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This episode argues that Reconstruction began well before Appomattox, with the Port Royal experiment of 1861, when Union forces took the Sea Islands of South Carolina, planters fled, and thousands of Gullah people began organizing schools, land and free labor. After the war, a quarter of white Southern men of military age were dead, white Southern per capita income fell from $125 in 1857 to $80 by 1879, and the country split between reconciliationist, white supremacist and emancipationist visions of what came next. Andrew Johnson, taking office after Lincoln's assassination, pardoned thousands of former Confederate leaders, and the restored governments passed Black Codes whose vagrancy laws leased fined Black men back to planters.

Northern anger, sharpened by Johnson's disastrous speaking tour of 1866, gave Radical Republicans two-thirds majorities. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, and Johnson's firing of Edwin Stanton under the Tenure of Office Act led to his impeachment and a one-vote acquittal in 1868. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments followed, along with public schools and Black officeholders, while the Ku Klux Klan, the White League and the Red Shirts answered with terror. After the Panic of 1873 and the disputed 1876 election, the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and withdrew federal troops from Southern politics.

• The 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott ruling by establishing birthright citizenship and equal protection under federal law.
• White mobs, often aided by police, killed dozens of Black citizens in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866.
• Ulysses S. Grant used the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to suspend habeas corpus and send troops into South Carolina.
• The Dunning School portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt mistake until W. E. B. Du Bois and later Eric Foner challenged it.
• Historian Manisha Sinha argues Reconstruction did not truly end until the 19th Amendment in 1920.

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This episode follows a single three-letter word, tap, across medicine, engineering, espionage, gaming and science. It starts with the two physical meanings behind the word: drawing liquid out of a pressurized container, as with a faucet or beer tap, and a brief intentional strike, as in tap dancing, guitar tapping, a touchscreen tap, or the tap consonant, where the tongue flicks once against the alveolar ridge in the way many North Americans say the middle of butter. Medicine borrows the extraction sense for the spinal tap, the abdominal tap and the pleural tap.

The word then moves into interception and hacking, from telephone taps and passive network taps to the 1970s phone phreaking magazine TAP, founded by the Youth International Party. As an acronym, TAP names the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, India's Tarapur Atomic Power Station, the Polish wartime resistance Tajna Armia Polska, the Molson Coors stock ticker, and The Atlantic Paranormal Society. The episode ends with scientific uses, including a three apogee orbit for raising satellites, tandem affinity purification for studying proteins, and 2,4,6-triaminopyrimidine, a molecule discussed in research on the chemical origins of life.

• Early Ethernet vampire taps clamped onto thick yellow coaxial cable and drove a metal spike through the insulation to reach the copper core.
• Prisoners of war used a tap code built on a five by five letter grid, with C and K sharing a square, tapping out row and column numbers.
• In online gaming, a lag switch lets a player cut their own connection so they appear frozen, then seem to teleport when data floods back.
• Researchers suggest triaminopyrimidine could form hydrogen bonds with other early molecules, a possible step toward self-assembling structures before RNA.
• The word also shows up in Los Angeles County's TAP transit card, contactless payment, and the bugle call Taps played at military funerals.

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In July 1861, congressmen and Washington socialites rode out in carriages with picnic baskets to watch what they expected to be a quick Union victory at Bull Run, also called First Manassas. Lincoln's 90-day volunteers were nearing the end of their enlistments, and the press demanded a march on Richmond. Brigadier General Irvin McDowell protested that his roughly 35,000 men were too green, and Lincoln answered that the enemy was green also. The army left Washington on July 16 and crawled toward Manassas Junction as soldiers broke ranks to pick blackberries, while Rose O'Neal Greenhow's spy ring warned P. G. T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston slipped his army away from Robert Patterson by rail.

