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Sally Louisa Tompkins was born on November 9, 1833, at Poplar Grove, a Virginia tidewater estate. Her father died before she turned five, and in 1842 an epidemic killed three of her sisters, Martha, Harriet and Elizabeth, within weeks. She began nursing the sick in her community, and in 1854 moved with her family to Richmond. When trains brought hundreds of wounded men into the city after the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, the 28-year-old took over Judge John Robertson's house and turned it into a hospital staffed by women from St. James Episcopal Church and enslaved workers.

When Jefferson Davis ordered all military hospitals placed under military command, Robertson Hospital faced closure. On September 9, 1861, Davis commissioned Tompkins a captain in the Confederate States Army, making her the first woman formally inducted into an American army. She wrote on the commission that she refused to be placed on the payroll. Her strict cleaning, frequent bandage changes and ventilation produced the lowest mortality rate of any military hospital, Union or Confederate. After Richmond fell in April 1865, she persuaded the Union medical director to let her keep the hospital open two more months.

• Robertson Hospital treated 1,334 wounded soldiers over four years, and only 73 died.
• As Union blockades choked Richmond, the hospital hired a blockade runner to bring in medical supplies.
• Diarist Mary Chesnut called her our Florence Nightingale, and she declined several marriage proposals from soldiers she treated.
• She spent her inherited fortune on charity, moved into the Confederate Women's Home in 1905, and was buried with military honors in 1916.
• A 1960s statue designed by Salvador Dali drew public outrage and was never built, and the hospital site is now a 24-hour diner.

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Joseph Eggleston Johnston, born in 1807 into a prominent Virginia family whose mother was a niece of Patrick Henry, graduated from West Point in 1829, 13th in the class in which Robert E. Lee finished second. Trained as a civil engineer, he was ambushed as a civilian topographic engineer in the Second Seminole War, reportedly with some 30 bullet holes through his clothing and a scar across his scalp. He was wounded by grapeshot at Cerro Gordo and again at Chapultepec, and by 1860 he was quartermaster general of the U.S. Army.

After Virginia seceded, Johnston was the highest-ranking U.S. officer to resign, yet Jefferson Davis ranked him fourth among the Confederacy's full generals, arguing his general's star had been a staff rank. Johnston's furious reply began a feud that shaped the war. He deferred to Beauregard at First Bull Run, was wounded at Seven Pines and replaced by Lee, saw Davis go around him at Vicksburg, and was removed before Atlanta for his Fabian retreats against Sherman. In 1865 he surrendered nearly 90,000 troops at Bennett Place, the largest surrender of the war.

• Winfield Scott remarked that Johnston had an unfortunate knack for getting himself shot in nearly every engagement.
• When Lee brought news that Johnston's nephew Preston had been killed in Mexico, the two officers wept together.
• Davis ordered John Pemberton to hold Vicksburg at all costs, overriding Johnston's order to abandon the city and save the army.
• Sherman issued 10 days of rations to Johnston's surrendered troops, and Grant later wrote that Johnston's tactics were right.
• At Sherman's funeral in 1891, Johnston, 84, kept his hat off in freezing rain, caught a cold that became pneumonia, and died a month later.

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In August 1862, Major General John Pope took command of the new Union Army of Virginia with orders to take the fight to the enemy, while George McClellan's army moved by water to join him. Robert E. Lee had to strike before the two armies combined. This episode follows the Second Battle of Bull Run as a study in confirmation bias, beginning with Lee splitting his army and sending Stonewall Jackson on a march of roughly 50 miles in two days around Pope's right flank to capture and burn the Union supply depot at Manassas Junction.

Jackson then hid his men behind an unfinished railroad grade on Stony Ridge and revealed himself at Brawner's Farm, where John Gibbon's Black Hat Brigade traded volleys with the Stonewall Brigade at about 80 yards. Pope convinced himself Jackson was retreating, sent in piecemeal assaults, disregarded John Buford's report of Longstreet's arrival, and issued a contradictory Joint Order to Fitz John Porter. On August 30, Longstreet's 25,000 men struck the Union left in the largest simultaneous mass assault of the war.

