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Clement Vallandigham, born in 1820 in New Lisbon, Ohio, left Jefferson College without a degree after a dispute over debate society rules, practiced law in Dayton with a $500 loan from his friend Edwin Stanton, and became a Democratic congressman opposed to abolition. He questioned John Brown after Harpers Ferry, proposed dividing the country into four sections with Senate vetoes, and coined the Copperhead slogan about the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.

After a May 1863 speech in Mount Vernon defying General Ambrose Burnside's General Order No. 38, soldiers arrested him at night and a military commission convicted him. Lincoln commuted the prison sentence to banishment behind Confederate lines. Vallandigham went on to Bermuda and Canada, ran for Ohio governor from a hotel in Windsor, Ontario, lost in a landslide, and led the secret Order of the Sons of Liberty. In 1871, after urging Democrats to accept the Reconstruction amendments, he shot himself while demonstrating how a victim might have fired his own pistol, and his client was acquitted.

• William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator called him a venomous creature doing the dirty work of the South.
• While in Richmond he advised Confederate officials against invading Pennsylvania.
• He returned from Canada in disguise in 1864, and Lincoln ordered him watched but left alone.
• He wrote the peace plank of the 1864 Democratic platform, which nominee George McClellan rejected.
• His exile inspired Edward Everett Hale's story The Man Without a Country.

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Herman Haupt was born in Philadelphia in 1817, lost his father at 11, and won an appointment to West Point from Andrew Jackson, only to resign his commission soon after graduating in 1835. He patented the Haupt truss in 1839, taught at Pennsylvania College in Gettysburg, and rose to general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, before sinking his savings into the Hoosac Tunnel in Massachusetts when his partner failed to raise capital.

In April 1862, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made him chief of the military railroads. Haupt refused a uniform and a salary, used formerly enslaved laborers in specialized ten man squads, and rebuilt the Potomac Creek bridge in under two weeks, prompting Lincoln's remark about cornstalks and bean poles. He fought with John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, and George McClellan to keep commanders from holding trains as warehouses, supplied the army at Gettysburg, and evacuated over 15,500 wounded. In September 1863 he refused an unconditional commission to protect his tunnel investment and was relieved.

• The Potomac Creek bridge spanned about 400 feet and stood roughly 100 feet above the creek.
• His two rules: the military must not interfere with train operations, and cars must be unloaded and returned at once.
• He experimented with placing explosives in bridge trusses and with firing cannonballs through pressurized locomotive boilers.
• On July 6, 1863, he went to the White House to tell Lincoln that Meade was not pursuing Lee.
• The Hoosac Tunnel ultimately drained his fortune, and he died in 1905 aboard a Pennsylvania Railroad train.

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Robert Gould Shaw was born in 1837 to wealthy Boston abolitionists Francis and Sarah Shaw, who lived beside the Brook Farm commune. He was miserable at a Catholic prep school in New York, drifted through schools in Switzerland and Hanover, read Uncle Tom's Cabin repeatedly, dropped out of Harvard, and hated clerking at his uncle's firm. The Civil War gave him structure: he fought with the 2nd Massachusetts at Winchester, Cedar Mountain, and Antietam and was wounded twice.

Governor John A. Andrew offered him command of the 54th Massachusetts, a Black regiment, and Shaw at first declined, fearing the men would be used only as laborers. Once in command he drilled them hard, urged them to refuse unequal pay of $10 a month, and protested in writing when Colonel James Montgomery burned Darien, Georgia. On July 18, 1863, he led the assault on Fort Wagner and was killed on the parapet. General Johnson Hagood had his body thrown into a trench with his men, and his father replied that no holier place could be imagined.

• Frederick Douglass sent two of his sons to serve in the 54th Massachusetts.
• Fort Wagner's sand and palmetto log walls absorbed the naval bombardment that was meant to weaken it.
• Shaw married Annie in May 1863, and she lived as his widow until 1907 without remarrying.
• After the battle, Black enlistment surged, with over 100,000 African Americans eventually joining the Union Army.
• Shaw's sword, stolen from his body, was found in 2017 in a Massachusetts attic by descendants of his sister.

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On March 21, 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens addressed a crowd at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia, weeks before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Seven states had seceded, Lincoln had been in office less than three weeks, and Stephens boasted that the revolution had been bloodless. This episode examines what he said: that the founders, including Jefferson, had been wrong to treat slavery as an evil, and that the new government's cornerstone was white supremacy, defended with polygenism and selective biblical readings.

Stephens also accused the North of caring only about Southern tax revenue and praised the Confederate constitution for barring federally funded internal improvements, letting cabinet members join congressional debates, and limiting presidents to one six year term. After the war, from a cell at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, he began claiming reporters had misquoted him, laying groundwork for the Lost Cause. The episode notes that the speech was reprinted in full in his own authorized record, that Frederick Douglass used it against the Confederacy, and that a story of Jefferson Davis being furious about it traces back to a 1950s biographer.

