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.

Hello and welcome to Civil War Stories. I'm your host, Steve Matthews. Today we're going to explore one of the darkest and most disturbing chapters of the American Civil War - the story of a man whose name became synonymous with brutality, vengeance, and the complete breakdown of civilized warfare. So settle in as we journey to the blood-soaked borderlands between Tennessee and Kentucky, where a guerrilla leader named Champ Ferguson turned the Civil War into a personal vendetta that would ultimately cost him his life and earn him a place in history as one of the war's most notorious war criminals.