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John Ericsson, born in Sweden in 1803, was a teenage surveyor on the Gota Canal project who carried a footstool to reach his instruments. After building a heat engine that ran on birch wood fumes, he left the Swedish army in 1826 for England, where the engine failed on coal, his locomotive Novelty lost the 1829 Rainhill Trials to George Stephenson's Rocket, and London fire crews rejected the steam fire engine that pumped for five hours at the Argyle Rooms blaze. Mounting debts landed him in debtors' prison.

Naval officer Robert Stockton brought Ericsson to New York in 1839 to build the USS Princeton, with underwater twin screw propellers and a 12-inch gun reinforced with heated iron hoops. Stockton's own thicker cast iron gun burst during an 1844 Potomac cruise, killing the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy, and Stockton shifted the blame to Ericsson. Backed by Cornelius Delamater's ironworks, Ericsson prospered with small caloric hot air engines, then reluctantly designed the USS Monitor, built in about 100 days, which fought the CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862.

• His hot air engine used a regenerator of wire mesh to capture exhaust heat and preheat incoming air.
• He won the Rumford Prize for his work in thermodynamics.
• The Monitor's low, flat deck was inspired by the lumber rafts he had seen as a child in Sweden.
• In 1883 he built a solar powered air engine using curved mirrors in rectangular troughs.
• He died on March 8, 1889, and after public outcry the Navy sent the cruiser USS Baltimore to carry his remains to Sweden.

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John Buford was born in March 1826 in Woodford County, Kentucky, raised in Rock Island, Illinois, and graduated 16th of 38 from West Point, where his classmates included A.P. Hill and Henry Heth. Commissioned into the Dragoons, he spent the 1850s on the frontier in Texas, the Utah War and Bleeding Kansas, fought the Sioux at Ash Hollow alongside Heth, and adopted John Watts de Peyster's ideas about dismounted skirmish lines. When war came, with a cousin who became a Confederate general and a half-brother who became a Union general, he turned down the Kentucky governor's offer of any command he wanted.

Wounded in the knee at Second Bull Run and falsely reported dead, Buford rose to command the First Division after Brandy Station. On June 30, 1863 he reached Gettysburg, recognized the value of Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge, and on July 1 held off Heth's division with dismounted troopers firing breech-loading carbines until John F. Reynolds and the First Corps arrived. Five months later, likely ill with typhoid, he died in George Stoneman's Washington home on December 16, 1863, the same day Lincoln approved his promotion to major general.

• One in four troopers led the horses to the rear while the other three fought from behind fences, stone walls and trees.
• Alfred Pleasonton sent Buford's men to Emmitsburg to resupply after the first day, leaving the Union left flank exposed.
• In delirium Buford scolded his servant Edward, then called him back to apologize and thank him for his faithful service.
• He died in the arms of his aide Miles Keogh, who later fell with George Custer at the Little Bighorn.
• His horse Grey Eagle followed the casket, and he was buried at West Point next to Alonzo Cushing.

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John C. Breckinridge was born in Kentucky in 1821, grandson of Thomas Jefferson's attorney general, who introduced the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and the theory of nullification. His father died when he was a toddler, and after law school he left a crowded Lexington bar for Burlington in the Iowa Territory in 1841. A bout of influenza on a visit home in 1843 kept him in Kentucky, where he met and married Mary Cyrene Burch. As a Democrat he won a House seat in Henry Clay's Ashland district in 1851 and in 1853 defeated Robert Letcher, who had never lost in 14 elections. He enslaved people yet represented free Black clients and supported colonization, while backing the Dred Scott decision.

In 1854 a dispute with New York congressman Francis Cutting nearly became a duel. In 1856 the Democrats made him James Buchanan's running mate, and at 36 he became the youngest vice president, though Buchanan shut him out. In 1860 the Southern Democrats nominated him in a four-way race won by Abraham Lincoln. He backed the Crittenden Compromise, fled behind Confederate lines in late 1861, and was expelled from the Senate 36 to 0. He fought at Shiloh, Baton Rouge and New Market, became Confederate Secretary of War in February 1865, urged surrender and saved the archives, then escaped through Florida to the Bahamas and lived in exile until an 1869 amnesty. He died in 1875 at 54.

