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Thomas Jonathan Jackson was born in 1824 in Clarksburg, in present-day West Virginia, lost his sister and father to typhoid as a toddler, and was orphaned by age seven. Raised by bachelor uncles at Jackson's Mill, he traded reading lessons to an enslaved man in exchange for pine knots to read by, and that man later escaped to Canada. Jackson entered West Point at the bottom of his class in 1842 and graduated 17th of 59. This episode examines the rigid personal code he formed, from refusing an order to withdraw at Chapultepec to obeying an order to fire on civilians in Mexico City.

At the Virginia Military Institute from 1851, Jackson was a failure in the classroom, repeating memorized lectures louder when cadets were confused, and earned the nickname Tom Fool. He ran a Sunday school for Black residents of Lexington in defiance of state law while enslaving six people. The episode then covers First Bull Run and the disputed meaning of Barnard Bee's stone wall remark, the 1862 Valley Campaign, his habit of keeping plans from his own generals, and the night at Chancellorsville in May 1863 when the 18th North Carolina fired on his party. He died of pneumonia on May 10, 1863.

• Primary accounts from his staff and wife do not support the legend that he constantly sucked lemons.
• He often rode with one arm raised, believing his blood did not circulate properly.
• In the Valley his men marched 50 minutes and rested 10, covering 646 miles in 48 days.
• His amputated left arm was buried in its own marked grave.
• His sister Laura, a staunch Unionist, said she would rather know he was dead than see him lead a rebel army.

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Traveller was foaled in 1857 in Greenbrier County, Virginia, sired by the racehorse Grey Eagle out of a mare named Flora, and first named Jeff Davis. Trained by an enslaved boy named Frank Winfield Page, the iron gray American Saddlebred grew to 16 hands and about 1,100 pounds and won ribbons at the Lewisburg fair. Captain Joseph M. Brown bought him for $175 and renamed him Greenbrier, and in February 1862 Robert E. Lee bought him for $200. This episode explains why his smooth four-beat gait suited a commander who spent long days in the saddle.

At Second Bull Run, Traveller spooked while Lee held his bridle on foot, and Lee fell and broke both hands. After the war the horse lived with Lee at Washington College in Lexington, where visitors plucked his tail hairs as souvenirs. He walked behind Lee's casket in 1870, then died of tetanus in 1871 after stepping on a nail. The episode follows his remains through exhumation, a skeleton exhibited in Rochester, New York, a university basement where students carved initials into the bones, a 1971 burial in concrete, and a new headstone in 2023.

• Lee's other mounts included Lucy Long, who lived to 34, Richmond, Brown Roan, and Ajax.
• Lee wrote to his daughter Mildred that the souvenir hunters were making Traveller look like a plucked chicken.
• Journalist Joseph Bryan paid in 1907 to bring the skeleton back to Lexington.
• When President Thomas Burish closed the stable doors kept open for Traveller's spirit, he had them painted a shade called Traveller Green.
• Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, published the novel Traveller in 1988, narrated by the horse.

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After David Farragut's fleet ran past Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip in late April 1862, New Orleans, the Confederacy's richest port, fell almost without a fight. On May 1, Major General Benjamin Butler, a Massachusetts lawyer and Democratic politician, arrived as military governor with about 5,000 troops to hold a hostile city of 150,000. This episode explains his background, including the contraband of war ruling at Fort Monroe in 1861, where he used Confederate property law to refuse the return of people who had escaped slavery.

New Orleans women spat on soldiers, left streetcars, and emptied chamber pots from balconies, so on May 15, 1862 Butler issued General Order No. 28, the Woman Order, which drew condemnation in the British House of Lords and earned him the name Beast. He hanged William B. Mumford for tearing down a U.S. flag and was called Spoons over rumors of stolen silver. He also imposed strict sanitation, set a quarantine station 70 miles downriver, and funded food relief by seizing money from Confederate donors. In December 1862 he was replaced by Nathaniel Banks, whose Red River campaign followed.

• The secession convention delegates were said to represent only about 5 percent of Louisiana's citizens.
• Merchants sold chamber pots with Butler's face painted on the bottom.
• Jefferson Davis declared Butler an outlaw and a felon.
• When Confederates attacked Baton Rouge in August 1862, the expected civilian uprising in New Orleans never came.
• Farragut later said Butler was the right man in the right place in New Orleans.

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In early 1862, Confederate Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley persuaded Jefferson Davis to back an invasion up the Rio Grande from the Confederate Arizona Territory, with plans to seize the Colorado gold fields and then Pacific ports in Southern California. After occupying Santa Fe in March 1862, his Texans needed Fort Union, and the road there ran through Glorieta Pass in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This episode covers the Colorado volunteers under Colonel John P. Slough who marched about 400 miles from Denver in 14 days to block them.