• Jackson rode alone into an open field in a dusty plain uniform to count a passing Union column, then ordered his artillery to open fire.
• At Brawner's Farm, about one in three men on the field was shot during more than two hours of standing volleys.
• Confederate brigades under Bradley Johnson and Leroy Stafford ran out of ammunition and threw rocks at the 24th New York, who threw them back.
• A rearguard on Chinn Ridge and Henry House Hill, ground from the first battle 13 months earlier, kept Pope's army from total collapse.
• Pope was sent to Minnesota for the Dakota War, while Porter was court-martialed and not exonerated until the 1880s.

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In May 1864, after two days of fighting in the burning thickets of the Wilderness, the Army of the Potomac expected the usual order to fall back toward Washington. Instead, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant marched it south. This episode follows the eight-week Overland Campaign between Grant and Robert E. Lee, starting with Grant's plan to advance five Union armies on the same day, including Sherman in Georgia, Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley and Butler on the James River, and his directive that wherever Lee goes, the army would go also.

The campaign moved from the Wilderness to a race for Spotsylvania Court House, where Colonel Emory Upton's dense, capped-rifle column briefly broke the Confederate line and Grant's May 12 assault on the Mule Shoe Salient produced the Bloody Angle. Philip Sheridan's cavalry raid killed J.E.B. Stuart at Yellow Tavern but left Grant without scouts, and he walked into Lee's inverted V at the North Anna River just as Lee fell ill. After the failed June 3 assault at Cold Harbor, Grant slipped his army across the James toward Petersburg, forcing Lee into the siege he feared most.

• Texas troops refused to advance in the Wilderness until Lee, riding Traveller forward to lead the charge, went to the rear.
• At the Bloody Angle, rain ruined gunpowder, men fought with clubbed muskets and bayonets, and musket fire cut down oak trees nearly two feet thick.
• At North Anna, with Longstreet wounded, Stuart dead, A.P. Hill sick and Ewell broken down, no one ordered the attack while Lee lay bedridden.
• After Cold Harbor, neither commander wanted to request a truce, and most of the wounded between the lines died before one was arranged.
• Union engineers built a 2,200-foot pontoon bridge over the James in about seven hours, carrying over 100,000 men and 5,000 wagons.

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Fort Pillow stood on a bluff above the Mississippi River in Tennessee, held in April 1864 by about 600 Union men, roughly half white West Tennessee Unionists and half United States Colored Troops. A May 1863 Confederate law meant captured Black soldiers faced state slave codes rather than prisoner of war camps. The fort's parapet was so thick that defenders could not fire down at its base without climbing on top. This episode follows Nathan Bedford Forrest's attack on April 12, 1864, when sharpshooters killed Major Lionel F. Booth and fired from barracks the garrison had failed to burn.

At about 3:30 p.m. Forrest demanded surrender within 20 minutes, and Major William F. Bradford refused, apparently counting on the gunboat USS New Era. Confederates used a human ladder to scale the wall, and the defenders fled to the riverbank, but the gunboat had sealed its ports and never fired. Union testimony and a Confederate sergeant's letter describe men shot while trying to surrender. Nearly 300 Union soldiers died. The episode covers the congressional investigation, Forrest's revised report, the split in Lincoln's cabinet over retaliation, and Lincoln's decision not to execute Confederate prisoners.

• Forrest's force is estimated at 1,500 to 2,500 cavalrymen against roughly 600 defenders.
• Bradford answered Forrest using the dead Booth's name and asked for an hour, which Forrest refused.
• About 60 percent of the white soldiers were taken prisoner, compared with about 20 percent of the Black soldiers.
• Reports from the fort's surgeon and the gunboat captain said noncombatants had been evacuated to barges before the battle.
• Lincoln told Frederick Douglass he feared retaliatory executions would start an endless cycle of bloodshed.

