lawyers went straight to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, sitting as circuit judge, who ordered General George Cadwalader to produce Merryman. Cadwalader sent a colonel with a letter instead, Taney held him in contempt, and the marshal sent to arrest the general was turned away at the gate. Taney's written ruling argued that the suspension clause sits in Article One and belongs to Congress; Lincoln ignored it and defended his actions to Congress in July. Merryman was indicted for treason, released on $20,000 bail, and never tried, as Taney and later Salmon P. Chase kept postponing the case.

• Federal judge William Fell Giles had already seen one of his writs ignored by the Fort McHenry commander.
• The treason indictment charged Merryman with leading about 500 armed men against federal infrastructure.
• Federal authorities also detained Baltimore Mayor George Brown and Congressman Henry May.
• Editor Frank Key Howard, grandson of Francis Scott Key, was held in the same fort that inspired his grandfather's anthem.
• Congress passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act in 1863, and the same tension resurfaced in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004.

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Elizabeth Van Lew was born in 1818 to a wealthy Richmond hardware merchant and educated at a Quaker school in Philadelphia, where she absorbed abolitionist views. When her father died in 1843, his will barred the family from freeing the people they enslaved, so Elizabeth and her mother quietly paid them wages instead. Once the war began, the two women brought food, books and clothing to Union officers in Libby Prison, using the cover of Victorian charity to pass money, notes hidden in book bindings, and directions to safe houses.

General Benjamin Butler recruited her after escaped prisoners described her work, and her network grew to include clerks in the Confederate War and Navy departments and Mary Bowser, a formerly enslaved woman whom the Van Lews had educated in Pennsylvania, who reportedly worked in Jefferson Davis's household. Messages traveled in a book cipher, sometimes rolled inside hollowed eggs. After the war, Grant made her Richmond's postmaster, where she hired Black men at equal pay, but Rutherford B. Hayes replaced her in 1877. Shunned by Richmond society and denied reimbursement, she died poor in 1900.

• She raised the first United States flag in Richmond when the city fell in April 1865.
• George H. Sharpe of the Army of the Potomac recommended she be reimbursed $15,000 for funding the network herself.
• Relatives of Colonel Paul Joseph Revere, whom she had aided as a prisoner, supported her in old age and paid for her tombstone.
• The Crazy Bet nickname and feigned-madness story came from a 1911 biography and are rejected by modern scholars.
• Richmond demolished the Van Lew mansion in 1911, and she entered the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1993.

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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 led the Michigan Wolverines against J.E.B. Stuart on the East Cavalry Field at Gettysburg. Philip Sheridan bought the Appomattox surrender table and gave it to Custer's wife, Libbie.

Peacetime exposed the same traits. Custer hid a seized racehorse from Grant, nearly provoked a mutiny in Texas, was suspended for going absent to see his wife, and in 1876 testified on hearsay against Secretary of War William Belknap and the president's brother Orvil Grant, which got him arrested and nearly removed from the Sioux campaign. After the Washita attack and his 1874 Black Hills gold announcement, he turned down extra cavalry and Gatling guns, ignored his scouts, and split the 7th Cavalry on June 25, 1876. He and about 210 men with him were killed, and the legend that followed was built by Libbie Custer and an Anheuser-Busch painting.

• Custer had cropped his thinning hair and taken off his buckskin jacket in the heat before the battle.
• At the Washita in 1868 he ordered the killing of hundreds of Cheyenne ponies and took women and children captive.
• Cheyenne oral history says two women pushed sewing awls into his ears so he would hear better in the afterlife, for breaking his promise not to fight.
• The Army recovered only a handful of his bones a year later for reburial at West Point.
• The site was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in 1991 after American Indian Movement protests.

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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 Round Tops, pulled by Devil's Den, Union sharpshooters and broken terrain, while Hood's wounding left Evander Law unaware at first that he commanded the division.

