Hello and welcome to Civil War Stories. I'm your host, Steve Matthews. Today we're going to explore one of the most crucial yet often overlooked aspects of the American Civil War - the extraordinary contributions of African Americans to the Union victory and their own liberation. This is not just a story of military service, though that was remarkable enough. It's the story of how nearly 200,000 Black Americans transformed themselves from enslaved people and second-class citizens into soldiers, spies, nurses, and leaders who fundamentally changed the nature of the war and secured their own path to freedom.

Hello and welcome to Civil War Stories. I'm your host, Steve Matthews. Today we're going to explore one of the most poignant and heartbreaking stories from the American Civil War - the tale of a Union officer whose letter to his wife became one of the most famous pieces of writing in American history, and whose death became a symbol of both love and sacrifice. So settle in as we journey to the summer of 1861, when a Rhode Island lawyer named Sullivan Ballou penned words that would echo through the ages, words that captured the eternal tension between love of family and duty to country.

Hello and welcome to Civil War Stories. I'm your host, Steve Matthews. Today we're going to confront one of the darkest and most shameful chapters in Civil War history - the story of Andersonville Prison, where over 13,000 Union soldiers died in conditions so horrific that they shocked even a nation already hardened by years of brutal warfare. This is not a story of heroism or military glory, but rather a tale of human suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, and of how the breakdown of civilization during wartime can create horrors that haunt us to this day.