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

About this episode: 

For those aboard the fifty-gun USS Congress, it had been a quiet morning. Its crew, as usual, prepared the twenty-year-old vessel for inspection which would be held the next day. Meanwhile, the ship’s quartermaster gazed out over Hampton Roads which glistened under a late winter sun. All seemed normal. And then, at 12:45 p.m., a column of heavy black smoke. Curiosity aroused, the quartermaster turned to a fellow officer, handed him his glass and asked for him to take a look. Their gaze created concern. Indeed, as the quartermaster put it, at last, “that thing is a-comin”. Something no one had ever seen before. Its mission - to change the course of the war. It was Saturday, March 8, 1862, and one vessel, an ironclad, was about to alter centuries of naval warfare. This is the story of technology turning a page. This is the story of the Duel between the Ironclads.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Stephen Mallory

John Mercer Brooke

John L. Porter

Gideon Welles

John Ericsson

John Worden

Additional Resources:

Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad and the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History by James Tertius De Kay

Duel Between The First Ironclads by William C. Davis

The Blockade: Runners and Raiders (The Civil War Series, Vol. 3) by Time-Life Books

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*Title Image by Ivan Berryman

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

When exercising power, the 16th President’s stocky and sphinxlike Secretary of War could demonstrate a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Personally honest, he could be unforgiving and given to histrionics when he thought them necessary. And again, when required, warm hearted, selfless and patriotic. In charge of the Union’s land-based operations, he made tough decisions and did so with little regard for those affected by those decisions. His mission was to win the war and he pursued that purpose with relentless fury. In doing so, far too many simply remembered him as the “unloved Secretary of War”. In the pantheon that was Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet, this is the story of his Mars. This is the story of Edwin McMasters Stanton.   

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Salmon P. Chase

Daniel Sickles

Simon Cameron

William Seward

Lorenzo Thomas

Manton Marble

Additional Resources:

Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton by William Marvel

Stanton: Lincoln's War Secretary by Walter Stahr

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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.

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*Title Image by The McMahan Photo Archive/RMP Archive/Mathew Brady / The Brady Studio

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

For most of us, our mental snapshot of 19th-century battlefield medicine is captured when Union Major General Carl Schurz recorded a ghastly scene at Gettysburg: “There stood the surgeons, their sleeves rolled up to their elbows … [One] surgeon snatched his knife from between his teeth …, wiped it rapidly once or twice across his bloodstained apron, and the cutting began. The operation accomplished, the surgeon would look around with a deep sigh, and then – 'Next!'”  Relying on first-hand accounts, meticulous statistics and research, we share a side of the conflict that few who fought wanted to think about and, particularly, experience.  For our 70th episode, we tell the story of Civil War Medicine.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

William A. Hammond

Jonathan Letterman

Samuel Preston Moore

Sally Tompkins

Dorothea Dix

Clara Barton

Additional Resources:

The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy by Bell Irvin Wiley

The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union by Bell Irvin Wiley

Voices of the Civil War by Richard Wheeler

Civil War Medicine 1861-1865 by C. Keith Wilbur

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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.

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*Title Image by Alexander Gardner

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

Back in December of 2018, we told the story of an engagement that took place along the banks of the Rappahannock and detailed events that took place afterwards.  Now, five years later, we return to that story but with greater detail, and the addition of first person accounts.  Once again, we would like to take you back to November and December 1862, when yet another Federal commander wanted Richmond but, in order to do that, had to take a sleepy little town almost halfway between the Southern capital and Washington City. Once again, we return to stories not only about men in battle but men showing compassion for one another - yes, even for those deemed their enemy.  This is story of the Battle of Fredericksburg, revisited. 

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

George B. McClellan

Ambrose Burnside

William B. Franklin

William Barksdale

Richard Kirkland

Additional Resources:

Battle of Fredericksburg Overview

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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

*Title Image by Mort Kunstler

*Map by Hal Jespersen

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

By 1864, a desperate Confederacy realized it must resort to desperate measures.  Measures not only confined to land battles and trying to break the Union blockade, but the procuring and use of commerce raiders which would scour the oceans to wreak havoc on the North’s vast merchant marine.  Anything to create economic hardship. Anything to doom Abraham Lincoln’s chances for reelection.  This is the story of one such raider.  This is the story of the CSS Shenandoah. 

