pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In the summer of 1859, John Brown hid at the Kennedy Farmhouse in Maryland under the alias Isaac Smith, a few miles from the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. With 21 men, 16 white and five Black, he stockpiled nearly 200 Sharps carbines and almost a thousand pikes meant for enslaved people he expected to join him, telling neighbors the pikes were mining tools. Frederick Douglass heard the plan at a Pennsylvania quarry and called it a steel trap, but Shields Green chose to follow Brown. Warnings leaked through drillmaster Hugh Forbes and an anonymous letter to Secretary of War John B. Floyd, who dismissed it in part because it placed the armory in Maryland.

On October 16, Brown seized the armory, then sent men to take a great-grandnephew of George Washington hostage along with a sword and pistols linked to Washington and Lafayette. No uprising came. Hayward Shepherd, a free Black baggage handler, was the first man killed, and Brown let a stopped B&O train go on to Baltimore, where the alarm was raised. Militia pinned his men in the engine house, where his sons Watson and Oliver were mortally wounded, until Marines under Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart broke in on October 18.

• Brown's men drilled at night and welcomed thunderstorms that covered their noise.
• The Marine officer who struck Brown carried a light dress sword that bent double instead of killing him.
• Wounded on the paymaster's office floor, Brown told the governor of Virginia and visiting congressmen to prepare for eternity, as reporters took notes.
• John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd at Brown's hanging on December 2.
• Brown's final note said the nation's sins could never be washed away without a great shedding of blood.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

When the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia traded fire at Hampton Roads in 1862 and neither could pierce the other, centuries of wooden naval warfare ended. This episode traces how the ironclad emerged from three technologies: explosive shells such as the French Paixhans guns, steam power with the screw propeller, and metal armor. The Russian destruction of an Ottoman fleet at Sinop in 1853 proved wooden hulls could not survive shellfire. French floating batteries at Kinburn in 1855 showed iron could, and the wood-hulled Gloire of 1859 prompted Britain's all-iron HMS Warrior, which reached over 14 knots by armoring only a central citadel.

After Austria's flagship rammed and sank the Re d'Italia at Lissa in 1866, navies spent two decades fitting ships with underwater rams. Guns grew to 16 inches and 110 tons, firing once every 11 to 15 minutes, while armor moved from iron backed by teak to compound plate, Harvey steel and Krupp cemented steel. The episode covers John Ericsson's Monitor, James Eads's river ironclads, the Whitehead torpedo and France's Jeune École, and how by the 1890s the ironclad became the pre-dreadnought battleship.

• Crews heated iron shot red-hot to set wooden enemy hulls on fire.
• The double-loaded muzzle-loader that burst aboard HMS Thunderer in 1879 pushed the Royal Navy toward the de Bange breech seal.
• Just under six inches of Krupp armor matched 15 inches of the old wrought iron.
• HMS Captain, combining a low freeboard with a full sailing rig, capsized in a gale and took designer Cowper Coles with her.
• H.G. Wells later used the term land ironclads for his fictional forerunners of the tank.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

William Tecumseh Sherman spent much of his first 40 years by his own account as a failure. Born in Ohio in 1820 and left destitute when his father died, he was raised by the Ewing family and sent to West Point, where he excelled academically and piled up demerits. He missed combat in the Mexican-American War while serving in California, where he drafted documents confirming the gold discovery. He then managed a San Francisco bank that failed in a national panic, survived two shipwrecks, practiced law in Kansas without passing the bar, and ran the Louisiana military college that became LSU, warning Southern friends that Northern industry would beat them.

In 1861 he resigned, fought well at Bull Run, then broke down in Kentucky, overestimating enemy numbers until he was relieved and newspapers called him insane. At Shiloh he had three horses shot from under him and was wounded twice, and the episode argues the battle cured his anxieties. His bond with Grant led to Atlanta, the March to the Sea, and hard war aimed at property rather than civilians. The episode also covers his rejected surrender terms, the Indian Wars, and how Lost Cause writers and British historians reshaped his reputation.

• Sherman's troops heated and twisted rails around trees, known as Sherman's neckties.
• He fed about 60,000 men off the land after cutting his own supply line in Georgia.
• His lenient terms in the Carolinas were rejected in Washington, and the Secretary of War hinted to the press that he might be a traitor.
• He attacked corrupt reservation agents while pressing war against tribes resisting the railroads.
• He died of pneumonia in New York City in 1891, respected in both North and South.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Dred Scott was born enslaved in Virginia around 1799, taken to Alabama and then St. Louis by Peter Blow, and sold to Army surgeon John Emerson. Emerson's postings took Scott to Illinois and to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was banned under the Missouri Compromise. There he married Harriet Robinson in a civil ceremony performed by her owner, Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro, and their daughter Eliza was born on a steamboat in free territory. After Emerson died in 1843, his widow Irene leased the family out and in 1846 refused Scott's offer to buy their freedom.