On March 26 at Apache Canyon, Major John M. Chivington's men climbed the canyon walls and drove back Major Charles Pyron's Texas veterans. Both sides reinforced, and on March 28 William R. Scurry's Confederates pushed Slough's force back from Pigeon's Ranch to Kozlowski's Ranch. Meanwhile, Chivington's detachment, guided by Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Chaves, found the Confederate supply train at Johnson's Ranch and destroyed it. Without supplies, the Confederates retreated to Santa Fe and eventually San Antonio. The episode also covers the dispute over who deserved credit for the raid and the Gettysburg of the West label.

• Slough divided his army, sending Chivington with about 400 men on a wide loop through the mountains.
• Confederates seized high ground later called Sharpshooter's Ridge and forced a Union retreat at Pigeon's Ranch.
• At Johnson's Ranch, Union troops burned 80 wagons, spiked cannons, and killed or scattered about 500 horses and mules.
• Indian affairs official James Collins said Chivington had to be persuaded for two hours before descending on the wagons.
• A mass grave with the remains of 30 Confederate soldiers was found at Pigeon's Ranch in 1987, now within Pecos National Historical Park.

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John Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Hudson, Ohio, where his father Owen ran a tannery, sheltered escaped slaves, and employed Jesse Grant, father of Ulysses S. Grant. At 12, Brown watched a man beat an enslaved boy with an iron shovel, and his strict Calvinist faith turned that memory into a sense of divine mandate. This episode traces his adult life as a father of 20 children who failed as a surveyor, wool merchant, postmaster, and bank director, was wiped out in the Panic of 1837, and declared bankruptcy in 1842.

While his businesses collapsed, Brown ran an effective Underground Railroad station from a Pennsylvania tannery with a hidden ventilated room. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act pushed him toward violence: in Kansas he led the Pottawatomie killings of May 1856, fought at Black Jack and Osawatomie, and lost his son Frederick. In October 1859 he seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry with a provisional constitution in hand, but no uprising followed. Captured by Marines under Robert E. Lee, he was convicted after 45 minutes of jury deliberation and hanged on December 2, 1859.

• In 1843 alone, three of Brown's children died of dysentery.
• His station is estimated to have helped about 2,500 people reach safety over roughly 10 years.
• An Ohio church expelled him after he seated a Black man in his family pew.
• His raiders cut the telegraph wires and took hostages including Colonel Lewis Washington, great-grandnephew of George Washington.
• Church bells rang in Northern cities on the day of his execution, and Union troops later marched to the song John Brown's Body.

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Fitz John Porter was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1822 into a naval family that included David Farragut and David Dixon Porter, but chose West Point, graduating eighth in 1845 and earning brevet promotions in Mexico. Commanding the Fifth Corps under George McClellan in 1862, he fought skillfully at Gaines' Mill and Malvern Hill. This episode opens with April 1862 at Yorktown, when Porter went up alone in a hydrogen reconnaissance balloon, the tether snapped, and he drifted over Confederate lines while sketching their positions before venting gas and landing safely behind Union lines.

At Second Bull Run on August 29, 1862, John Pope ordered Porter to attack Stonewall Jackson's flank while keeping contact with John F. Reynolds, unaware that James Longstreet's wing stood in Porter's path. Porter held back. The next day Longstreet's counterattack crushed Pope's assault, and Porter's reserve of New York troops helped slow it. Pope accused him of insubordination, and after McClellan's removal Porter was court-martialed and dismissed in January 1863. He spent the following decades gathering evidence, including from Confederate officers, until the Schofield Commission cleared him in 1878 and Grover Cleveland signed relief in 1886.

• Porter's father, a naval captain, had been moved to land duty because of alcoholism.
• Pope's single written order required Porter to attack Jackson and stay in contact with Reynolds, which the terrain made impossible.
• About 5,000 New York troops Porter held on his left took the brunt of Longstreet's August 30 counterattack.
• After his dismissal he turned down a command in the Egyptian army and later served as New York City's public works, police, and fire commissioner.
• Two days after Congress restored his rank in 1886, he retired voluntarily.

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Pauline Cushman was born Harriet Wood in New Orleans in 1833 to a Spanish merchant father and a French mother, and grew up at a family trading post in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After her 1862 stage debut in Louisville, Kentucky, two Confederate sympathizers paid her to toast Jefferson Davis in public. She did, was fired by her theater company, and used the resulting reputation as cover while offering her services to the Union Army. This episode follows how she befriended Confederate officers and smuggled battle plans and drawings out of enemy territory hidden in her shoes.

Cushman was wounded twice and caught twice in 1863. The second time she was brought before General Braxton Bragg, tried, and sentenced to hang. Already ill, she exaggerated her symptoms, the execution was postponed, and retreating Confederates left her behind when Union troops advanced. James A. Garfield gave her a brevet rank of major and Lincoln made her an honorary major. She lectured on her exploits and worked with P.T. Barnum, but her later years brought the deaths of children, a failed marriage, poverty, and a $12 monthly pension drawn from her first husband's service.