• The duel stalled because Breckinridge chose rifles at 60 paces while Cutting insisted on pistols at 10, and friends brokered peace.
• Asking at the White House to see Miss Lane, Buchanan's niece and hostess, was the code for reaching the president.
• He told constituents he was exchanging his six-year Senate term for the musket of a soldier.
• In Florida he sent his teenage son Cabell, suffering from mosquito allergies, to surrender to Union troops.
• Calling himself an extinct volcano, he declined Grant's overtures, denounced the Ku Klux Klan and backed Black testimony in Kentucky courts.

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John Bell Hood grew up in Kentucky, the son of a doctor who opposed a military career, and reached West Point through an uncle, finishing near the bottom of his class with 196 demerits in his final year against a limit of 200. A Comanche arrow pierced his left hand in Texas in the late 1850s. Joining the Confederacy for Texas, he broke a Union line during the Seven Days Battles and wept at his casualties. At Gettysburg he asked to flank rather than attack frontally, was refused, and had his left arm ruined by shrapnel. At Chickamauga he lost his right leg just below the hip, and his soldiers raised over $3,000 for a cork prosthetic smuggled through the blockade.

Strapped to his saddle, Hood wrote to Richmond criticizing Joseph E. Johnston's retreats and at 33 replaced him, becoming the youngest army commander on either side. Former classmates warned William T. Sherman that Hood would attack regardless of odds, and he launched four costly assaults around Atlanta before abandoning the city. In letters to Sherman he declared a belief in white supremacy and anger at the Union's use of Black soldiers. His march into Tennessee led to Franklin, where he sent troops across nearly two miles of open ground without artillery support, and to defeat at Nashville by George Henry Thomas, his former West Point instructor. In New Orleans he and his wife had 11 children before yellow fever killed them both in 1879.

• A surgeon sent Hood's amputated leg along in the ambulance, expecting the general to die.
• In Richmond he pursued South Carolina socialite Buck Preston, who would not give him a clear answer.
• His troops sang a bitter parody of The Yellow Rose of Texas after the Tennessee campaign.
• Yellow fever killed Hood, his wife and his eldest daughter within one week, and their 10 orphans went to seven families.
• Private Sam Watkins later wrote that the war left nothing of Hood whole but a fearless heart, and Fort Hood was renamed after 2020 legislation.

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James Ewell Brown Stuart, born in Virginia in 1833, was nicknamed Beauty at West Point for his short chin and grew a full beard as soon as regulations allowed. He graduated 13th, his rank hurt by poor drawing, and served in Texas and Bleeding Kansas, where in 1857 a Cheyenne warrior's pepperbox pistol fired point-blank into his chest barely broke the skin. In 1859 he sold rights to his patented saber hook to the government for $5,000, and while in Washington he joined Robert E. Lee at Harpers Ferry, delivering surrender terms and recognizing John Brown. When his father-in-law, Philip St. George Cooke, stayed with the Union in 1861, Stuart renamed his infant son to remove Cooke's name.

Stuart rode into battle in a red-lined cape, yellow sash and ostrich plume, wearing cologne and followed by a banjo player, yet avoided alcohol and tobacco. He formed an unlikely partnership with Stonewall Jackson, rode 150 miles around the Union army in 1862 with 1,200 men while Cooke tried to catch him, seized John Pope's dress uniform at Catlett Station and led Jackson's corps at Chancellorsville. In June 1863 his grand reviews were followed by a surprise attack at Brandy Station, and on the road to Gettysburg he took 140 wagons and lost touch with Lee, who greeted him with "Well, General, you are here at last." In May 1864, against Philip Sheridan at Yellow Tavern, he was shot by dismounted Private John A. Huff and died the next day at 31.

• Stuart described his whirlwind engagement to Flora Cooke by adapting Caesar: I came, I saw, I was conquered.
• He publicly wished that George H. Thomas, a Virginian loyal to the Union, would be hanged as a traitor.
• The episode weighs Lee's vague orders against Stuart's choices in the debate over Gettysburg.
• His last battlefield order told his men to go back and do their duty, saying he would rather die than be whipped.
• Flora wore black for six decades, and his Richmond statue was removed in 2020.

