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A sutler, or victualler, was a civilian merchant who followed an army and sold provisions from a wagon or canvas tent, often close to the front lines. This episode traces the trade from the Dutch word soetelaar, meaning a drudge or scullion, related to a root meaning to foul or sully, to its role in the American Civil War and beyond. Sutlers needed a license from the post or army commander, set up within army limits or just off the defense line, and were subject to military rules on what they sold and at what price.

Because commanders needed sutlers to keep soldiers supplied with coffee, sugar, tobacco and alcohol, rules were often loosely enforced, and sutlers held a monopoly on comforts in camps far from towns. During the Civil War, when coins were scarce, they minted brass and copper sutler tokens redeemable only at their own wagons. Between 1865 and 1890, at permanent forts in the American West, sutler stores just outside post boundaries became centers of gambling, drinking and prostitution. Today the word survives among Civil War reenactment vendors and in the British Army's Honourable Artillery Company.

• Sutler wagons loaded with sugar, coffee and whiskey were prime targets for enemy raiding parties.
• Dealings with a sutler feature in MacKinlay Kantor's 1955 novel Andersonville.
• Soldiers sometimes handed over a whole paycheck for a sack of tokens, locking them into one merchant much like a company store.
• Commanders tolerated frontier vice dens because unbroken discipline in isolated posts risked desertion and mutiny.
• At its Finsbury headquarters in London, the Honourable Artillery Company calls its all-ranks bar the Sutling Room, and in the field it uses a Sutling Tent or Sutling Lorry.

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Rose Greenhow, born Maria Rosetta O'Neal around 1813 on a Maryland plantation, lost her father in 1817 when his valet killed him. Around 1830 she and her sister Ellen moved to Washington to live with their aunt, Maria Ann Hill, who ran a fashionable boarding house in the Old Capitol building where congressmen lived in mess groups. In 1835 she married State Department official Dr. Robert Greenhow Jr. with Dolley Madison's blessing. Widowed in 1854, she hosted a salon for Southern sympathizers and admired John C. Calhoun, and Captain Thomas Jordan handed her his spy network and a 26-symbol cipher.

In July 1861 she obtained General Irvin McDowell's marching orders, and courier Betty Duvall carried them to General P.G.T. Beauregard woven into her hair, before the Confederate victory at Bull Run. Allan Pinkerton put her under house arrest in August, then moved her and her eight-year-old daughter to the Old Capitol Prison, the same building where she grew up. Exiled south in 1862, she traveled to Europe as a Confederate envoy. Returning in October 1864, her blockade runner Condor ran aground off Wilmington while chased by the USS Niphon, and her rowboat capsized.

• Pinkerton's raid found burned cipher scraps, fortification maps and love letters attributed to Senator Henry Wilson, though biographers doubt he wrote them.
• Her home became a makeshift prison called Fort Greenhow, where she kept smuggling notes in dress hems and guards' boots.
• At the Old Capitol Prison she signaled couriers by arranging candles and blinds in her window, and flew a Confederate flag from the bars.
• In Europe she was received by Napoleon III and Queen Victoria and published the bestselling My Imprisonment and the First Year of Abolition Rule at Washington.
• She drowned weighed down by about $2,000 in gold sewn into her clothes, and her grave in Wilmington calls her a bearer of dispatches.

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The Confederate States of America drafted a constitution, printed currency and fought a four-year war, yet no foreign government ever recognized it. This episode examines how it was built and why it failed. Secession followed Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election on a platform to stop slavery's expansion into the territories. The Deep South left before his March 1861 inauguration, while Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina left only after Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops. Missouri and Kentucky ended up with rival governments, and western Virginia broke away to rejoin the Union.

The Confederate constitution protected slavery in any new territories, set a single six-year presidential term and gave the president a line-item veto, while state governors used states' rights to defy Jefferson Davis and the absence of political parties left Congress gridlocked. The King Cotton embargo of 1861 failed as Britain drew on stockpiles and new supplies from India and Egypt. After 1865, groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy built the Lost Cause through textbook committees and monuments, and the battle flag returned with the Dixiecrats in 1948.

• More than 100,000 Southerners fought for the Union, and the Confederacy suspended habeas corpus and imposed martial law in East Tennessee.
• Frederick Douglass and Sarah Parker Remond toured Britain speaking against slavery, and the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation closed the door to European intervention.
• The Anaconda Plan blockaded 3,500 miles of coastline and split the Confederacy along the Mississippi.
• Incompatible track gauges forced cargo to be unloaded and reloaded, leaving food rotting at depots while Richmond saw bread riots.
• The Confederacy signed treaties with the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee nations, which the U.S. later used to demand land cessions.

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Maria Isabella Boyd was born in 1844 in Martinsburg, Virginia, now West Virginia, and sent to a Baltimore finishing school at 12. On July 4, 1861, when Union soldiers came to raise a flag at her family's home and one insulted her mother, the 17-year-old shot and killed him. A military board cleared her, but sentries watched the house. She charmed the officers posted there, including Captain Daniel Keily, wrote what they let slip in cipher, and had Eliza Hopewell, a woman enslaved by her family, carry the messages past checkpoints in a hollowed-out watch case.

