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Before dawn on Friday, August 21, 1863, about 450 Missouri guerrillas under William Quantrill, many of them teenagers lashed to their saddles after a 24-hour ride, entered Lawrence, Kansas. The town was the center of the free-state movement from the Bleeding Kansas years and the base of Jayhawkers and Red Legs led by men such as Senator James H. Lane, Charles Doc Jennison and James Montgomery, who raided western Missouri. Quantrill cited Lane's 1861 sacking of Osceola, Missouri, where nine men were executed after a drumhead court-martial. Then, on August 13, 1863, a Kansas City building used to hold female relatives of guerrillas under General Thomas Ewing Jr.'s General Order No. 10 collapsed, killing five young women, including 15-year-old Josephine Anderson, sister of William Bloody Bill Anderson.

Henry Thompson, a Black servant who saw the column, ran to Eudora to raise a warning that came too late. The raiders posted lookouts on Mount Oread, made the Eldridge House their headquarters, and carried lists of men to kill. Union troops had left for Fort Leavenworth and residents had earlier been disarmed. Over four hours they burned about a quarter of the town and killed more than 150 unarmed men and boys, including 18 of 23 recruits not yet mustered in. Lane escaped through a cornfield in his nightshirt, and former governor Charles L. Robinson watched from a stone barn the raiders avoided.

• Fifteen-year-old Billy Speer gave the raiders a false name, was released, and later shot one of them as they left town.
• The youngest victim is usually given as Bobby Martin, killed while wearing clothes made from his father's Union uniform.
• The H. M. Simpson family hid in a cornfield for three hours, the mother feeding her baby raw green corn to keep her quiet.
• Ewing's General Order No. 11 then evicted residents of four Missouri border counties, and Jennison's men burned so many homes that the chimneys left standing were called Jennison monuments.
• Quantrill died of wounds in Kentucky in 1865, while followers Frank and Jesse James survived the war.

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On December 18, 1860, after Abraham Lincoln's election and as Southern states threatened secession, Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden, a Constitutional Unionist and political heir to Henry Clay, introduced a package of six constitutional amendments and four congressional resolutions. The central amendment revived the Missouri Compromise line at 36 degrees 30 minutes and extended it to the Pacific, banning slavery north of it and recognizing and protecting it south of it in all territory held or hereafter acquired. Because the Dred Scott decision of 1857 had already struck down the old line, the plan aimed to place it beyond the reach of the Supreme Court and future Congresses.

Other amendments barred Congress from abolishing slavery on federal property in slave states, interfering with the interstate slave trade, or ending slavery in Washington, D.C., unless Maryland and Virginia abolished it first, district residents consented, and owners were compensated. A final amendment declared that no future amendment could change these provisions. The resolutions targeted Northern personal liberty laws, while the North was offered only minor changes to the Fugitive Slave Act. From Springfield, Lincoln told Republicans to accept no compromise on the extension of slavery, warning of a covenant of war reaching to Tierra del Fuego. The plan failed in committee and in both houses, and the Peace Conference of February 1861, led by John Tyler, also collapsed.

• Under the plan, the federal government would compensate owners when crowds rescued fugitives, then sue the county where the rescue happened.
• The North's concessions included ending the $10 versus $5 fee gap for commissioners and limiting marshals' power to draft bystanders.
• Lincoln's fear of expansion reflected 1850s filibuster expeditions such as William Walker's seizure of Nicaragua, where he legalized slavery.
• When House Republicans offered to admit New Mexico immediately as a state, pro-slavery delegates rejected it.
• Ben Winters' 2016 novel Underground Airlines imagines a present-day America in which the Crittenden Compromise passed.

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On June 16, 1861, meteorologist Thaddeus Lowe floated 500 feet above the Columbian Armory in Washington and sent the first telegraph message from an aerial station to President Lincoln over a wire running into the White House. Backed by Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian, Lowe went around the usual procurement channels, and Lincoln personally took him to General Winfield Scott. His appointment angered rival aeronauts. John Wise held a commission from the topographical engineers but tangled his balloon in brush on the way to Bull Run, and John LaMountain, a former partner, attacked Lowe in the press and argued for free flight, while Lowe insisted on tethered balloons that could telegraph reports in real time.