• Stephens told the crowd the Confederacy was larger than France, Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom combined.
• He expected the border states to join and federal forces to abandon Fort Sumter without a fight.
• He used the Georgia Railroad to argue that local commerce should pay for local improvements.
• He later recast the speech as being about racial uplift and said the war was only about constitutional differences.
• Harry V. Jaffa concluded the speech captured the soul of the Confederacy and of the Jim Crow era that followed.

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Alexander H. Stephens never weighed more than 100 pounds, suffered chronic illness from childhood, and was orphaned at 14 after losing his mother as an infant and his father and stepmother to pneumonia. This episode follows him from his uncle's library to Franklin College, a brief career as a strict schoolteacher, and a law practice in Crawfordville where he never lost a client to the death penalty, before he entered the U.S. House in 1843 as a Whig and became a wealthy enslaver.

Stephens survived being stabbed by Georgia judge Francis Cone in 1848 rather than retract a statement, used an obscure procedural maneuver to force passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and compared the Union to the Garden of Eden while arguing against secession. When Georgia seceded he followed his state and became Confederate vice president, delivering the Cornerstone Speech in 1861. He then broke with Jefferson Davis over conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus, met Lincoln at the Hampton Roads conference, and after prison worked to recast the war as a constitutional dispute in multi volume histories.

• He took the middle name Hamilton from a Presbyterian mentor during his schooling.
• He later reconciled with the judge who had stabbed him.
• At Hampton Roads, Lincoln arranged the release of Stephens' nephew from a Northern prison camp.
• Pardoned by Andrew Johnson after about five months in prison, he was elected to the Senate but refused his seat, then served in the House from 1873.
• He was elected governor of Georgia in 1882 and died in 1883, four months into his term.

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Alexander Gardner, born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1821, trained for seven years as a jeweler, edited the Glasgow Sentinel to fund a cooperative commune in Iowa inspired by Robert Owen, and then fell for photography after seeing Mathew Brady's work at London's Great Exhibition of 1851. Arriving in America in 1856 to find the commune ravaged by tuberculosis, he joined Brady, mastered large imperial prints, and ran Brady's Washington gallery as Brady's eyesight failed.

Through Allan Pinkerton, Gardner became a photographer with McClellan's army and used the wet plate collodion process to photograph the dead at Antietam, images that shocked New Yorkers. Angered by Brady's practice of stamping his own name on employees' work, Gardner opened his own studio in 1863, photographed Lincoln seven times, documented the execution of the assassination conspirators, and published his two volume Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War in 1866, crediting every photographer. In 1975, historian William Frassanito showed that Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter was staged by dragging a body about 40 yards into Devil's Den.

• Wet plate photographers had roughly 10 to 15 minutes to coat, expose, and develop each glass plate in a mobile darkroom wagon.
• Families used magnifying glasses on the Antietam prints to identify dead relatives.
• A famous cracked plate portrait of Lincoln, long called the last photo before his death, was actually taken in February 1865.
• The Sketch Book credited photographers including Timothy O'Sullivan and James Gibson but sold poorly in a grieving nation.
• Gardner left photography by 1871, helped found an insurance company, and hundreds of his lost negatives were found in 1893.

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Albert Sidney Johnston served in the armies of three nations: the United States, the Republic of Texas, and the Confederacy. Born in Kentucky in 1803, he befriended a younger Jefferson Davis at Transylvania University, graduated eighth in his West Point class of 1826, resigned to care for his dying wife Henrietta, then enlisted as a private in Texas, rose to senior brigadier general, and took a bullet through the hip in a duel with Felix Huston over command of the army.

The episode follows his rally of breaking volunteers at Monterrey, his disciplined winter at Fort Bridger during the Utah War, and his refusal as commander of the Department of the Pacific to release a single cartridge to secessionists before resigning. Given the vast Western Theater with too few men, he was undone by subordinates John B. Floyd and Gideon Pillow at Fort Donelson. At Shiloh on April 6, 1862, he was struck behind the right knee, the blood collecting unseen in his riding boot. He had sent his surgeon to treat wounded prisoners, and a tourniquet sat unused in his pocket.

• Zachary Taylor called Johnston the best soldier he ever commanded, but the spoils system kept him out of the regular army for years.
• His 2nd U.S. Cavalry officers included Robert E. Lee, George H. Thomas, and John Bell Hood.
• In California he moved 10,000 muskets to Alcatraz Island to keep them from local Southern militias.
• At Shiloh he scolded an officer for looting and took a tin cup as his only share of the spoils, using it to direct troops.
• After his death P.G.T. Beauregard halted the attack for the night, and Grant's reinforced army counterattacked the next day.