Backed by the Blow family, Scott sued under Missouri's once free, always free precedent. He lost in 1847 on a hearsay technicality, won a retrial in 1850 after a cholera epidemic and a great fire, then lost when the Missouri Supreme Court abandoned its precedent in 1852. The federal case against John Sanford reached the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled in 1857 that Black Americans could not be citizens and struck down the Missouri Compromise. The episode traces the outrage, the Panic of 1857, and how the Scotts were freed anyway.

• President-elect James Buchanan pressed a Northern justice to join the Southern majority before the ruling.
• The Missouri judges wrote that a dark and fell spirit on slavery had changed the country.
• Irene Emerson married abolitionist congressman Calvin Chaffee, and the family was transferred to Taylor Blow.
• Taylor Blow freed Dred and Harriet Scott and their daughters on May 26, 1857.
• Scott worked as a hotel porter in St. Louis and died of tuberculosis in 1858, while Harriet lived until 1876.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The word carpetbagger took hold around 1867, when Tennessee politician Andrew J. Fletcher mocked Northern newcomers arriving with one dirty shirt and a pair of socks in a rusty carpet bag. This episode looks at who the label actually covered during Reconstruction, roughly 1865 to 1877. Alongside opportunists came Union veterans, lawyers, editors, missionaries and hundreds of Northern women who taught freed children, in a region whose planter elite had kept taxes low and built almost no public schools. Republicans in the South drew on three groups, and Democrats branded two of them: scalawags and carpetbaggers.

The episode profiles Louisiana governor Henry C. Warmoth, accused of profiting from state bonds while defending Black voting rights against the White League, and William Hines Furbush, born enslaved in Kentucky, who served in a Union colored regiment, photographed in Liberia, and won a seat in the Arkansas House. It covers the Red Shirts, the flight of Mississippi governor Adelbert Ames, Milton Littlefield's railroad bond fraud, and the Dunning School that cast the era as a mistake. It ends with the word's later lives in politics, British building societies, an OSS operation and a stuffed steak.

• By 1890, Northern investors controlled 88 percent of the railroad mileage in the South.
• Furbush and state senator Richard Dawson sued a Little Rock saloon that refused them service and won the only successful case under Arkansas's 1873 civil rights law.
• In 1878 Furbush became the first known Black Democrat elected to the Arkansas General Assembly.
• Hiram Revels wrote to Ulysses S. Grant in 1875 accusing Northern adventurers of exploiting Black voters.
• A 1950 highway marker in Colfax, Louisiana, called a massacre the end of carpetbag misrule and stood until 2021.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

This episode traces the blockade runner, a ship built to slip through a naval barricade rather than fight it, across more than two thousand years. In the Peloponnesian War, Leon of Salamis sent runners to Athens for reinforcements, and during the Punic Wars runners rowing at night with muffled oarlocks kept Carthage fed. In the 14th century the Victual Brothers ran provisions into Stockholm under siege by Queen Margaret I of Denmark. The core trade-off never changed: give up armor and survivability for speed and stealth.

In the American Civil War, the Union's Anaconda Plan stretched about 500 ships across 3,500 miles of coast, roughly one per seven miles, so runners only had to beat the ships at the choke points. British investors, hit by the Lancashire cotton famine, financed long, narrow, shallow-draft steamers staged from the Bahamas and Bermuda, and historians estimate the cargo they delivered lengthened the war by up to two years. The episode follows the idea forward to German cargo submarines, a zeppelin sent toward Africa, Axis submarine runs to Japan, British motor gunboats in the Skagerrak, and modern narco subs.

• Civil War runners burned nearly smokeless anthracite, were painted gray, and could lower their smokestacks.
• The CSS Advance made more than 20 runs through the blockade before it was captured.
• The Union took more than 1,100 runners and destroyed another 355.
• The German cargo submarine Deutschland crossed the Atlantic and surfaced in Baltimore in 1916.
• In World War II, only 16 of 32 German surface runners sent to Japan made it.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On the morning of April 6, 1862, Ulysses S. Grant was at breakfast in Savannah, Tennessee, on crutches after a fall from his horse, when he heard artillery from his army's camps at Pittsburg Landing. This episode treats Shiloh as a case study in crisis management. Fresh from victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Grant had been briefly sidelined by Henry Halleck over rumors of drinking. His camps near Shiloh church had no entrenchments, because he and William T. Sherman believed Albert Sidney Johnston's army at Corinth would not attack.

Colonel Everett Peabody's unauthorized dawn patrol into Fraley Field triggered the battle and bought time. Sherman, who had brushed off warnings, saw an orderly shot beside him, then rallied raw troops while wounded twice. Johnston's three-mile-wide lines broke apart in the ravines, he bled to death leading at the front, and Benjamin Prentiss held the Hornet's Nest for six hours. That night the gunboats Tyler and Lexington shelled Confederate positions, Buell's army arrived, and Grant counterattacked on April 7. Nearly 24,000 casualties led to calls for his removal, which Lincoln refused.