After the coal-gas balloon Union was hauled for nine hours over the Chain Bridge and then lost to a gale, Lowe built portable generators with the Washington Navy Yard: copper-lined wagon tanks where sulfuric acid and iron filings produced hydrogen, cooled through water before entering a varnished silk envelope. On September 24, 1861, he directed unseen artillery fire on Confederate camps at Falls Church, and he launched balloons from the converted coal barge George Washington Parke Custis. At Seven Pines in 1862 he spotted Samuel Heintzelman's corps being cut off and filled the balloon Intrepid from the smaller Constitution through a camp kettle with its bottom cut out.

• An early Confederate hot smoke balloon was lifted by burning oil-soaked pine cones and spun into uncontrolled flight when its tether was cut.
• The story of a Confederate balloon sewn from donated silk dresses is a myth, as the silk was bought from merchants.
• Edward Porter Alexander signaled from a Confederate balloon using wigwag flags.
• Under Captain Cyrus B. Comstock, Lowe's pay was cut from $10 a day in gold to $3, and he resigned in 1863, with the Army dropping balloons by that August.
• In 1864 Brazil offered Lowe the rank of major general to run a balloon corps in its war with Paraguay, and he declined.

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Thaddeus Lowe was born in 1832 in Jefferson, New Hampshire, to a poor farming family and got only three months of winter schooling a year. At 18 he volunteered at a traveling chemistry lecture on lighter-than-air gases, became the lecturer's assistant, then bought the show and billed himself as Professor Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe. He married Parisian actress Leontine Gachon in 1855 and, with backing from Smithsonian head Joseph Henry for his theory of a steady west-to-east upper air current, built the giant balloon Great Western in 1859 to cross the Atlantic. Gas supply problems in New York and a windstorm in Philadelphia stalled the attempt, and an April 1861 test flight from Cincinnati in the balloon Enterprise came down in South Carolina just after Fort Sumter, where locals took him for a spy.

On June 11, 1861, Lowe sent the first air-to-ground telegraph message to Lincoln from 500 feet above the White House and became chief aeronaut of the civilian Union Army Balloon Corps. He resigned in May 1863 after his pay was cut from $10 a day to $3 and he fell ill with malaria. He then turned his skill with gases to civilian work, patenting a water gas process in 1873, building compression ice machines using ammonia, and shipping refrigerated beef and fruit by steamship. He won the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal, moved to Pasadena, and spent his fortune on the Mount Lowe Railway.

• At Seven Pines, Lowe used a camp kettle with its bottom knocked out to move hydrogen from one balloon to another in about 15 minutes.
• His field generators made hydrogen by pouring sulfuric acid over iron filings in copper-lined wagons.
• German observer Ferdinand von Zeppelin studied Lowe's balloon operations during the war.
• The Mount Lowe Railway, built with engineer David J. McPherson from 1893, included a 2,800-foot funicular to Echo Mountain, an 80-room hotel and an observatory with a 16-inch telescope.
• The venture went into receivership by 1899, its hotel burned in 1900, and Lowe died in 1913 at 80, living in his daughter's Pasadena home.

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Sullivan Ballou was born in March 1829 in Smithfield, Rhode Island, into a Huguenot family, and lost his father as a young boy. He went on to Phillips Academy, Brown University and the National Law School in New York, was admitted to the Rhode Island bar in 1853, and was elected to the state House of Representatives the same year, rising to clerk and then Speaker. He married Sarah Hart Shumway in 1855, had two sons, and was a committed Republican and supporter of Abraham Lincoln. After Fort Sumter he volunteered and was commissioned a major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry and judge advocate of the Rhode Island militia.

At Camp Clark near Washington in July 1861, Ballou wrote to Sarah, then 24, about his debt to the Revolutionary generation, his guilt at risking leaving his sons fatherless, and his promise to remain near her even in death. He never mailed it. At the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, a six-pound solid shot killed his horse and shattered his right leg, which was amputated at Sudley Church in Manassas. Left behind in the Union retreat, he died on July 29 at 32. Confederate troops later exhumed and desecrated his body, and only ashes and bone fragments were recovered for reburial at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence.

• The letter was found in Ballou's trunk, and Rhode Island Governor William Sprague, who went to Virginia to recover soldiers' effects, delivered it to Sarah about a year later.
• Sarah never remarried, later moved to New Jersey to live with her son William, and died in 1917 at 82.
• She was buried beside her husband in Providence.
• The letter reached millions through Ken Burns' 1990 documentary The Civil War.
• It has since inspired music by the band Goodnight Texas, choral works, stage productions, and a quest in World of Warcraft.