Gouverneur K. Warren spotted the glint of bayonets from the summit and sent aides, including future Brooklyn Bridge builder Washington Roebling, to find troops. Colonel Strong Vincent intercepted one messenger and rushed his brigade to the hill about ten minutes ahead of the attackers. Beyond Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine, the episode covers the near-collapse of the 16th Michigan, Vincent's mortal wound, Patrick O'Rorke's charge, cannons hauled up by hand that could not depress to fire downhill, and historian Garry Adelman's math on whether losing the hill would really have lost the battle.

• The 15th Alabama arrived after a 20-mile march in July heat with empty canteens.
• Chamberlain refused his line into a V and, after 90 minutes and out of ammunition, ordered the bayonet charge.
• Lieutenant Holman Melcher started a spontaneous charge, and Captain Walter Morrill's hidden company fired into the retreating Alabamians' flank.
• General Stephen Weed was shot by a sniper, and Charles Hazlett was killed while leaning over him to hear his last words.
• Adelman calculated that at most about 2,650 exhausted Confederates could have held the summit against 11,600 fresh Sixth Corps troops a mile away.

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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, Illinois, where Pinkerton stumbled onto a counterfeiters' camp while hunting for barrel wood, staked it out, and handed the sheriff a clean set of arrests. Chicago made him its first police detective in 1849, and in 1850 he founded the agency whose open-eye logo and motto, We Never Sleep, gave the world the term private eye.

While guarding railroads for profit, Pinkerton ran an Underground Railroad stop, met Frederick Douglass, and gave John Brown $500 and help buying supplies for Harpers Ferry. His agents, led by Kate Warne, foiled the Baltimore plot against President-elect Lincoln, but as George McClellan's intelligence chief he sometimes doubled or tripled Confederate troop counts. After the war came the failed hunt for Jesse James, an 1872 contract to help Spain suppress a Cuban revolution aimed at ending slavery, and his death in 1884. Under his sons, the agency became the strikebreaking force behind the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893.

• His agency recovered $688,000 of a $700,000 train safe robbery using surveillance, undercover work and daily written reports.
• Kate Warne became the first female detective in the United States and is buried beside Pinkerton and his wife in Graceland Cemetery.
• Posing as Confederate Major E. J. Allen, Pinkerton was recognized in Memphis and barely escaped.
• Historians split over the inflated estimates: T. Harry Williams called the service incompetent, while Edwin Fishel and James Mackay blame McClellan's biases.
• Accounts of his death range from gangrene after biting his tongue in a fall to a stroke or malaria from his wartime undercover work.

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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 suspicion from Henry Halleck, marched 12 miles overland to lay siege, only for an Arctic front on February 13 to drop temperatures to 10 degrees, freezing muskets, powder and artillery wheels.

Andrew Foote's gunboats were wrecked on February 14 by plunging fire from the bluff, and on February 15 Pillow's dawn assault broke the Union right and opened the road to Nashville. Then Pillow ordered his men back into the trenches. Grant returned, noticed captured Confederates carrying three days of rations, read it as a sign of desperation, and ordered C. F. Smith and Lew Wallace to counterattack. By nightfall the escape route was closed, Floyd and Pillow fled by boat, and Buckner, who had once loaned Grant money, was left to accept unconditional surrender.

• John McClernand's unauthorized probing attacks set the dry winter grass on fire, trapping wounded men between the lines.
• Union troops heard the rebel yell for the first time in the Western theater during Pillow's breakout.
• Attacking Union infantry used Zouave tactics, dropping flat after each Confederate volley and rushing forward during the 20-second reload.
• Nathan Bedford Forrest refused to surrender and led hundreds of cavalrymen out through the freezing, waist-deep water of Lick Creek.
• About 13,000 Confederates surrendered, Nashville became the first Confederate state capital to fall, and admirers began sending Grant thousands of cigars.

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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 a Washington studio in 1849. He photographed 18 of the 19 presidents of his era, missing only William Henry Harrison, and stamped every image Photo by Brady, whoever operated the camera.

When the war began he sold cartes de visite to families of departing soldiers, then won Lincoln's permission to photograph the armies at his own expense. With failing eyesight, he directed a team of more than 20, including Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, who hauled wet plate darkroom wagons to battlefields. His October 1862 exhibition The Dead of Antietam showed corpses to New Yorkers for the first time. He spent over $100,000 on about 10,000 plates, but a war-weary public lost interest, Congress paid only $25,000 in 1875, and he died penniless in 1896.

