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The phrase 40 acres and a mule began as a concrete military order. Early in the war Benjamin Butler declared enslaved people who reached Fort Monroe contraband of war, and the Port Royal experiment on the South Carolina Sea Islands followed. By December 1864 William T. Sherman's march had brought about 10,000 refugees to Savannah. On January 12, 1865, Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton met 20 Black leaders, and spokesman Garrison Frazier, a 67-year-old former Baptist minister, told them their people needed land of their own. Four days later Special Field Orders No. 15 set aside coastal land from Charleston into Florida in plots of no more than 40 acres per family.

By June 1865 about 40,000 freed people had settled roughly 435,000 acres under General Rufus Saxton. The mule never appeared in the order; surplus Army mules were lent to the settlers. Andrew Johnson's amnesty in May 1865 restored property to pardoned Confederates, he forced O.O. Howard to replace Circular 13 with Circular 15, and soldiers evicted families who refused to leave. Sharecropping and debt took the place of ownership, though Black farmers owned about 15 million acres by 1910.

• The Grand Contraband Camp grew in the burned ruins of a nearby Virginia town.
• Garrison Frazier had bought freedom for himself and his wife for about $1,000.
• Freed people on Edisto Island petitioned the president that they could not forgive their former enslavers.
• Sharecroppers faced interest of 50 to 70 percent and vagrancy arrest if they tried to leave.
• Pigford v. Glickman and the H.R. 40 reparations study bill both invoke Sherman's order.

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Born Mary Jenkins in Maryland in the 1820s, Mary Surratt converted to Catholicism at a girls' academy in Virginia and married John Surratt, a man with heavy debts, a violent temper and a drinking problem. After a fire destroyed their farmhouse they built a tavern at the crossroads that became Surrattsville, which during the Civil War served as a way station for Confederate couriers, one of her sons among them. When John died of a stroke in 1862, Mary leased the tavern and opened a boarding house in Washington, D.C., where John Wilkes Booth and his circle began to gather around a plot that started as a plan to kidnap Abraham Lincoln.

Days before the assassination Mary rode to the tavern on what she called debt collecting, and her tenant testified she told him to ready hidden firearms. On the day itself she delivered a package of field glasses from Booth. Two nights after the murder she denied knowing a disguised man with a pickaxe at her door, the attacker of the Secretary of State. A military tribunal convicted her, five of nine judges asked for clemency, habeas corpus was suspended in her case, and she became the first woman executed by the federal government.

• Her husband sold land and enslaved people to pay creditors after the fire.
• The tribunal could convict by simple majority and admit evidence a civilian court might exclude.
• The two key witnesses, her tenant and a boarder, faced prosecution themselves if they did not cooperate.
• Her daughter Anna was turned away at the White House while trying to plead for her mother's life.
• The officer overseeing the hanging tied her noose with fewer loops, expecting a last-minute reprieve.

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In the spring of 1862 civilian spy James J. Andrews proposed to cut the Western and Atlantic Railroad, the line that could rush Confederate reinforcements from Atlanta to Chattanooga. A first attempt in March collapsed when the sympathetic engineer he was counting on in Marietta had been drafted onto another line and none of his eight volunteers could run a locomotive. In April Andrews returned with 22 Ohio soldiers and civilian William Hunter Campbell in plain clothes. On April 12 they seized the locomotive General during the breakfast stop at Big Shanty, a station with no telegraph office.

Andrews posed as the officer of a special ammunition train for General P.G.T. Beauregard while his men cut wires, but a red flag on a passing freight trapped them on a siding at Kingston for over an hour. Conductor William A. Fuller chased them on foot, by handcar and with the Yonah, the William R. Smith and the Texas, run in reverse. Rain soaked the bridges they meant to burn, and the General ran out of fuel 18 miles from Chattanooga. Andrews and seven men were hanged, and survivors later received the first Medals of Honor, though Andrews, as a civilian, did not.

• Two raiders who missed the rendezvous kept their cover by enlisting in a Confederate artillery unit.
• The raiders broke the track with a single crowbar and derailed Fuller's William R. Smith north of Adairsville.
• Eight prisoners escaped, and two floated down the Chattahoochee to a Union blockade ship in the Gulf.
• Private Jacob Parrott, beaten in captivity, received the first Medal of Honor from Edwin Stanton on March 25, 1863.
• The episode inspired Buster Keaton's The General and a 1956 Walt Disney film.

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Born Jennie Irene Hodgers in Clogherhead, Ireland, on December 25, 1843, Albert Cashier crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway and reached Belvidere, Illinois, where a relative dressed him in boys' clothing to work in a shoe factory. He kept that identity. In August 1862, at 19, five foot three and 110 pounds, he signed with an X to join Company G of the 95th Illinois Infantry. The regiment marched about 9,000 miles and fought roughly 40 engagements, including the siege of Vicksburg, the Red River Campaign, Brice's Crossroads and Nashville, and Cashier served until the August 1865 discharge.