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This episode examines how the defeated Confederacy shaped American memory of the Civil War. The phrase Lost Cause came from Virginia journalist Edward A. Pollard's 1866 book, which he wanted to call History of the War until his New York publisher chose a more marketable title. The narrative cast slavery as benevolent and recast the war as a defense of states' rights, despite secession declarations and Alexander Stephens's Cornerstone Speech naming slavery as the Confederacy's foundation, and despite Southern demands for federal power in the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision. It also deified Robert E. Lee while writers influenced by Jubal Early blamed James Longstreet, who had criticized Lee and worked with Republicans during Reconstruction.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy spread the story through the Children of the Confederacy, card games of Confederate heroes and control over textbook adoption, leading Northern publishers to print separate editions for Southern schools. In 1915 C. Helen Plane of the UDC hired Gutzon Borglum to carve Stone Mountain and asked that the Ku Klux Klan be included, the same year William J. Simmons burned a cross there after The Birth of a Nation, and Gone with the Wind later carried the narrative nationwide. The episode covers resistance from Frederick Douglass at Arlington in 1871, editor John Mitchell Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois and Tuskegee students in 1966, and modern fights over flags, holidays and monuments.

• Mildred Lewis Rutherford's 1919 pamphlet A Measuring Rod was used to reject books that framed secession as rebellion or condemned the South.
• Jefferson Davis's 1881 memoirs presented the war as purely about constitutional rights.
• John Mitchell Jr. of the Richmond Planet campaigned against the 1890 Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue, which was removed after the 2020 and 2021 protests.
• Tuskegee students defaced the town's Confederate monument after Sammy Younge Jr.'s killer was acquitted by an all-white jury.
• In Texas, Confederate Heroes Day often falls on the same weekend as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

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After Fort Sumter in 1861, George B. McClellan proposed a fast overland march on Richmond by way of the Kanawha River or across Kentucky to Nashville. General-in-chief Winfield Scott rejected it, citing a river unsuited to heavy transport and the risk of driving fragile border states and pro-Union western Virginians, five of every seven by his estimate, toward the Confederacy. In May 1861 he proposed blockading every Southern port on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and sending about 80,000 men with gunboats down the Mississippi to the forts below New Orleans. Critics in the press mocked the idea as a sluggish snake, giving it the name Anaconda Plan, and Scott retired before the year was out.

Henry Halleck preferred turning strongholds along the Tennessee River, so the Navy pressed the river campaign alone. In April 1862 David Farragut ran past Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip and a chain boom to take New Orleans, then Baton Rouge and Natchez, but the 200-foot bluffs at Vicksburg were beyond his guns, Halleck sent no troops and the falling river forced him back. Grant's campaign ended with Vicksburg's surrender on July 4, 1863, and Port Hudson soon after. On the coast, coal-hungry steam blockaders forced the Union to seize bases at Hatteras Inlet, Port Royal and Fernandina. The episode weighs Rowena Reed's view that no coherent plan existed against the collapse of the cotton economy.

• Confederate torpedoes used glass vials of sulfuric acid that shattered on contact and set off the powder charge.
• The H.L. Hunley, hand-cranked by eight men, sank the USS Housatonic in 1864 with a spar charge and was lost afterward.
• British-built blockade runners with low silhouettes and smokeless anthracite coal completed an estimated 2,500 to 2,800 runs.
• Runners brought in about half a million rifles, but Southern cotton exports fell 95 percent from prewar levels.
• Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major Confederate port, fell in January 1865, shortly before the Army of Northern Virginia collapsed.

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This biography follows a New Hampshire-born editor, born in 1811, who did not breathe for the first 20 minutes of his life. Raised in poverty by a father constantly fleeing debt, he ran away at 15 to apprentice as a printer and arrived in New York City in 1831 with almost nothing. Living in a boarding house that banned meat, alcohol, coffee and spices, he saved enough to buy his own type. In 1841 he founded a daily newspaper that rejected the scandal-driven penny press, mailed a weekly edition to farmers and frontier readers, promoted utopian socialism, vegetarianism, feminism and temperance, and employed Karl Marx as a European correspondent for a decade.

