Threads From The National Tapestry: Stories From The American Civil War

About this episode: 

In the aftermath of the great and bloody battle of Shiloh, we pick up with the life and career of William Tecumseh Sherman. His personal journey continues to be one that spans the vast spectrum that comprises life itself - ups and downs, triumphs and defeats. In this episode, we speak of his command of the Union’s Western Theater and its campaigns, his post-war rise to General-in-Chief and, after retirement, his time as citizen. Through all, he was larger than life and no stranger to complexity and controversy. Now, in Part II, we continue the deeply-layered story that is William Tecumseh Sherman.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Edwin Stanton

Ulysses S. Grant

Henry Halleck

Joseph E. Johnston

Jefferson Davis

For Further Reading

Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman by Michael Fellman

Sherman: Merchant of Terror, Advocate of Peace by Charles Edmund Vetter

William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life by James Lee McDonough

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Thank you to our sponsor, Celebrity Word Scramble. In collaboration with Fred Kiger, they have published a Civil War edition of the Celebrity Word Scramble series. Included in the book is 16 pages of Civil War facts, stories, and insights written by Fred Kiger.

Get your copy of the book here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Thank you to our sponsor John Bailey.

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

It was a Wednesday, August 11, 1880 and some 5000 Union veterans gathered at the Ohio State Fair. President Rutherford B. Hayes had just finished a speech when another was called for. The next speaker was tall, sinewy and long in the neck. His head was large and his face a regular nest of wrinkles. Often animated and mercurial in temperament, on this day, his features expressed determination - especially his mouth. “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell…” This is the story of that speaker - one who survived charges of insanity. A man who, in the vortex of civil war, bonded with another and the two would eventually bring the Confederacy to its knees. This is the story of William Tecumseh Sherman.   

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Thomas Ewing

Ellen Ewing Sherman

Robert Anderson

John Sherman

Henry Halleck

P. G. T. Beauregard

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, Celebrity Word Scramble. In collaboration with Fred Kiger, they have published a Civil War edition of the Celebrity Word Scramble series. Included in the book is 16 pages of Civil War facts, stories, and insights written by Fred Kiger.

Get your copy of the book here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Thank you to our sponsor John Bailey.

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

The year was 1859 and future Confederate Secretary of the Navy, Florida Senator Stephen R. Mallory, trumpeted, “It is no more for this country to pause in its career than for the free and untrammeled eagle to cease its soar.” He had every reason to be optimistic, for the decade of the 1850s had brought the United States of America exceptional growth and prosperity. And, with enormous resources, there was much to look forward to: vast unoccupied lands, a network of navigable rivers, untapped riches in timber, iron, coal, copper and California gold.  It is also true that in that same decade political tension had escalated but in the cold light of economics, the two sections were interdependent - perhaps inseparable. Yet there were unsettling factors at work: geography, population and its make-up, internal improvements, technology, religion, education, reform, politics and, yes, slavery and the question of its expansion. Taken as a whole, the United States in 1860, was in fact, two worlds.  On the heels of our tour of the American South in 1860, we now look at that world that comprised the so-called Free States - the North.   

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Roger Taney

John Rock

William H. Seward

Salmon Chase

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, Celebrity Word Scramble. In collaboration with Fred Kiger, they have published a Civil War edition of the Celebrity Word Scramble series. Included in the book is 16 pages of Civil War facts, stories, and insights written by Fred Kiger.

Get your copy of the book here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Thank you to our sponsor John Bailey.

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

Sometime in 1861, the young Georgia poet Sidney Lanier, a recent Confederate Army enlistee, attended a mock medieval tournament in Kinston, NC. Watching mounted Confederate officers dressed as knights competing for the honor of a local belle, he was moved…even enraptured. To him, the scene was a metaphor for the war itself. The South was a gallant knight battling against dark Northern materialistic forces. Defending hallowed chivalry. As Lanier put it, the Confederacy’s war had “the sanctity of a religious cause” arrayed in “military trapping.” These men, this image of knights in shining armor, this lifestyle are what most remember of the antebellum South. Indeed, what many still want to remember. But they represented only a very thin slice of Southern society. About only one half of 1% of a total population of some nine million. And unlike royalty of old, those planters… those knights were part of  an aristocracy sired by property, not birth. Most of them self-made men from ordinary backgrounds whose influence was measured in the number of slaves they owned and the acreage of their plantations. Enjoying leisure and wealth, those few had the time and energy to pursue politics and, in positions of economic and political power, they enjoyed deference from the masses that made up the majority of the Southern white population. Deference which meant that majority followed the leadership and adopted the views of something they would never attain over the course of their entire existence. For this episode, we tell the story of a 19th century world filled with magnolia and cotton…populated with planters, yeomen farmers, “crackers” and the enslaved.  Taken together, the completed picture of a world…a culture that in five years would truly be “gone with the wind.” This is the story of the Antebellum South on the eve of civil war.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

John C. Calhoun

Eli Whitney

Edgar Allan Poe

Stephen Foster

James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow

William L. Yancey

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Thank you to our sponsor John Bailey.