• Her reputation was built on a publicly staged toast to Jefferson Davis that got her fired.
• She sometimes crossed enemy territory dressed in a man's uniform.
• Ferdinand Sarmiento wrote an embellished biography of her based on her notes.
• Her adopted daughter Emma died in Arizona in 1888 at age six, and she separated from Jere Fryer in 1890.
• She died in San Francisco in December 1893 and was buried with military honors at the Presidio, under a stone reading Union Spy.

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On April 1, 1865, after nearly 10 months of siege at Petersburg, the dirt crossroads of Five Forks guarded the South Side Railroad, Robert E. Lee's last supply line. Lee ordered George Pickett to hold it at all hazards, but Pickett's exhausted men, fresh from fighting at Dinwiddie Court House, built a thin line of shallow ditches and pine logs about a mile and three quarters long, ending in a vulnerable refused flank. That afternoon Pickett and Fitzhugh Lee rode off to a shad bake hosted by Thomas Rosser across Hatcher's Run without telling anyone they were leaving.

A temperature inversion and dense pine forest created an acoustic shadow, so the generals heard nothing while Philip Sheridan's assault struck their line. Gouverneur K. Warren's Fifth Corps, delayed by mud and a collapsed bridge at Gravelly Run, swung too far east but came out behind the Confederate flank and rolled it up. Thousands surrendered, Lee informed the government that Petersburg and Richmond must be evacuated, and the Appomattox campaign began. That evening Sheridan relieved Warren of command, a decision a court of inquiry overturned in 1883, months after Warren's death.

• The shad for the lunch had been caught in the Nottoway River and brought up to the lines packed on ice.
• Artillery chief Colonel Willie Pegram was the senior officer on the field without knowing the generals had left.
• Pegram was mortally wounded at the crossroads after ordering his gunners to fire canister low.
• Estimates of Confederates captured range from 2,400 to 4,000, against just over 800 Union casualties.
• Warren asked to be buried in civilian clothes rather than an Army uniform.

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The 54th Massachusetts Infantry was raised in early 1863 under the shadow of Jefferson Davis's December 1862 proclamation that captured Black soldiers and their officers would be put to death. Governor John A. Andrew built the regiment through abolitionist networks, with Frederick Douglass recruiting and sending his own sons, and appointed Robert Gould Shaw as colonel and Norwood Penrose Hallowell as lieutenant colonel. This episode follows the regiment from its first raid on Darien, Georgia, where Shaw protested James Montgomery's order to burn the town, through Grimball's Landing and the July 18, 1863 assault on Fort Wagner.

After Wagner, Black sergeants and corporals held the shattered companies together, and the regiment opened a second front against its own government. Promised $13 a month, the men were offered $10 minus a $3 clothing deduction and refused all pay for 18 months, even when Massachusetts offered to cover the difference. At Olustee, Florida, in February 1864, they covered the Union retreat and hauled a train of wounded men by hand, only for General Joseph Hawley to demand that newspapers deny them credit. The episode closes with Shaw's burial, the Saint-Gaudens memorial, and the regiment's 2008 reactivation.

• Only 250 men of the 54th halted an advance by 900 Confederates at Grimball's Landing on James Island.
• Of about 600 men who charged Fort Wagner, 270 were killed, wounded, or missing.
• Colonel Edward Hallowell had his men swear they owed no man unrequited labor on or before April 19, 1861, so all could claim equal back pay.
• During the Olustee retreat the regiment fired over 20,000 rounds and pulled a broken-down train for three miles, a 42-hour ordeal.
• Hawley wrote that the officer who credited the 54th with saving the day deserved to be shot.

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In May 1865, one month after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Washington was still draped in black bunting when President Andrew Johnson declared on May 10 that armed resistance was virtually at an end. Government authorities ordered a formal review of the troops, and about 145,000 soldiers converged on the capital: the Army of the Potomac arriving on May 12, the Army of the Tennessee by train, and William T. Sherman's Army of Georgia marching up from North Carolina after the Carolinas campaign. This episode explains how the two-day Grand Review was staged to replace national grief with a visible display of order and survival.

Before the parade, rivalry between the Eastern and Western armies spilled into brawls in the city's taverns, and Sherman drilled his men relentlessly, fearing they would look like an unpolished horde beside the better supplied Easterners. On May 23, General George Gordon Meade led about 80,000 men down Pennsylvania Avenue in a six-hour procession. On May 24, Sherman's 65,000 followed, trailed by freed people, laborers, scavengers, and livestock taken in the Carolinas. Within a week the armies were mustered out, while the episode notes that violence moved into guerrilla bands, outlaw gangs, and the Ku Klux Klan.

• A single signal gun fired at 9 a.m. on May 23 to start the review, with infantry marching 12 men across.
• The Army of the Potomac's cavalry alone formed a continuous line about seven miles long.
• Meade dismounted at the White House reviewing stand and joined Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant to watch his own army pass.
• A herd of cattle taken from Carolina farms brought up the rear of Sherman's procession past the Treasury building.
• The modern National Memorial Day Parade follows parts of the same route along Constitution Avenue.