• The Brady stand used an iron neck rest to hold sitters still during long exposures.
• He was the first to persuade the New York Herald to run distinct fonts in his advertisements.
• Brady came under fire at First Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Petersburg.
• His negatives passed to supplier E. & H.T. Anthony, and the story of plates becoming greenhouse glass is considered a myth.
• Historian Bob Zeller notes most of the team's war photographs were stereoscopic 3D images.

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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 payment from Mary Lee's cousin Philip Fendall because she had not appeared in person. The government then bought the property at auction. In 1864 Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ordered burials placed as close to the mansion as possible, starting with Private William Henry Christman in May.

George Washington Custis Lee sued, and in 1882 the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in his favor; he sold the land back for $150,000 in 1883. On the southern part of the estate, Freedman's Village, founded in 1863, housed between one and three thousand people with schools, churches and a hospital until evictions and a $75,000 buyout cleared it by 1900. A 2010 Department of Defense Inspector General report found misplaced headstones, discarded cremated remains and paper records that did not match the graves.

• Mary Lee buried the family silver before fleeing.
• Sojourner Truth lived and worked in Freedman's Village.
• The cemetery conducts about 27 to 30 funerals a day, and in-ground burial is now tightly restricted while the columbarium accepts most honorably discharged veterans.
• The Vietnam Unknown was identified in 1998 as Air Force First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie, and his crypt has stayed empty.
• Wreaths Across America began in 1992 when Maine wreath maker Morrill Worcester brought 5,000 surplus wreaths to Arlington.

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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 surviving wartime letter between them is platonic. When the battle began on July 1, Jenny, her mother and two younger brothers moved to her sister Georgia McClellan's house at 548 Baltimore Street to help with Georgia's newborn.

The McClellan house sat in the crossfire and took over 150 bullet strikes. Around 8 a.m. on July 3, while Jenny kneaded bread dough in the kitchen, a Minié ball passed through two wooden doors, struck her left shoulder blade, went through her heart and stopped in her corset. Union soldiers sheltering upstairs buried her in the backyard in a coffin made for Confederate General William Barksdale. The next day her mother baked 15 loaves from the same dough. Whether the shot came from a Confederate sharpshooter or a stray round cannot be proven.

• Skelly died on July 12 without learning of her death.
• She was reburied at the German Reformed Church in January 1864 and in Evergreen Cemetery, near Skelly, in November 1865.
• In 1882 the Senate granted her mother a pension, citing Jenny as baking bread for Union soldiers.
• Her 1900 monument, designed by Anna M. Miller, flies a flag 24 hours a day, an honor shared by the Betsy Ross House.
• Elderly Ephraim Whisler died of a heart attack after a shell burst over his house, and children were later killed by unexploded shells.

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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 in 1836 and joined the 1st U.S. Dragoons under his uncle Stephen W. Kearny, with Jefferson Davis as adjutant. Sent to study at Saumur, he fought in Algeria with the Chasseurs d'Afrique, who called him Kearny le Magnifique.

In the Mexican-American War he bought 120 matched dapple gray horses for his company, which became Winfield Scott's bodyguard, and lost his left arm to grapeshot at Churubusco. After a scandal over his relationship with Agnes Maxwell, he fought for Napoleon III at Solferino in 1859 and became the first U.S. citizen awarded the Légion d'honneur. In the Civil War he commanded the 1st New Jersey Brigade, then a division of the 3rd Corps, and called George McClellan's retreat after Malvern Hill cowardice or treason. On September 1, 1862, at Chantilly, he rode into Confederate lines in a thunderstorm and was shot dead.

• Kearny threw away letters that misspelled his name without reading them.
• At Williamsburg he told his men he was a one-armed Jersey son of a gun and to follow him.
• His order for officers to wear red cloth patches led to the corps badges Daniel Butterfield later standardized.
• A.P. Hill recognized the body, and Robert E. Lee had his belongings returned and burned his personal letters unread.
• He was reinterred at Arlington in 1912 under an equestrian statue dedicated in 1914.