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The Springfield Model 1861 was a 56 inch, 9 pound rifled musket that put sharpshooter accuracy in the hands of ordinary infantry. This episode explains how the .58 caliber Minie ball made rifles as fast to load as smoothbores, why percussion caps replaced flintlocks, and why the Ordnance Department abandoned the gummy, jam prone Maynard tape primer of the Model 1855 in favor of simple copper caps and rugged flip up leaf sights.

Demand overwhelmed the Springfield Armory, which built about 265,000 rifles between 1861 and 1863, so the government contracted 20 private manufacturers across the North. Colt's engineers simplified the design into the Colt Special, and several of its changes were adopted in the Model 1863. Yet the rifle's potential was wasted by West Point doctrine built for smoothbores and by the Minie ball's high arc, which sent shots over the heads of charging enemies when frightened soldiers left their 500 yard sights raised. After the war, surplus rifles spread worldwide and Erskine S. Allen's conversions turned them into breechloaders.

• A trained marksman with the Model 1861 could consistently hit a man sized target at 500 yards.
• The Confederacy favored the British Enfield Pattern 1853, whose ladder sight was graduated past 900 yards.
• Colt replaced spring retained barrel bands with screw clamped bands and reinforced the bolster to reduce cracking.
• In Korea in 1871, U.S. Marines and sailors fought with a mix of rolling block breechloaders and surplus Model 1861 muzzleloaders.
• The Allen conversions led to the Springfield Model 1873, the standard rifle of the Indian Wars.

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On October 8, 1862, the largest Civil War battle in Kentucky began in the village of Perryville as thirsty armies converged on the last stagnant pools of Doctors Creek during a severe drought. The episode explains why Lincoln considered Kentucky essential, how the state's declared neutrality collapsed by September 1861, and how the divided Confederate command of Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith produced a disorganized invasion while Don Carlos Buell raced to protect Louisville.

The battle itself was shaped by strange conditions: a temperature inversion created an acoustic shadow that kept Buell, injured from a fall from his horse and two miles away, from hearing the fighting. Bragg attacked with about 16,000 men believing he faced a small detachment, when Buell actually had around 55,000. Raw Union recruits were swept off the Open Knob, fighting spilled into 10 to 12 foot cornfields, and Leonidas Polk bluffed his way out of a Union regiment after riding into it by mistake. Bragg won the field but lost the campaign, retreating to Tennessee and leaving Kentucky in Union hands.

• Bragg left his army to attend the inauguration of a Confederate governor in Frankfort, which was interrupted by Union cannon fire.
• Scientists link the drought to the eruption of an African volcano the year before, which may have disrupted the jet stream.
• Patrick Cleburne's men, wearing captured blue pants, were shelled by their own artillery, and Cleburne was wounded in the ankle.
• A burning log barn on Squire Henry Bottom's farm killed wounded Union soldiers who had crawled inside for shelter.
• Polk's volley into the 22nd Indiana caused 65 percent casualties, and two days after the battle the drought broke with heavy rain.

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More than 178,000 men enlisted in the United States Colored Troops knowing the Confederacy had promised to treat them not as prisoners of war but as armed insurrectionists. This episode traces how a reluctant Union government came to arm Black soldiers, from General Benjamin Butler declaring escaped slaves contraband of war at Fort Monroe, through Lincoln's fear of losing the border states, to the Emancipation Proclamation and the creation of the Bureau of Colored Troops in 1863.

Inside the Union Army, USCT soldiers faced a glass ceiling on rank, white officers screened by General Silas Casey's examining board, and a pay gap of $7 against $13 a month that entire regiments protested by refusing pay for over a year. On the battlefield, the Confederate policy of May 1863 led to massacres at Fort Pillow, the Crater, and Olustee, halted the Dix-Hill prisoner exchange, and pushed the Union to adopt the Lieber Code. The episode closes with the Medal of Honor stories, the Buffalo Soldier regiments, and the argument that the USCT was the largest slave rebellion in modern history.

• Only about 110 Black soldiers received officer commissions, mostly as chaplains and surgeons, though one Kansas light artillery battery was led entirely by Black officers.
• The first official USCT engagement came at Island Mound, Missouri, in late 1862, before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.
• USCT mortality ran about 20.5 percent, roughly 35 percent higher than regular white troops, with over 36,000 deaths.
• Sergeant William Harvey Carney carried the colors at Fort Wagner while wounded and waited 37 years for his Medal of Honor.
• Corporal Andrew Jackson Smith, who saved his regiment's colors at Honey Hill, was not awarded the Medal of Honor until 2001.