In May 1862 at Front Royal, she listened through an enlarged knothole as General James Shields planned to move troops east, then used forged passes to ride through Union lines with the news. Stonewall Jackson took Front Royal on May 23 and thanked her in a handwritten note. Arrested at least six times and tracked by Allan Pinkerton's men, she was exiled in 1864 after her blockade runner was captured, and in England she married Samuel Wylde Hardinge, the Union officer who had detained her. She later acted as Nina Benjamin and lectured on her spying until her death in Wisconsin in 1900.

• Her memoir's account of bullets piercing her skirt as she ran between the lines at Front Royal is likely embellished.
• Jackson awarded her the Southern Cross of Honor and honorary ranks of captain and aide-de-camp.
• Betrayed by a lover in July 1862, she was held in Washington's Old Capitol Prison for a month.
• Newspapers called her the Siren of the Shenandoah and the Cleopatra of the Secession.
• She died of a heart attack at 56 while on a speaking tour, and Union veterans served as her pallbearers.

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In 1862 the Confederacy, lacking shipyards, sent agent James Bulloch to Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, where John Laird Sons & Company built hull number 290, also called the Enrica. Britain's Foreign Enlistment Act barred arming a warship for a belligerent in British waters, so the ship was built with reinforced decks, bulwarks and deep magazines but no guns. On July 29, 1862, it slipped out on a trial run, and in the Azores Captain Raphael Semmes armed it from a supply ship, including a 100-pounder Blakely rifle, and commissioned it the CSS Alabama on August 24.

Semmes won over a mostly British crew of 83 with double wages in gold and a share of prize money. Over 534 days the Alabama captured or burned 65 Union merchant ships, took over 2,000 prisoners and sank the USS Hatteras. Worn out after 45,000 miles, it put into Cherbourg in June 1864, where the USS Kearsarge under John Ancrum Winslow waited. Semmes challenged it, and on June 19 the two ships circled seven times before the Alabama sank. In 1872 a Geneva arbitration ordered Britain to pay the United States $15.5 million in the Alabama claims.

• The Alabama could raise its brass propeller into the hull and lower its telescopic funnel to pass as a slow sailing merchantman.
• A Blakely shell lodged in the Kearsarge's sternpost but failed to explode because of degraded powder and fuses.
• The Kearsarge carried 120 fathoms of anchor chain along its sides, hidden behind planks painted black.
• Assistant surgeon David Herbert Llewellyn, who could not swim, refused a seat in an overloaded lifeboat and drowned.
• Semmes threw his sword into the sea and escaped to England on the British yacht Deerhound, and the wreck was found off Cherbourg in 1984.

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Patrick Cleburne was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1828, the son of a doctor. Orphaned at 15, he failed the entrance exam for Trinity College of Medicine in Dublin in 1846 and enlisted as a private in the British Army's 41st Regiment of Foot, guarding starving prisoners on Spike Island during the Great Famine. He bought his discharge, emigrated with three siblings to Helena, Arkansas, and worked as a pharmacist, studied law and co-owned a newspaper with Thomas C. Hindman. In 1856, after he was shot in the back by a Know Nothing gang, he turned and killed one attacker.

Cleburne rose from private in the Yell Rifles to major general by December 1862, fighting at Shiloh, Corinth and Stones River. In early 1864 he presented a written proposal to free enslaved people and enlist them in the Confederate army. General W.H.T. Walker sent it up the chain as an abolitionist plot, Jefferson Davis ordered it suppressed, and Cleburne was passed over for corps command three times. On November 30, 1864, he protested John Bell Hood's frontal assault at Franklin, then led it and was killed near the Union works.

• At Richmond, Kentucky, a minie ball struck his left cheek, smashed through his teeth and exited his mouth, yet he returned to command at Perryville.
• At Ringgold Gap in late 1863 his hidden rear guard halted a force about three times its size and earned him the thanks of the Confederate Congress.
• His proposal cited the Spartan helots, galley slaves at Lepanto and the revolts in Haiti.
• His body was found looted of boots, watch and sword the morning after Franklin.
• He was reburied at St. John's Episcopal Church near Mount Pleasant, which reminded him of Ireland, then moved to Helena in 1870.

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The Grand Army of the Republic began in Decatur, Illinois, on April 6, 1866, when Dr. Benjamin Franklin Stephenson formed a fraternal group for veterans of the Union Army, Navy and Marines, built on fraternity, charity and loyalty. Its local posts nearly collapsed by the early 1870s. As veterans aged and old wounds and illnesses caught up with them, new leaders turned the GAR into a pension lobby, using a structure of posts, state departments and a national command to send tens of thousands of letters to Congress and vote as a bloc against opponents.

In 1868, commander-in-chief John A. Logan's General Order No. 11 set May 30 as a day to decorate soldiers' graves, the origin of Memorial Day. Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison and McKinley were all GAR members, while Grover Cleveland, who had paid a substitute, vetoed hundreds of private pension bills. Because only those who served from 1861 to 1865 could join, membership peaked at over 400,000 in 1890 and then dwindled. The 83rd and final encampment met in Indianapolis in 1949, and the GAR dissolved in 1956 when its last member, Albert Woolson, died.