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In the spring of 1862, with George B. McClellan's army moving up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson commanded the Valley District with as few as 5,000 men and at most about 17,000. The Shenandoah Valley, 140 miles long and producing about 19 percent of Virginia's wheat, was split down the middle by Massanutten Mountain, and Jackson used its gaps as interior lines to strike separated Union forces. His campaign opened with a defeat at First Kernstown on March 23, when Turner Ashby reported only about 3,000 Union troops and Jackson found about 9,000. Richard B. Garnett retreated after his brigade ran out of ammunition, and Jackson had him court-martialed.

Kernstown still alarmed Lincoln, who diverted Irvin McDowell's troops away from the Richmond offensive. Jackson had cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss map the valley, marched east through mud in early May as a feint, then took westbound trains back to Staunton and won at McDowell on May 8. Joined by Richard S. Ewell, he moved through the Luray Valley to strike Front Royal on May 23 and drove Nathaniel P. Banks through Winchester on May 25. Lincoln then sent the armies of John C. Frémont, Banks and James Shields to trap him at Strasburg, but Jackson escaped up the paved Valley Pike while his cavalry burned bridges behind him.

• Jackson's infantry moved so fast they were called the foot cavalry, at times outpacing their own cavalry by dropping packs and leaving tents and wagons behind.
• Troops captured about $300,000 in supplies at Winchester and nicknamed the Union general Commissary Banks.
• Turner Ashby was killed in a rearguard skirmish on June 6.
• Ewell held off Frémont at Cross Keys on June 8, and at Port Republic on June 9 Jackson's piecemeal attacks on the Coaling cost him more than 800 casualties.
• Over 48 days his men marched about 646 miles and tied down more than 50,000 Union troops, but Jackson was sluggish in the Seven Days Battles that followed.

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Before dawn on October 19, 1864, Union soldiers camped along Cedar Creek in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley were asleep in heavy fog, believing the campaign was over. Ulysses S. Grant had ordered Philip Sheridan to shut down the valley that fed Robert E. Lee's army, and Sheridan's cavalry burned crops, barns and mills along a 92-mile stretch, with Sheridan writing that a crow crossing the valley would have to carry its own rations. After two defeats, Jubal Early's army seemed finished, and Union scouting slackened while Early received reinforcements, including Joseph Kershaw's division. A minor attack at Hupp's Hill on October 13 led Sheridan to recall the veteran 6th Corps to Cedar Creek.

From Massanutten Mountain on October 17, John B. Gordon saw that the Union left was lightly guarded. His men marched single file all night on a narrow trail, leaving canteens behind so nothing would rattle, and struck at 5 a.m., routing two Union corps and taking more than 1,300 prisoners and 18 cannons. George Getty's division held a cemetery near Middletown, and around 10 a.m. Early halted his starving, exhausted troops. Sheridan, returning from Washington, rode south from Winchester on his horse Rienzi, rallied the fleeing men, and launched a counterattack at 4 p.m. that broke Early's army.

• Gordon's officers synchronized their pocket watches before the attack, with troops in position by 3:30 a.m.
• George Custer's cavalry, armed with seven-shot Spencer repeating rifles, charged toward the Cedar Creek bridge, the Confederate escape route.
• A bridge on the turnpike collapsed during the retreat, and Early abandoned the 24 captured cannons plus 43 of his own.
• Confederate General Stephen Ramseur, who had just learned of his first child's birth, was mortally wounded and died among West Point friends including Custer.
• The victory came three weeks before the 1864 election and helped secure Lincoln's second term.

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George Edward Pickett was born in 1825 into a Richmond planting family whose Turkey Island estate relied on enslaved labor. A popular story says Abraham Lincoln secured his West Point appointment, but Lincoln was then a state legislator with no such power, and the appointment came from Illinois congressman John T. Stuart, an associate of Pickett's uncle. Pickett graduated 59th of 59 in 1846, then carried the colors to the top of Chapultepec in 1847 after James Longstreet was wounded. On the frontier he lost his first wife, Sally, in childbirth and later his second wife, Morning Mist, of the Haida people, after the birth of their son.