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By the 1860s New York City's merchants and bankers depended on Southern cotton, Mayor Fernando Wood had proposed in January 1861 that the city declare independence, and Tammany Hall was fast-tracking new Irish and German immigrants into citizenship. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 created the first national draft, with a $300 commutation fee roughly equal to a year's wages for a dockworker. This episode explains how labor fears sharpened by the Emancipation Proclamation, including an attack on about 200 Black dockworkers that March, set the stage for the riots of July 1863.

The draft began quietly on Saturday, July 11, but after names appeared in Sunday papers, a crowd led by volunteer fire company Engine 33, the Black Joke, burned the draft office at Third Avenue and 47th Street on Monday morning. Rioters cut telegraph lines, nearly killed Police Superintendent John Kennedy, and turned on Black New Yorkers, burning the Colored Orphan Asylum and lynching at least 11 Black men and boys. Governor Horatio Seymour's appeal failed, and more than 4,000 federal troops, some fresh from Gettysburg, restored order by Thursday. Official deaths numbered about 119 to 120, with some estimates far higher.

• By 1822 nearly half of New York City's exports were cotton shipments.
• Police and the asylum superintendent got about 230 children out the back of the orphanage as it was looted and burned.
• The mob wrecked James McCune Smith's pharmacy, believed to be the first owned by a Black man in the United States.
• New York Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond set up Gatling guns in the paper's windows.
• In March 1864 the 20th U.S. Colored Infantry paraded through the city before about 100,000 spectators.

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Henry Wager Halleck, born in 1815 on a farm in Westernville, New York, ran away to an uncle in Utica to escape farm work and became a prodigy at West Point, teaching classes while still a cadet. He studied French fortifications in Europe, wrote an 1846 textbook on military tactics shaped by Antoine-Henri Jomini, helped write California's constitution, and grew rich in San Francisco as a lawyer, railroad president, and quicksilver mine director. This episode follows how the man called Old Brains brought order to the Department of the Missouri in 1861 and then clashed with Ulysses S. Grant.

Halleck took credit for Grant's victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, briefly sidelined him over paperwork, and after Shiloh took personal command of 100,000 men for an advance on Corinth at less than a mile a day. P.G.T. Beauregard evacuated the town while Halleck dug in. Named general-in-chief, he acted as an adviser rather than issuing orders, and Lincoln called him a first-rate clerk. As chief of staff from 1864 he ran Union logistics, but in April 1865 he turned on William T. Sherman over surrender terms, a break Sherman made public at a Richmond review.

• Halleck married Elizabeth Hamilton, a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton.
• His Montgomery Block was San Francisco's first fireproof building, set on a foundation of interlaced redwood logs.
• At Corinth, Confederates ran empty trains in with whistles and cheering to suggest reinforcements were arriving.
• Sherman ordered his army to march past Halleck's Richmond headquarters without saluting.
• Halleck helped popularize the name Alaska and died in Louisville in 1872 at age 56.

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Philip Sheridan, a son of Irish Catholic immigrants raised in Somerset, Ohio, stood about five foot five and began as a dry goods clerk. At West Point he was suspended for a year after threatening classmate William Terrill with a bayonet, then served on the Pacific Northwest frontier. This episode shows how his bookkeeping mattered early in the Civil War, when Henry Halleck had him untangle a $12 million mess left by John C. Fremont in Missouri and he refused to pay officers for horses taken from civilians, telling his commander no authority could compel him to steal.