Unlike most of the hundreds of soldiers assigned female at birth who served disguised as men, Cashier went on living as a man. In Saunemin, Illinois, he lit street lamps, cleaned the church, voted, and drew a veteran's pension from 1907. A state senator's car broke his leg in 1911, and in 1914 dementia moved him to the Watertown State Hospital, where staff forced him into women's clothing and the pension board investigated fraud. His old comrades testified for him, and the board ruled in February 1915 that his pension would continue. Many historians now understand him as a trans man.

• At Vicksburg he was captured on a reconnaissance, overpowered a guard and made it back to his regiment.
• He refused tent mates and never bathed with the others, and a cursory enlistment exam never exposed him.
• The neighboring Lannon family and the doctor who set his leg both learned his secret and kept it.
• He died in October 1915 at 71 and was buried in uniform with Grand Army of the Republic honors.
• His one-room house was moved eight times and was nearly burned in a firefighter training exercise before Betty Estes saved it.

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In May 1864 Ulysses S. Grant's coordinated offensive sent Franz Sigel south up the Shenandoah Valley toward Staunton, aiming to cut the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad and the farms feeding Robert E. Lee's army. John C. Breckinridge could gather only about 4,100 men against roughly 6,300, so he called up the Virginia Military Institute Cadet Corps: 247 students under Lieutenant Colonel Scott Shipp, average age 18 and some as young as 15. John Imboden's cavalry slowed the Union advance at Rude's Hill, and on May 15 Breckinridge drove the Union off Manor's Hill with a frontal assault and a flank attack across Smith's Creek.

Sigel reformed on Bushong's Hill, and massed canister broke the 51st Virginia, opening a gap Breckinridge could fill only with the cadets. Shipp fell wounded, Captain Henry A. Wise took over, and the cadets crossed a rain-soaked plowed field that pulled the shoes from their feet. The Union line broke and the cadets captured a cannon. Ten cadets died and 50 more were wounded. Weeks later David Hunter took Staunton anyway, and VMI turned the day into lasting ritual.

• Sigel reportedly shouted orders in German, which helped paralyze the Union response.
• Union losses were 841 and Confederate losses 520, both about 13 percent of each army.
• Grant relieved Sigel, and Hunter won at Piedmont on June 5 and occupied Staunton the next day.
• Cadet Moses Ezekiel later sculpted Virginia Mourning Her Dead, where six of the dead cadets are buried.
• Since 1887 VMI's New Market Day roll call has been answered with died on the field of honor, sir.

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In 1861 a wounded soldier could lie in the mud for days while quartermaster wagons rolled past carrying rations and powder. Jonathan Letterman, born in Pennsylvania in 1824 and a graduate of Jefferson Medical College in 1849, spent more than a decade as an Army surgeon in Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico and California learning how supply lines fail. After the Seven Days Battles left the wounded stranded in 1862, Surgeon General William Hammond made him medical director of the Army of the Potomac, and George McClellan gave him authority to rebuild the system.

Letterman created forward aid stations with triage by severity, mobile division and corps hospitals, and an Ambulance Corps answering only to the medical department. The system was working by Antietam and handled 12,000 casualties at Fredericksburg. After Gettysburg he built Camp Letterman on the George Wolf Farm. Generals still cut his supply wagons, Hammond was court-martialed after banning calomel, and Letterman resigned in December 1864. He later served as San Francisco coroner and died in 1872 at 47, after Congress had made his methods law for all U.S. armies.

• Mortality in the Army of the Potomac fell from 33 percent during the Peninsula Campaign to 2 percent after Gettysburg, a drop credited to faster evacuation.
• Major John McNulty of the 12th Corps defied orders to leave his medical wagons behind and finished all major surgeries within 24 hours.
• An oil venture for railroad magnate Thomas A. Scott in San Francisco failed after about a year.
• His wife Mary Digges Lee died at 38, and he fell into a severe depression.
• The Army hospital at the Presidio was named Letterman Army Hospital in 1911.

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In the spring of 1861 Captain Nathaniel Lyon allegedly slipped through a Missouri militia camp disguised as an old blind woman in a bonnet. Missouri was a slaveholding border state whose governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, preached armed neutrality while secretly working with Richmond. Lyon surrounded the militia at Camp Jackson, marched the prisoners through St. Louis, and the shooting that followed killed 28 civilians. At the Planters House Hotel on June 11, Lyon ended talks with Jackson and Sterling Price by declaring, This means war, then chased the Missouri State Guard into the southwest corner of the state.

By August Lyon held Springfield with about 5,400 men after expiring 90-day enlistments drained his ranks, facing more than 12,000 under Ben McCulloch and Price. He gambled on a dawn attack on August 10 and split his force with Franz Sigel. A gray-uniformed Louisiana regiment overran Sigel's guns because Union officers mistook it for the 1st Iowa. Lyon was shot through the heart leading a counterattack, the first Union general killed in combat, and Missouri was left with two rival governments and years of guerrilla war.