• Robert A. Pinn, an African American veteran, was elected commander of a predominantly white GAR post in Ohio.
• Pension files of Black Union soldiers are now a major source for African American genealogy.
• Sarah Emma Edmonds, who served as Franklin Thompson in the 2nd Michigan Infantry, won a pension and was admitted to the GAR in 1897.
• Kady Brownell, who served alongside her husband in Rhode Island regiments, has the GAR insignia engraved on her gravestone.
• U.S. Route 6 is designated the Grand Army of the Republic Highway along its entire length.

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On May 12 and 13, 1865, more than a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Union and Confederate troops fought at Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, Texas. Commanders in South Texas knew of Lee's surrender, but Edmund Kirby Smith's Trans-Mississippi Department had rejected John Pope's surrender terms. The two sides had kept an unofficial truce, with Union troops at Brazos Santiago and Confederates holding Brownsville, where cotton crossed the Rio Grande to neutral Matamoros, out of reach of the Union blockade.

Union Colonel Theodore H. Barrett, 30, had never seen combat, and his brigade included about 300 dismounted cavalrymen without horses. He sent Lieutenant Colonel David Branson with men of the 62nd U.S. Colored Troops inland, but Captain William N. Robinson's small force stalled them. On May 13, Colonel John Rip Ford arrived with artillery and drove the Union troops into a bend of the Rio Grande, capturing dozens. Ford, who had called the force a mongrel army, paroled the Black prisoners, and later testified in defense of the Union officer Barrett had court-martialed.

• The 2nd Texas Cavalry, a Union unit largely of Hispanic Texans, fought there, and Colonel Santos Benavides was the highest-ranking Hispanic officer in either army.
• Soldiers reported shots fired from the Mexican side of the river and claims of French involvement, which remain unverified.
• Barrett reported one Union death, but historians estimate about 30, many likely drowned in the Rio Grande.
• Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana is recorded as the last combat fatality of the battle and arguably of the war.
• Stand Watie, a Cherokee leader, did not surrender until June 23, 1865, and the insurrection was not declared over until August 1866.

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Samuel Rush Watkins was born in June 1839 in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, and was educated at Jackson College. When Tennessee seceded in May 1861, the 21-year-old enlisted in Company H of the 1st Tennessee Infantry, the unit he later spelled out as Co. Aytch. As a corporal in the Western Theater he fought at Shiloh, the siege of Corinth, Perryville, Chickamauga, the Atlanta campaign at Rocky Face Ridge, Resaca and Kennesaw Mountain, and the Battle of Nashville, and was wounded at Stones River and again at Atlanta.

In April 1865, Watkins was one of only seven men from his original company who surrendered to William T. Sherman in North Carolina. He returned to Maury County, married Virginia Mayes that year and farmed for more than a decade. In 1881, surrounded by children who never knew the war, he began writing columns for the Columbia Herald, collected in 1882 as Co. Aytch. Uninterested in defending secession or grand strategy, he wrote with humor and grief about hunger, cold, stolen chickens and lost friends.

• Shiloh in 1862 produced more casualties than all previous American wars combined up to that point.
• Watkins described the morning of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, 1864, with a sky like brass, ground like baked iron and a lone woodpecker tapping before the guns opened.
• The fighting at Kennesaw's Dead Angle was so intense that it cut down full-grown trees.
• Watkins died in July 1901 at 62 and was buried with military honors at Zion Cemetery in Maury County.
• Ken Burns quoted him heavily in the 1990 documentary The Civil War, and his Kennesaw account inspired the folk song Kennesaw Line.

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Oliver Otis Howard, born in Leeds, Maine, in 1830, lost his father at nine, graduated from Bowdoin College and finished fourth in the West Point class of 1854. While stationed in Florida during the Seminole Wars he underwent an evangelical conversion and nearly resigned to become a minister, but the Civil War intervened and he became known as the Christian General. After losing his right arm at Fair Oaks in June 1862, Philip Kearny, who had lost his left arm years earlier, joked that the two could now shop for gloves together.

Commanding the largely German 11th Corps, Howard left his flank unentrenched at Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson's 12-mile flank march routed it, and at Gettysburg his corps broke again, though he placed a reserve division on Cemetery Hill. Sent west, he performed well at Chattanooga and Sherman gave him the Army of the Tennessee over John A. Logan. From 1865 to 1874 he ran the Freedmen's Bureau, clashing with Andrew Johnson, then went west, where he negotiated peace with Cochise and fought the Nez Perce War.

• Hooker warned that Howard's position at Chancellorsville was in the air, and many of his men were cooking dinner when Jackson attacked.
• At Gettysburg, Howard argued with Winfield S. Hancock over command and blamed Abner Doubleday's I Corps, a claim historians later found false.
• Asked by Sherman as a Christian gentleman, Howard let Logan lead the Army of the Tennessee in the Grand Review.
• He helped found Howard University in 1867 and served as its president, and also helped found Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee.
• Chief Joseph blamed Howard for the Nez Perce War, saying he refused the tribe time to gather their livestock before moving.