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

From June 18, 1864 until April 2, 1865, the Union Armies of the James and Potomac laid siege to Petersburg, Virginia - the all-important supply and communication center for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and Richmond itself. After 45 days of constant bloodletting in the Overland Campaign, the contesting forces began what would mirror warfare five decades later - miles and miles of trenches, denuded landmarks and death not so much by rifled muskets and artillery but disease. This is the story of the Confederacy’s long, slow descent into darkness. This the story of the siege of Petersburg. 

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

George Gordon Meade

Wade Hampton III

Benjamin Butler

Philip Sheridan

John B. Gordon

Gouverneur Warren

Additional Resources:

First Battle Of Deep Bottom - July 27-29, 1864

Siege Of Petersburg - Actions August 18-19, 1864

Siege Of Petersburg - Actions October 27, 1864

Siege Of Petersburg - Actions March 29-31, 1865

Siege Of Petersburg - Actions April 2, 1865

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Thank you to our sponsor John Bailey.

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

GPS, drones, laser-guidance—all modern marvels that have served mankind in both peace and war. Nothing new, for there were creations and adaptations for a conflict contested in the 1860s; enough so that that confrontation has been called, by many, the first “modern war.”  This is the story of enterprising inventors and engineers and their ideas and machines—their taking theory and making it practical.  The ongoing marriage between innovation and war, this is the story of Science and Technology in the American Civil War.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Joseph Bailey

Henry Pleasants

Richard Gatling

Samuel Morse

Horace Lawson Hunley

For Further Reading:

Trial by Fire: Science, Technology and the Civil War by Charles D. Ross

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Thank you to our sponsor John Bailey.

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

Revolution and civil war require explosive issues and impassioned men more than willing to make change and, if necessary, to do so violently. This is the story of two such Southern men. This is the story of fire eaters Louis T. Wigfall and Edmund Ruffin.  

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Nathaniel Macon

Roger A. Pryor

John Brown

Sam Houston

P. G. T. Beauregard

James H. Hammond

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Thank you to our sponsor John Bailey.

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

It takes a cast to put on a play and our story this day is filled with characters that emoted passions raging from reasoned deliberation to knee-jerk and violent. And not only for the chain of events that led to the first confrontation of the American Civil War but throughout and  even beyond the four-year long conflict. Men and women caught in the cross-hairs of history or those that created them. This is the story of the characters and events that led to momentous drama in Charleston Harbor. This is the cast and story of Fort Sumter Revisited.  

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Robert Anderson

James Buchanan

Winfield Scott

Robert Toombs

Mary Boykin Chesnut

Abner Doubleday

For Further Reading:

The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson

Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War by Maury Klein

Mary Chesnut's Civil War by Mary Chesnut

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

Some six years ago, we chronicled the Confederacy’s Gibraltar that allowed Wilmington, NC to be the last major Confederate port open to the outside world. 72 episodes later and in the 160th year of its capture, we, again, turn our attention to the massive earthen fort and those that took part in the campaign to either storm or defend the Confederate Goliath. This is the expanded story of the fort whose fall in January of 1865 hastened, in many respects, Lee’s retreat from Petersburg, Virginia and, subsequently, the surrender of his army at Appomattox. This is Fort Fisher Revisited.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Rose O'Neal Greenhow

William Lamb

William Henry Chase Whiting

Braxton Bragg

Gideon Welles

David Dixon Porter

For Further Reading:

The Wilmington Campaign: Last Rays Of Departing Hope by Chris E. Fonvielle, Jr.

Confederate Goliath: The Battle Of Fort Fisher by Rod Gragg

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

She stood only about 5’, yet, in terms of achievement and historical significance, she remains a giant. This is the story of not only a remarkable woman, but human being. This is the story of Harriet Tubman.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Charles Nalle

Frederick Douglass

Thomas Garrett

William Seward

John Brown

Subscribe to the Threads from the National Tapestry YouTube Channel here

Thank you to our sponsor, The Badge Maker - proudly carrying affordable Civil War Corps Badges and other hand-made historical reproductions for reenactors, living history interpreters, and lovers of history.

Check out The Badge Maker and place your orders here

Thank you to our sponsor Bob Graesser, Raleigh Civil War Round Table's editor of The Knapsack newsletter and the Round Table's webmaster at http://www.raleighcwrt.org

Producer: Dan Irving