Made colonel of the 2nd Michigan Cavalry in May 1862, Sheridan rose to major general and led an unauthorized charge up Missionary Ridge in November 1863. Ulysses S. Grant brought him east, where he clashed with George Meade, saw his troopers mortally wound J.E.B. Stuart at Yellow Tavern, burned the Shenandoah Valley, and rallied his army at Cedar Creek. After Appomattox he ruled Texas and Louisiana under martial law, ran winter campaigns on the Plains, and in the 1880s fought developers and poachers in Yellowstone, sending in the U.S. Cavalry in 1886. He died in 1888 at 57.

• Lincoln joked that Sheridan's arms were long enough to scratch his ankles without bending over.
• Showered with dirt by a shell after toasting Confederate officers at Missionary Ridge, he called it damn ungenerous and charged the guns.
• In New Orleans he refused to let police enforce segregated streetcars, and Andrew Johnson later removed him.
• The episode notes that the quote about the only good Indian appeared in print over a century later and that Sheridan denied saying it.
• He brought President Chester A. Arthur to Yellowstone and helped limit commercial development there to 10 acres.

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On July 18, 1863, Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore sent Union infantry against Fort Wagner on Morris Island, which guarded the southern approach to Charleston Harbor. The only approach was a strip of beach about 60 yards wide between the Atlantic and the marsh of Vincent's Creek. An eight-hour land and naval bombardment, including six ironclad monitors within about 300 yards, did little damage because the fort's sand walls absorbed the shells and most of the garrison waited in a bombproof. This episode reconstructs the 7:45 p.m. assault led by the 54th Massachusetts under Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.

The defenders emerged to fire into the narrow column, and canister from pivoted howitzers tore through follow-up regiments, killing or mortally wounding General George C. Strong, Colonel Haldimand Putnam, Colonel John Lyman Chatfield, and Shaw. Gillmore then turned to a siege that churned up the dead in the sand until the Confederates abandoned the fort on September 7. The episode traces how the battle spurred Black enlistment, how Confederate refusal to treat Black soldiers as prisoners of war collapsed the Dix-Hill exchange cartel, and how the site was saved from development in 2008.

• The bombardment killed only about eight defenders and wounded about 20 more.
• The 6th Connecticut reached the fort's southeast bastion, where a Confederate regiment had not taken its post in time.
• Union casualties totaled about 1,515 against 174 Confederate, and Johnson Hagood reported burying 800 Union dead in a trench.
• Only 315 men of the 54th came through unhurt, and Sergeant William Harvey Carney later received the Medal of Honor.
• The Trust for Public Land bought the Morris Island site for $3 million to block a housing development.

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In 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas, seeking to organize territory for a transcontinental railroad, pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, replacing the Missouri Compromise line with popular sovereignty. Settlers would vote on slavery themselves, and both sides raced to fill Kansas: border ruffians from Missouri and Free Staters backed by groups such as the New England Emigrant Aid Company. This episode covers the fraudulent territorial elections of 1854 and 1855, President Franklin Pierce's firing of Governor Andrew Reeder, and the rival legislatures at Lecompton and Topeka.

Political conflict turned violent with the Wakarusa War in November 1855, the sack of Lawrence on May 21, 1856, and Preston Brooks's caning of Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate days later. John Brown answered with the Pottawatomie killings, and the Marais des Cygnes massacre followed in 1858. Meanwhile, four constitutions, Topeka, Lecompton, Leavenworth, and Wyandotte, competed for approval in Washington. Southern senators blocked statehood until their states seceded, and Kansas entered the Union as a free state on January 29, 1861. The episode notes that up to 200 people may have died.

• Henry Ward Beecher reportedly shipped Sharps rifles in crates labeled Bibles.
• A congressional committee counted 1,729 fraudulent votes against 1,114 legal ones, and one district had 226 nonresident voters and 35 residents.
• Pro-slavery forces at Lawrence burned the Free State Hotel and brought a stolen cannon called Old Kickapoo.
• Supporters mailed Brooks new canes, one inscribed Hit him again.
• In a monitored 1858 vote, Kansans rejected the Lecompton Constitution 11,812 to 1,926.