• Pierre G.T. Beauregard sent a premature telegram on the first night announcing a complete victory.
• Sherman found Grant under a tree in the rain with a lantern, and Grant said they would whip them tomorrow.
• The episode argues that exhaustion, disorganization and lost daylight, not Johnston's death, stalled the Confederate attack.
• Journalist Whitelaw Reid published claims of Union soldiers bayoneted in their tents, drawn from stragglers' accounts.
• Halleck took field command and made Grant second in command, and Sherman talked him out of resigning.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In the summer of 1885, Ulysses S. Grant sat wrapped in blankets on a porch in upstate New York, unable to speak, writing to finish a book before throat cancer killed him. This episode explains how a two-term president ended up penniless. After a self-funded world tour drained his savings, Grant joined his son Buck and investor Ferdinand Ward in the brokerage Grant and Ward. Ward used Grant's name to hint at secret government contracts and ran a Ponzi scheme, and in May 1884 the firm collapsed, wiping out the fortune Grant believed he had. That autumn he was diagnosed with terminal throat cancer.

Articles for Century magazine paid $500 each, and Century offered a 10 percent royalty for a full memoir until Mark Twain intervened. Twain proposed a subscription sale through his own firm, with about 10,000 agents, many of them Union veterans, selling with dummy books, and offered a 70 percent royalty and a $25,000 advance. Grant wrote 25 to 50 pages a day, often refusing cocaine swabs to keep his mind clear, and finished on July 18, 1885, five days before he died. The episode also looks at what the memoir includes, omits, and argues.

• A rumor that Twain ghostwrote the book began with former staffer Adam Badeau, but the manuscript is largely in Grant's hand.
• Grant called the Mexican-American War one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker one.
• He described arriving at Appomattox in a mud-spattered private's blouse while Lee wore full dress uniform.
• Agents pre-sold 350,000 two-volume sets, and in its first year the book outsold Uncle Tom's Cabin.
• Julia Grant received about $450,000 in royalties within three years, over $16 million today.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In May 1864, Ulysses S. Grant opened his Overland Campaign by crossing the Rapidan River with about 118,700 men and a supply train of over 4,000 wagons. This episode explains why that army halted in the Wilderness, roughly 70 square miles of secondary growth left after clear-cutting for tobacco and iron furnaces in Spotsylvania and Orange counties. Robert E. Lee, with about 66,000 men, struck while the Union columns were tangled in scrub pine, briars and vines that cancelled the advantages of numbers, artillery and cavalry.

On May 5, Lieutenant Colonel John Hammond's 5th New York Cavalry fought dismounted with Spencer carbines and delayed a Confederate corps for hours. At Saunders Field the Iron Brigade was hit in the flank, and muzzle flashes set the dry woods on fire, burning wounded men where they lay. On May 6, James Longstreet's flank attack along an unfinished railroad bed rolled up the Union line until his own men shot him, near where Stonewall Jackson fell a year earlier. Despite nearly 29,000 casualties, Grant turned his army south toward Spotsylvania instead of retreating.

• Lost Union soldiers wandered into the Widow Tapp Farm, Lee's headquarters, and ran back into the woods.
• Confederate prisoners believed Hammond's few hundred cavalrymen had been a full infantry brigade.
• Longstreet's corps reached the field after a 32-mile march.
• Grant rebuked an officer who warned that Lee would land in the army's rear, telling his staff to think about what they would do to Lee instead.
• Union soldiers cheered when they realized the night march of May 7 was heading south.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Gideon Welles was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, on July 1, 1802, into a family of state officeholders. He read law, then in 1826 founded the Hartford Times and served as a Jacksonian Democrat in the Connecticut House. From 1846 to 1849 he ran the Navy's Bureau of Provisions and Clothing, learning procurement and how to spot fraudulent invoices. His opposition to slavery led him to the Free Soil Party in 1848 and to help found the Republican Party, and in March 1861 Abraham Lincoln named him Secretary of the Navy as Southern officers resigned en masse.

Welles's first mission was sabotaged when Secretary of State William Seward diverted the USS Powhatan away from Fort Sumter. He opposed calling the closure of Southern ports a blockade, arguing the term implied Confederate sovereignty, but carried out the Anaconda Plan once Lincoln decided. From 76 ships and 7,600 sailors he built a navy about ten times larger by buying and converting merchant ships. Under Andrew Johnson he joined Seward in the National Union Party, privately deplored the Swing Around the Circle tour, and testified for Johnson at his impeachment trial.

• His ancestor Thomas Welles is the only person to hold all four of Connecticut's top offices.
• Lincoln nicknamed him Neptune for his management of the naval buildup.
• He championed ironclads including the USS Monitor and helped create the Navy's Medal of Honor.
• His wartime diaries remain a key source on the Lincoln and Johnson cabinets.
• He died in 1878 at 75, and two Navy warships were later named USS Welles.