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.

----more----

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.

----more----

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.

----more----

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