In the Pig War of 1859 on San Juan Island, Pickett and 68 men faced three British warships and about 1,000 men after an American farmer shot a Hudson's Bay Company pig, and he refused to withdraw until diplomats defused the standoff. In the Confederate army he rode a horse named Old Black and wore perfumed ringlets. On July 3, 1863, his division was one of three in Longstreet's assault on Cemetery Ridge, which Richmond papers named for him. Every one of his 13 regimental commanders was killed or wounded, along with brigade commanders Richard Garnett, Lewis Armistead and James Kemper, and Pickett told Lee he had no division left.

• After a failed attack on New Bern in 1864, Pickett ordered 22 captured Union soldiers from North Carolina hanged as deserters, one of them 15 years old.
• At Five Forks in April 1865, he was about two miles behind his lines at a shad bake when Union forces overran his position.
• Facing a federal investigation of the hangings, he lived in exile in Montreal for a year until Ulysses S. Grant intervened.
• He later sold life insurance and farmed, and died in 1875 at age 50 of a liver abscess.
• His widow LaSalle Corbell Pickett outlived him by 55 years and published letters historians consider largely fabricated, casting him as a Lost Cause hero.

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Robert Smalls was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839, enslaved by Henry McKee and raised by his mother Lydia Polite, who asked that her favored son be sent to the fields so he would see the system's brutality. At 12 he was hired out in Charleston, earning $16 a week and keeping one dollar, and he learned the harbor as a rigger, sailmaker and wheelman. After marrying Hannah Jones, he calculated that freeing his family would cost $800 when he had saved $100. On the night of May 12, 1862, the white officers of the Confederate transport CSS Planter, loaded with four artillery pieces and ammunition, went ashore, leaving the enslaved crew aboard.

Around 3 a.m. on May 13, Smalls collected the families hidden on the steamer Etiwan, put on the captain's straw hat, and gave the correct whistle signals past five forts, including Fort Sumter at about 4:30. Out of range, the crew raised a white bedsheet and surrendered to the USS Onward. Smalls gave the Union the signal code book, mine locations and word that Coles Island was abandoned, met Lincoln and Edwin Stanton to push for Black enlistment, and later fought in 17 battles. After the war he bought the house where he had been enslaved, helped launch the Enterprise Railroad, wrote South Carolina's free compulsory public school law, and served five terms in Congress.

• In December 1863, when the Planter's white captain hid in the coal bunker under fire, Smalls took command and was unofficially promoted to captain.
• In Philadelphia, his refusal to give up a streetcar seat helped prompt the integration of Pennsylvania's public transit.
• He let his former enslaver's elderly widow move back into the Beaufort house before she died.
• At the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention, he argued against literacy tests, property rules and poll taxes aimed at Black voters.
• In 1913, at 74, he pressured the mayor and sheriff into stopping a lynch mob, and he died in the same house in 1915.

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Richard Stoddert Ewell was a bald, bird-like, profane general who lived on hulled wheat boiled in milk and slept curled around a camp stool. Born in 1817 in Georgetown and raised on a Virginia estate called Stony Lonesome, he was the grandson of Benjamin Stoddert, the first Secretary of the Navy. He graduated 13th of 43 at West Point in 1840, served with the 1st U.S. Dragoons on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, scouted at Contreras alongside engineer Robert E. Lee, and was wounded fighting forces under Cochise in 1859 before malaria forced him home from Fort Buchanan in 1860. Though pro-Union, he followed Virginia out in 1861.

After First Bull Run, Ewell proposed to Jefferson Davis that the Confederacy free and enlist enslaved men, an idea Davis rejected as impossible. He learned to read Stonewall Jackson's secretive moves in the Shenandoah Valley, then lost his left leg after a wound at Brawner's Farm in August 1862 and married his cousin and nurse, Lizinka Campbell Brown, in May 1863. Given Jackson's Second Corps, he routed two Union corps at Gettysburg on July 1 but judged Lee's order to take Cemetery Hill if practicable not workable, a decision Jubal Early agreed with at the time and later attacked as Lost Cause writers made Ewell a scapegoat.

• At Spotsylvania's Mule Shoe in May 1864, Ewell broke down and struck fleeing soldiers with his sword, and Lee relieved him of field command.
• He blamed civilian mobs for the April 1865 Richmond fire, though demolition orders through his own command started the main blazes.
• Captured at Sailor's Creek, he was held at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.
• After Lincoln's assassination he organized 16 imprisoned generals to sign a letter to Grant condemning the murder.
• He became a successful farmer near Spring Hill, Tennessee, and he and Lizinka died of pneumonia days apart in January 1872.