Curated playlist
Union army generals
- Ulysses S. GrantUlysses S. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant on the 27th of April 1822, in Ohio, and by the time he died on the 23rd of July 1885, he had commanded the largest army in American history, won the Civil War, and served two terms as…
- Rutherford B. HayesRutherford B. Hayes became the 19th president of the United States under a cloud so thick that his critics called him "Rutherfraud" and "His Fraudulency" for every day of his four years in office. He had won the presidency by a single…
- Don Carlos BuellDon Carlos Buell arrived at the Battle of Shiloh on the second day of April 1862 convinced that he had saved the Union cause. By the following October, his own soldiers suspected him of treason. He was a general who could organize an army…
- James A. GarfieldJames A. Garfield arrived at the presidency having never once sought the job. At the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, delegates spent 35 ballots locked in a stalemate between Ulysses S. Grant and James G. Blaine. On the 36th…
- Andrew JohnsonAndrew Johnson was acquitted in the United States Senate by a single vote. That vote, cast in May 1868, saved his presidency from becoming the first to end in removal from office. Yet the trial itself exposed everything that had gone…
- Winfield ScottWinfield Scott stood six feet, five inches tall and weighed 230 pounds, and he spent the better part of six decades reshaping the United States Army from the inside out. Born near Petersburg, Virginia, on the 13th of June 1786, Scott died…
- Joseph HookerJoseph Hooker is one of the most contradictory figures of the American Civil War. He was the general who commanded the largest, best-organized army the Union had ever fielded, then lost his nerve at the moment it mattered most. He fought…
- John Pope (general)John Pope was serving on lighthouse duty when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency. The army chose him as one of four officers to escort the president-elect into Washington, D.C. He even offered to join Lincoln's staff as an aide. Within…
- William Tecumseh ShermanWilliam Tecumseh Sherman was born on the 8th of February, 1820, in Lancaster, Ohio, and by the time he died seventy-one years later, he had helped reshape the way wars are fought and won. His name conjures a single image for most…
- Irvin McDowellIrvin McDowell's name is permanently attached to one of the most humiliating afternoons in American military history. On a summer day in 1861, the Union Army he commanded streamed back toward Washington in a chaotic rout, civilians who had…
- John SedgwickJohn Sedgwick was standing in the open at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House on the 9th of May, 1864. Confederate sharpshooters, about 1,000 yards away, had begun targeting officers directing artillery. His staff was flinching.…
- Quincy Adams GillmoreQuincy Adams Gillmore entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1845. He graduated in 1849 as first in a class of 43 members. This top ranking secured his appointment to the engineers branch of the army. From…
- George B. McClellanGeorge Brinton McClellan arrived in Washington in the summer of 1861 as the man the Union had been waiting for. He had won the only land battles of the war so far, newspapers were calling him "the Napoleon of the Present War", and crowds…
- Gordon GrangerGordon Granger was born on the 6th of November 1821, in Joy, Wayne County, New York, and by the end of his life he had shaped two of the most consequential moments in American history. One of those moments unfolded on a battlefield in…
- John SchofieldOn the 2nd of July, 1892, John McAllister Schofield awarded himself the Medal of Honor. He was Commanding General of the United States Army. The award recognized conduct in a Missouri battle in August 1861. The citation described him as…
- Philip SheridanPhilip Henry Sheridan was born on the 6th of March, 1831, the third of six children of Irish Catholic immigrants from Killinkere parish in County Cavan, Ireland. He grew up in Somerset, Ohio, and stood only 5 feet 5 inches tall. Abraham…
- Benjamin ButlerBenjamin Butler earned two completely different reputations in the same war. The white South called him a beast and a felon worthy of execution if captured. Black newspapers, when he died in 1893, described him as "a staunch and…
- Carl SchurzCarl Schurz was born on the 2nd of March, 1829, in a small town called Liblar in the Rhine Province of Prussia, the son of a schoolteacher and a woman who was herself a journalist and public speaker. He died in New York City on the 14th of…
- David HunterDavid Hunter rode on Abraham Lincoln's inaugural train in February 1861, shoulder to shoulder with the president-elect as the locomotive made its way from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C. Somewhere in Buffalo, the crowd pressed…
- Franz SigelFranz Sigel was born on the 18th of November 1824 in Sinsheim, in the German state of Baden, and by the time he died in New York City on the 21st of August 1902, his name had been attached to parks, streets, townships, and statues…
- George CrookGeorge Crook was born on the 8th of September 1828 on a farm near Taylorsville, Ohio, and by the time he died in 1890, he had fought in two of the defining conflicts of 19th-century America. He led infantry charges through waist-deep…
- George Henry ThomasGeorge Henry Thomas was born on the 31st of July, 1816, into a plantation family in Southampton County, Virginia, five miles from the North Carolina border. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, his family turned his portrait…
- Nathaniel P. BanksNathaniel Prentice Banks spent his boyhood pulling empty bobbins from textile machines in the mills of Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts. That unglamorous childhood job earned him the nickname Bobbin Boy Banks, a label he carried for the…
- William W. AverellWilliam Woods Averell was born on the 5th of November 1832, in Cameron, New York, and before he was done, he would be the only Union general to win a major victory in the Shenandoah Valley before Philip Sheridan arrived to take charge. Yet…
- Francis Amasa WalkerFrancis Amasa Walker died on the 5th of January 1897 after returning from a dedication ceremony deep in the wilderness of Northern New York. He was exhausted and ill, and apoplexy took him within days. His funeral was held at Trinity…
- George MeadeGeorge Gordon Meade woke in the early morning hours of the 28th of June 1863, to a messenger at his tent. He assumed he was being arrested. Army politics had dogged him for years, and at that moment in the middle of a war, a midnight visit…
- John C. FrémontJohn Charles Frémont was born on the 21st of January 1813, the illegitimate son of a French-Canadian schoolteacher and a Virginia planter's daughter who had fled her elderly husband. He died destitute in New York City in 1890. Between…
- Ambrose BurnsideAmbrose Burnside is best remembered for two catastrophic failures, but the word his name spawned is used every day by people who have never heard of him. Born on the 23rd of May, 1824, in Liberty, Indiana, Burnside rose from a tailor's…
- Nathaniel LyonNathaniel Lyon died on the 10th of August, 1861, shot through the heart at about 9:30 in the morning on a Missouri hillside. He was the first Union general killed in the American Civil War. At the moment he fell, his forces numbered…
- William Babcock HazenWilliam Babcock Hazen was born on the 27th of September 1830 in West Hartford, Vermont. He moved to Ohio when he was three years old and spent his boyhood in Hiram. There he formed a close personal friendship with James A. Garfield who…
- William RosecransWilliam Starke Rosecrans was born on the 6th of September 1819, on a farm near Little Taylor Run in Kingston Township, Ohio, and by the time he died on the 11th of March 1898, his casket lay draped by the same headquarters flag that had…