His three-month term in Congress in 1848 produced an exposé of colleagues' padded travel expenses, a bill to ban flogging in the Navy and a proposal to rename the country. At the 1860 Republican convention he worked against the front-runner, a former ally, helping open the way for Abraham Lincoln. During the Civil War he demanded immediate emancipation, drawing Lincoln's reply that saving the Union came first, and held unauthorized peace talks with Confederate representatives in Canada. After the war he helped pay the bail of the former Confederate president, and readers canceled subscriptions. In 1872 he ran for president with Democratic backing, lost his wife days before the election, lost in a landslide, and died weeks later.

• Biographers have speculated that oxygen deprivation at birth shaped his singular focus and difficulty reading social cues.
• He kept his strict diet for nearly the rest of his life.
• A campaign cartoon showed him reaching across a grave to shake hands with Lincoln's assassin.
• After his defeat he was institutionalized and died before the Electoral College cast its ballots.
• His funeral in New York drew his fiercest rivals, including the president who had just defeated him.

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More than 600,000 military deaths in the Civil War shattered the Victorian ideal of a good death at home, and Americans improvised new rituals of mourning. Historian David Blight points to May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, where freed Black residents reburied 257 Union soldiers from a mass grave at the Washington Race Course prison camp and about 10,000 people paraded and covered the graves with flowers. In March 1866 Mary Ann Williams of the Ladies Memorial Association in Columbus, Georgia, proposed April 26 for decorating Confederate graves, and in Columbus, Mississippi, women at Friendship Cemetery also decorated Union graves. In 1966 Lyndon B. Johnson named Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace anyway.

On May 5, 1868, John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order No. 11 naming May 30 as Decoration Day, and over 180 cemeteries in 27 states took part that year. Many Southern states kept separate Confederate memorial days, some on Jefferson Davis's June 3 birthday, which the episode ties to the Lost Cause. After World War I the day expanded to all American war dead, with the poppy drawn from John McCrae's In Flanders Fields and championed by Moina Michael. The episode follows the 1911 dispute over holding the Indianapolis 500 on the day, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed in 1968 that created the three-day weekend, and the 2000 National Moment of Remembrance Act.

• Logan's wife's memoirs say May 30 was chosen because flowers would be in bloom across the North.
• The American Legion adopted the poppy in 1920.
• Older GAR veterans called the Indy 500 a desecration, while younger World War I veterans supported the race.
• On Memorial Day the flag flies at half-staff until noon, then is raised to full staff.
• The Veterans of Foreign Wars objected to the Monday holiday, and Congress later asked Americans to pause at 3 p.m. local time.

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The Battle of Pea Ridge was fought on March 7 and 8, 1862, in northwestern Arkansas, as Earl Van Dorn tried to destroy Samuel R. Curtis's Union Army of the Southwest and retake Missouri. Curtis had about 10,250 men and 50 guns, more than half of them German immigrants grouped under Franz Sigel, who had threatened to resign over not getting the command. Van Dorn brought 16,000 men, including an 800-man Native American cavalry brigade, and planned to swing around Curtis's defenses at Little Sugar Creek. He ordered his men to carry three days' rations, 40 rounds and one blanket, left his supply trains behind, and marched through a winter storm on roads blocked by felled trees, until he split his army at dawn.

At Leetown, Benjamin McCulloch was shot dead while scouting alone, his staff concealed his death, James McIntosh was killed leading a cavalry charge, and Louis Hébert was captured after getting lost in the woods, leaving the wing leaderless. At Elkhorn Tavern, Van Dorn and Sterling Price faced Eugene Carr, who was wounded three times and later received the Medal of Honor, until Henry Little's charge pushed the Union back to Ruddick's Field. Overnight the Confederates found their reserve ammunition had been sent six hours away. On March 8 Sigel massed 21 guns against 12 and fired into the limestone of Big Mountain, raining rock on the Confederate line, and Van Dorn retreated, later saying he had only failed in his intentions.

• Reports that Union wounded were killed and mutilated after an early clash permanently tarnished the reputation of Albert Pike.
• Elkanah Greer was not told for several hours that he had taken command of the Confederate right wing.
• Union General Alexander Asboth urged a retreat after the first day, and Curtis refused.
• After the victory, Sigel marched his infantry in the wrong direction toward Missouri.
• The Union lost over 1,300 men and the Confederates about 2,000, and Missouri stayed in Union hands for the rest of the war.