• A rainstorm on August 9 led McCulloch to cancel his own attack and pull in his pickets, leaving the camp blind.
• An acoustic shadow bent the sound of the opening cannon fire over McCulloch's headquarters, and he first took it for a false alarm.
• Union gunner James Totten dueled across the valley with Confederate captain William Woodruff, his former artillery student.
• Judge James McBride's Ozark militia, led by country lawyers, stumbled into a flanking position against the 1st Missouri.
• The 1st Kansas suffered one of the highest casualty rates of any Union regiment in the war in a single morning.

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In 1842 a frustrated Washington, D.C. constable named John Zell complained that escaping enslaved people must be using steam balloons or some hidden underground railroad. Free Black abolitionist Thomas Smallwood printed the remark in an abolitionist newspaper, and the joke gave a dangerous movement its code: stations, conductors, passengers, cargo and stockholders. This episode examines how the network actually ran, driven mainly by free Black communities in Philadelphia, New York and Ohio, Black churches, and the freedom seekers themselves, with no headquarters and strict compartmentalization so that one captured stationmaster could not betray the whole system.

The routes ran in many directions: south into Spanish Florida alongside the Seminole, onto the lands of the Ottawa, Shawnee and Wyandotte, across the Rio Grande into Mexico, and out of ports in cargo holds. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 paid magistrates $10 to send a person into slavery and $5 to free them, yet William Still kept detailed ledgers in Philadelphia while sheltering up to 60 people a month. With the Civil War, Union lines became the destination, and about half a million people crossed into them as contraband of war.

• Freedom seekers broke scent trails with turpentine on their shoes in North Carolina and a paste of charred bullfrogs in Texas.
• Maroon communities settled permanently inside the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina.
• Harriet Tubman used Eastern Shore tides, star navigation and long winter nights on frozen ground to time her escapes.
• Sylvia Hector Weber ran a licensed ferry on the Rio Grande that carried freedom seekers into Mexico.
• William Still's coded messages announced four adults and two children as four large hams and two small hams.

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Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard was born outside New Orleans into an aristocratic Louisiana Creole family and spoke only French until about age 12. Largely raised by an enslaved caretaker from the Caribbean who decades later called him her son, he was mocked at West Point for his accent and height, and dropped the hyphen from his name. Passed over for top brevets after strong reconnaissance work in the Mexican-American War, he later stabilized the sinking U.S. Custom House in New Orleans with a timber grillage foundation, and in 1861 served just five days as West Point superintendent before Louisiana seceded.

At Charleston he demanded the surrender of Fort Sumter from Major Robert Anderson, his former artillery instructor, sent him whiskey, brandy and cigars, then shelled the fort for 34 hours. Celebrated after First Bull Run, though Joseph E. Johnston directed much of the fighting, he feuded with Jefferson Davis, stacked his corps in three-mile lines at Shiloh and halted the attack at dusk. In 1864 he held Petersburg with about 5,400 men against 16,000 until Lee arrived. After the war he patented a cable car system, fronted the Louisiana State Lottery and joined the 1873 Unification Movement.

• The first Confederate battle flags he pushed for after Bull Run were sewn from the pink silk of women's dresses.
• At Corinth he ran empty trains with whistles blowing and men cheering to fake reinforcements while his army slipped away.
• Removed by Davis after taking unauthorized sick leave, he defended Charleston with underwater torpedoes and spar-torpedo boats.
• His wife Caroline died in Union-occupied New Orleans, and he could not attend her funeral.
• As state militia adjutant general in the late 1880s, he sent troops against sugarcane strikers, leading to the Thibodaux Massacre.

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Camp Sumter, known as Andersonville, opened in Georgia in February 1864 as a 16.5-acre stockade of pine logs about 15 feet high, expanded to 26.5 acres by June. Nineteen feet inside the wall stood a light inner fence called the deadline, and guards in platforms called pigeon roosts were ordered to shoot without warning any prisoner who touched or crossed it. At its peak each man had roughly five by six feet of ground. About 45,000 Union prisoners passed through in 14 months, and nearly 13,000 died, a mortality rate of about 28 percent.

Prisoners received poorly milled corn flour and little firewood to cook it, and a single creek served as both water supply and latrine, spreading scurvy, dysentery, typhoid and likely hookworm. When the Andersonville Raiders began robbing and killing fellow inmates, prisoners formed the Regulators, held trials with a judge, Peter McCullough, and juries of new arrivals, and hanged six Raider leaders. After liberation in May 1865, commandant Henry Wirz was tried by military tribunal, convicted on evidence including a Confederate surgeon's inspection report, and hanged in November 1865.

• In July 1864 Wirz paroled five prisoners to carry a petition for renewed exchanges to the Union, and after it failed they returned to the camp as they had sworn.
• Prisoners played dead to be carried out with corpses until Wirz ordered surgeons to examine every body.
• Of 45,000 prisoners, only 351 escaped, and Army records show 32 reached Union lines.
• Dorence Atwater, assigned to keep the death register, secretly copied it and smuggled it out, and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune published it.
• Quartermaster's office worker James Duncan was convicted of manslaughter, and the Women's Relief Corps later planted grass, pecan orchards and roses on the site.