On July 21, Captain Edward Porter Alexander spotted the Union flanking column from Signal Hill and sent the first combat wigwag message. Union forces drove the Confederates back to Henry House Hill, where Thomas J. Jackson placed 13 guns on the reverse slope and Barnard Bee's words gave him the name Stonewall. When the blue-uniformed 33rd Virginia approached Charles Griffin's guns, his superior ordered him not to fire, and a point-blank volley captured the battery. Around 4 p.m. a wagon overturned on the Cub Run bridge, and the retreat became the Great Skedaddle, with soldiers and spectators fleeing together toward Washington.

• Judith Carter Henry, an 85-year-old bedridden widow, was killed when Union artillery fired on her house.
• Historians still debate whether Bee's stone wall remark was praise or a complaint that Jackson was not coming to help, and Bee died the next day.
• Jefferson Davis urged a pursuit, but the exhausted, disorganized Confederates did not follow the Union army to Washington.
• Confusion between the Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes led to the Confederate battle flag with a blue cross on a red field.
• Days later, Thaddeus Lowe went up in the balloon Enterprise over Washington and reported the Confederates were not advancing.

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The Battle of Chickamauga in north Georgia, fought on September 19 and 20, 1863, followed one of the most efficient Union campaigns of the war. General William Rosecrans had pushed Braxton Bragg's Confederates out of Middle Tennessee in the Tullahoma Campaign at a cost of 569 casualties, then took Chattanooga without a fight after a brigade north of the city banged tubs, sawed boards and floated scrap wood downstream to fake a river crossing. Convinced Bragg was fleeing, Rosecrans split his army into three corps spread across about 40 miles of mountains, while the Confederacy rushed James Longstreet's corps west from Virginia by rail.

Bragg's feuding command repeatedly failed to spring his traps, first at McLemore's Cove, where D. H. Hill and Thomas C. Hindman held back, and again when Leonidas Polk did not attack at dawn. The battle itself began when Union soldiers looking for water near Jay's Mill met Confederate cavalry, and it became a soldiers' battle in smoke-filled woods. On the second morning, a mistaken report of a gap led Rosecrans to order Thomas J. Wood to close up on and support Reynolds. Wood, recently berated by Rosecrans, pulled his division out of line just as Longstreet's column of eight brigades struck the same spot, splitting the Union army.

• A popular claim says Chickamauga means River of Death in Cherokee, but it likely comes from a Chickasaw word meaning to be good.
• John T. Wilder's Lightning Brigade carried Spencer repeating rifles holding seven cartridges, against muskets firing about three shots a minute.
• George H. Thomas held Snodgrass Hill, also called Horseshoe Ridge, against 25 assaults, earning the name the Rock of Chickamauga.
• Bragg refused Longstreet's request for reserves and ordered no real pursuit, and the battle cost more than 34,000 men killed, wounded or captured.
• Lincoln said Rosecrans acted like a duck hit on the head, and Thomas replaced him before Grant arrived to break the siege of Chattanooga.

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Old Abe was a bald eagle taken from a nest near the Flambeau River in Wisconsin in the spring of 1861 by a young Ojibwe man known as Chief Sky, who cut down the pine tree to reach the fledglings. That summer he traded the eaglet to Daniel McCann for a bushel of corn, and McCann offered it to a new volunteer company, the Eau Claire Badgers, for $2.50. After soldiers surrounded civilian S. M. Jeffers until he paid with a quarter eagle gold coin, the bird was named for Abraham Lincoln and the unit became the Eagle Company, later part of the Eagle Regiment, the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry.

Carried on a shield-shaped perch by a series of eagle bearers, Old Abe went through more than 30 battles and skirmishes, including Farmington, the Vicksburg campaign, and the Red River campaign of 1864. Grant and Sherman reportedly took off their hats to him, while Confederates called him the Yankee buzzard and were ordered to kill or capture him. After the war Wisconsin kept him in a two-room apartment in the Capitol in Madison and sent him on tour, including the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In 1881 he raised the alarm over a basement fire, inhaled smoke, and died about a month later.

