The Blue Collar Scholar

In this podcast episode, we examine the African-American experience in the American Civil War. Early in the war, Blacks were not allowed to fight, and Union Generals struggled with crafting policies regarding escaped slaves who were fleeing from the enemy's land. Eventually, African-Americans were given opportunities to show their value to the Union war effort, and they performed spectacularly. Unfortunately, the South refused to treat Black soldiers as if they were the equals of Northern white prisoners-of-war. Captured African-American Union soldiers were treated like runaway slaves and put into slavery. Therefore, prisoners exchanges came to an end, and the result was horrific prisoner-of-war camps like Elmira and Andersonville.

Nearly every combat engagement of the American Civil War occurred on land. But let us not forget the extraordinary contributions by the US Navy. Without their increasingly successful blockade of the Confederate coastline and their indispensable assistance to the US Army on the Virginia Peninsula and on the Mississippi River, it is unlikely that the Union would have succeeded as they did. Any study of the Civil War is incomplete without examining the Naval War.

Gettysburg & Vicksburg represented perhaps the greatest individual victories for the Union Army in the Civil War, and those battles ended at virtually the same time. Lee's retreat from Pennsylvania and Pemberton's surrender of Vicksburg to Grant represented the high water mark of the Confederacy.

This episode examines the most significant Generals for the United States of America (the "Union") in the Civil War.

This episode is a quick glance at the most consequential Generals of the Confederate States of America.

From Bull Run to Chancellorsville, we will look at all of the significant battles of the first half of the American Civil War.

South Carolina was the first to secede from the United States, in late 1860. But they were not the only state to do so. For the first half of 1861, nearly half of the states in the United States left the Union. This podcast tracks the momentum that led to each state's decision to secede.

This episode summarizes political developments that have already been discussed in previous episodes, explaining how these developments led directly to the founding of the Republican Party. We spend most of the podcast talking about Abraham Lincoln, the second man that the Republican Party nominated for President, and the first Republican to win a Presidential election. But opposition to Lincoln was so strong that South Carolina decided that it was done being a state within the USA.

The American Civil War had a warm-up game in Kansas, as Free State Advocates and Pro-Slavery Advocates rushed into the territory to influence its development. Political war figuratively broke out, and literal war also reared its ugly head as scores of men on both sides of the debate died. Many Pro-Slavery Missourians inserted themselves in both the voter fraud and violence. Yet, in the end, the secession of Southern Senators finally made it possible for Free Staters and their prospective state constitution to be adopted, leading to the Free State of Kansas joining the United States just as that Union was being dissolved by Confederate states.

Antebellum (from the Latin for "before the war") America was a significantly different place than the United States of America that emerged from the American Civil War. This episode examines the culture, economy, religion, and society of Antebellum America.

The Civil War nearly began in South Carolina almost 30 years before the Civil War actually did begin in South Carolina. This was the "Nullification Crisis," where South Carolina made the strongest possible case for states' rights, attempted to nullify federal law, and nearly sparked a war with the Jackson Administration. ... Also, many of the big names of the American Civil War got valuable combat experience in a war against Mexico. The war enflamed American political parties who were for or against the obvious attempt to seize territory, arguably for the particular purpose of gaining more southern territory that could become slave states.

The this debut episode of The Blue Collar Scholar, host Will Reitz begins his series on The American Civil War by looking at the seeds of civil war that were planted in the revolutions of both the United States and Haiti.