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

James Dunwoody Bulloch

Thomas Dudley

Lord John Russell

James Iredell Waddell

William Conway Whittle

For Further Reading:

Sea of Gray: The Around-the-World Odyssey of the Confederate Raider Shenandoah by Tom Chaffin

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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

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

The Native Americans referred to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley as “Daughter of the Stars.” Yet, both the Federal Union and the Confederacy knew it to be the “Breadbasket of Virginia” - and that made it a theater for military operations. Both sides very aware of “Stonewall” Jackson’s assessment in 1862, “If the Valley is lost, then Virginia is lost.” Played out in 1864, this is the story of the dramatic ebb and flow to control that strategic site. This is the story of the Second Valley Campaign.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

John Imboden

Franz Sigel

William E. "Grumble" Jones

Philip Sheridan

Jubal Early

Stephen Dodson Ramseur

Additional Resources:

Map of the Shenandoah Valley Campaigns of 1864

For Further Reading:

The Shenandoah in Flames: The Valley Campaign of 1864 by Thomas A. Lewis

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

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

This time around, a different delivery, a different approach. Rather than anecdotes and stories from a biography, battle or campaign, this time a series of facts, figures, theories and themes that set the stage for waging civil war. This session: Strategy, Tactics, Arms and Technology - a basis for understanding why our civil conflict was so long and so costly.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Antoine-Henri Jomini

Carl von Clausewitz

Winfield Scott

Dennis Hart Mahan

Claude-Étienne Minié

William J. Hardee

For Further Reading:

Battle Tactics of the Civil War by Paddy Griffith

The Civil War Dictionary by Mark M. Boatner III

Get The Guide:

Want to learn more about the Civil War? A great place to start is Fred's guide, The Civil War: A History of the War between the States from Workman Publishing. The guide is in its 9th printing.

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

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

It was over 140 years ago that the American Red Cross was founded. Though most know its founder, few know the details of her lifetime of charity, sacrifice and service. This is an attempt to correct that. This is the story of an American pioneer - an American hero. This is the story of Clara Barton.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Charles Sumner

Frances Gage

Dorence Atwater

Samuel Green

Dorothea Dix

For Further Reading:

A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War by Stephen B. Oates

Get The Guide:

Want to learn more about the Civil War? A great place to start is Fred's guide, The Civil War: A History of the War between the States from Workman Publishing. The guide is in its 9th printing.

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

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

In the first days of the American Civil War, Winfield Scott, the then 74-year-old Union General-in-Chief, advised a strategy that he believed was key in putting down the Southern rebellion.  Derisively tabbed the “Anaconda” Plan, Scott believed: one, the Border States had to be held and used as avenues for invasion; two, Southern ports should be blockaded and, third, to split the Confederacy, the Mississippi River should become a Union highway.  This is the story of the incredible campaign that made Scott’s third element reality.  This is the story of Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign and siege of Vicksburg.

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

David G. Farragut

John Alexander McClernand

John C. Pemberton

Earl Van Dorn

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Stephen D. Lee

Additional Resources:

Assaults on Vicksburg - May 22nd, 1863

Operations against Vicksburg and Grant's Bayou Operations - November 1862 through April 1863

Get The Guide:

Want to learn more about the Civil War? A great place to start is Fred's guide, The Civil War: A History of the War between the States from Workman Publishing. The guide is in its 9th printing.

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

Producer: Dan Irving

About this episode: 

It was January 1872. In Lexington, Virginia and on the campus of recently re-named Washington and Lee College, former Confederate Lieutenant General Jubal Anderson Early was on a mission: a mission to venerate Robert E. Lee, and to give Southerners a positive spin on their defeat - not only to address the recent past, but to arm them and their descendants with, as he and his disciples put it, a “correct” narrative of the war. This is the story of an ideology that simmers even to this day. This is the story of the creation and foundations of the Lost Cause.  

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Some Characters Mentioned In This Episode:

Patrick Cleburne

Jubal Anderson Early

James Longstreet

Albert Sidney Johnston

Philip Sheridan

Frederick Douglass

For Further Reading:

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan

Get The Guide:

Want to learn more about the Civil War? A great place to start is Fred's guide, The Civil War: A History of the War between the States from Workman Publishing. The guide is in its 9th printing.

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

Producer: Dan Irving