• At the Second Battle of Corinth in October 1862, a bullet clipped three of his flight feathers and another cut his tether, while bearer David McLean was wounded.
• Newspapers claimed he soared over both armies at Corinth, but McLean said the bird only fluttered about 50 feet down the line.
• Soldiers foraged small game for him and sometimes gave up their own meat rations.
• His mounted remains were destroyed in the 1904 Capitol fire, a year after Theodore Roosevelt visited to see them, and a DNA test on saved feathers later confirmed he was male.
• The J.I. Case company of Racine adopted him as its logo in 1865, and his profile appears on the 101st Airborne Division's Screaming Eagles patch.

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In the summer of 1864, residents of Elmira, New York, could pay 10 or 15 cents to climb a wooden observation tower, buy snacks, and look down into a Union prison camp the inmates called Hellmira. This episode traces how Camp Rathbun, a Union training depot at the junction of the Erie Railroad and the Northern Central Railway, became one of the deadliest prisoner of war camps in the North after the Dix-Hill cartel collapsed over the Confederacy's treatment of captured Black Union soldiers. Commissary General of Prisoners William Hoffman gave Lieutenant Colonel Seth Eastman 10 days to prepare for 10,000 prisoners, though Eastman warned the camp could hold perhaps half that, with kitchens for 5,000 and no hospital.

Within a month the camp built for about 4,000 men held 12,000. Latrines drained into the stagnant Foster's Pond, surgeon Charles T. Alexander's warning went unheeded by the cost-conscious Hoffman, and rations were cut in retaliation for reports from Andersonville. In the winter of 1864 to 1865, with temperatures at 18 below zero, many prisoners lived in canvas tents. By the time the camp closed, 2,970 men had died, a mortality rate of 24.5 percent. The episode also follows the formerly enslaved sexton John W. Jones, who buried the dead at Woodlawn Cemetery, and the postwar effort to dismiss the camp's record.

• On July 15, 1864, a train carrying more than 800 prisoners collided head on with a coal train near Shohola, Pennsylvania, killing 49 prisoners and 17 Union guards.
• Starving prisoners caught and ate rats, which became a form of currency inside the camp.
• Only 10 men ever escaped, including Washington B. Traweek, who held out in a sweat box rather than name the tunnelers to commandant Henry V. Colt, brother of Samuel Colt.
• John W. Jones, who escaped slavery in Virginia in 1844, kept records so precise that only seven of nearly 3,000 graves are marked unknown.
• The camp was dismantled, its lumber sold and the land farmed, and reconstruction efforts at the site began in 2015.

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Montgomery C. Meigs was born in Augusta, Georgia in 1816 and raised in Philadelphia, entering the University of Pennsylvania at 15 before West Point. In the Army Corps of Engineers he worked on the Mississippi River under Robert E. Lee, then in the 1850s built the Washington Aqueduct and oversaw the Capitol's new wings and cast iron dome. After he refused to steer contracts to allies of Secretary of War John B. Floyd, he was sent to build a fort in the Dry Tortugas.

After a secret mission to secure Fort Pickens, Lincoln named him quartermaster general, and he managed about $1.5 billion in wartime spending, standardizing wagon parts, tents and uniforms and using the telegraph to anticipate needs. When his son John Rodgers Meigs was killed in Virginia in October 1864, Meigs believed he had been murdered after surrendering. He chose Lee's Arlington estate for a military cemetery and ordered the first officer burials around Mrs. Lee's flower garden.

• His grandfather had been a classmate of Noah Webster.
• William Seward said that without Meigs the national cause would have been lost.
• He sealed more than 2,000 unidentified soldiers in a vault at Arlington beneath a cenotaph he designed, and put his name on the McClellan Gate.
• His Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, used 15 million bricks.
• Its 1,200-foot frieze includes a freed slave driving a quartermaster wagon, a figure Meigs insisted on.

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During the Civil War, guerrilla fighters known as bushwhackers turned rural Missouri into a war of neighbor against neighbor, rooted in the Bleeding Kansas clashes with Kansas Jayhawkers. Unlike John Singleton Mosby's partisan rangers under the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act, most Missouri bands operated outside the Confederate chain of command, carrying several Colt revolvers each and relying on networks of civilian sympathizers. Union commanders answered with mass arrests, banishments, house burnings and summary executions, including that of Lieutenant Colonel Frisby McCullough after Kirksville.

In August 1863 William Quantrill's raiders burned Lawrence, Kansas and killed about 150 men, citing the sacking of Osceola and the deaths of five female relatives in a collapsed Kansas City jail. General Thomas Ewing Jr.'s General Order No. 11 then emptied Jackson, Cass, Bates and northern Vernon counties of nearly 25,000 people, creating the Burnt District. In 1864 Bloody Bill Anderson's men executed 24 unarmed soldiers at Centralia before Samuel P. Cox's militia killed Anderson, and survivors including Jesse James turned to bank robbery.

• The families of both Jesse James and future president Harry Truman were banished from Missouri.
• About 2,200 square miles were burned, leaving lone chimneys standing in the ash.
• Jesse James' only confirmed fight with federal troops from another state came a month after the war ended.
• In 1869 at Gallatin he killed cashier John W. Sheets, mistaking him for Samuel P. Cox.
• In California the Mason Henry gang murdered three men because they were known Republicans.

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Mary Todd was born in 1818 into a wealthy Lexington, Kentucky family, lost her mother at six, and studied French, classical drama and Whig politics at a finishing school. In Springfield she was courted by Stephen A. Douglas but chose Abraham Lincoln; their engagement broke on January 1, 1841, and they married abruptly in November 1842, moving into a single room in a tavern. Their son Eddie died as a toddler, and of four sons only Robert would outlive her.

In the White House she was mocked by Washington elites, had half-brothers fighting for the Confederacy, ran up debts on renovations, china and jewelry, and was bedridden after son Willie died of typhoid. She was holding Lincoln's hand at Ford's Theatre when he was shot. As a widow she auctioned possessions, was stung by Elizabeth Keckley's memoir, and fought for a $3,000 pension. After Tad died in 1871 she carried $56,000 in bonds sewn into her petticoats, and in 1875 Robert had her declared insane before lawyer Myra Bradwell helped win her release.

• Her migraines worsened after a serious head injury in an 1863 carriage accident.
• Some medical historians argue her symptoms fit pernicious anemia, a B12 deficiency, rather than bipolar disorder.
• She visited wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals, bringing fruit and writing letters to their families.
• Queen Victoria sent her a handwritten letter of condolence.
• She died in 1882 at age 63 in her sister Elizabeth's Springfield house, where she had first met Lincoln.

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In December 1860, after South Carolina seceded, Major Robert Anderson, a Kentuckian, commanded 85 men at Fort Moultrie, a coastal fort with sand dunes piled against its landward walls. On December 26 he spiked its guns, burned the gun carriages and rowed his garrison to Fort Sumter without orders, angering South Carolina's governor while James Buchanan stayed passive. By March 1861 the Confederacy had sent P.G.T. Beauregard, Anderson's former artillery student and assistant at West Point, to ring the harbor with batteries.

With six weeks of rations left, Lincoln announced a provisions-only relief expedition, and despite Robert Toombs' warning, Jefferson Davis ordered the fort reduced. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, a mortar shell opened a 34-hour bombardment of about 3,000 rounds. Anderson kept his men in the casemates, they sewed powder bags from socks, and heated shot set the barracks ablaze. Louis Wigfall rowed out and offered terms on his own authority before Beauregard confirmed them, and no one was killed by enemy fire.

• The supply ship Star of the West had already been turned back by fire from Citadel cadets.
• Beauregard paced his guns about two minutes apart to stretch roughly 48 hours of powder and shot.
• Men rolled powder barrels into the sea, but the incoming tide washed them back against the walls.
• During a 100-gun salute an explosion killed Private Daniel Hough and mortally wounded Private Edward Galloway, and the salute stopped at 50.
• On April 14, 1865, Anderson raised the same flag over the ruins of Fort Sumter.