Darkest Hours: Brother Against Brother

Summary

American History Hit
Episode: Darkest Hours: Brother Against Brother
Host: Don Wildman
Guest: Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Civil War Historian
Date: February 2, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode of American History Hit delves into the enduring myth and reality of "brother against brother" during the American Civil War. Host Don Wildman is joined by historian Aaron Sheehan-Dean to unpack where this powerful idea originated, how it played out among real families and communities, and how it has shaped America's collective memory of the war. Drawing on vivid stories, religious metaphors, and historical analysis, they reveal a more complex and sometimes surprising picture behind a phrase that continues to define how Americans see their own history of conflict.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

Biblical Roots and the Power of Metaphor

• Biblical Framing (Cain and Abel):
  Wildman and Sheehan-Dean trace the "brother vs. brother" trope to the Book of Genesis, specifically Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:8). This religious metaphor was actively invoked by Civil War-era ministers and writers, especially in the North, to capture a sense of tragic fratricide on a national scale.
  • Quote:
    "There were ministers in those early Sundays in April of 1861 where Northern ministers turned to that text almost as a way of saying, can you believe what's happening?"
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [04:18]
• Enduring Symbolism:
  The theme quickly became both a way to interpret real events and a tool for shaping public understanding, even as the war unfolded.
  • Quote:
    "The stories that people told themselves during the war were in some ways as powerful as the events of the war in determining how people understood what it was."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [05:21]

The American Geography of Division

• Blurred Borders and Mixed Loyalties:
  The division was never as neat as often remembered. Border states like Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and the newly-formed West Virginia had large populations fighting for both sides, with families and communities sharply divided.
  • Statistics & Examples:
    • Kentucky: 100,000 fought for the Union, 35,000 for the Confederacy [08:35]
    • At Gettysburg's Culp's Hill, Union and Confederate "1st Maryland" battalions literally faced each other [08:35]
  • Quote:
    "These are states where people are sort of hopelessly mixed in ideological and familial terms."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [06:50]
• Migration’s Role:
  Decades of migration north, south, and west meant many individuals landed on the “wrong” side of the divide, further complicating loyalties.
  • "Both regions are much more sort of densely settled with people not born in those regions."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [07:45]

Real Stories: Families Split by War

• Literal Family Splits:
  • Lincoln’s Family:
    Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, had three brothers fighting for the Confederacy; one (Alexander Todd) was killed in battle near Baton Rouge [13:21].
    • Quote:
      "Mary Todd is uncharitably often characterized as being hysterical, but she has some serious sort of challenges...the loss of this favorite brother is devastating to her. And in a way, her husband is responsible."
      — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [14:24]
  • Ulysses S. Grant:
    Grant’s father-in-law, Frederick Dent, was a prominent Southern Democrat and slaveholder, “publicly and politically aligned against his son in law” [17:34].
• Famous Divided Families:
  • Stonewall Jackson:
    Confederate General Jackson’s sister, Laura, was an outspoken Unionist and cared for wounded Union soldiers [18:55].
  • General George Thomas:
    A Virginian who stayed with the Union Army, his family "never forgave him"—upon his death, his sisters said, "Our brother died in 1861" [21:17].
  • Senator John J. Crittenden:
    Two sons became major generals: one for the Union (Thomas), one for the Confederacy (George) [23:18].
• Confrontations on the Battlefield:
  • Examples include brothers facing each other in actual combat, such as Captain William Brotherton (Union) capturing his Confederate brother at Front Royal [24:57].
  • The Conley brothers (Cornelius, a Unionist, and Harry, a Confederate guerrilla) represent the personal nature of conflict [24:57].

Beyond Brothers: Women, Husbands, and Political Convictions

• Marital Divides and Female Agency:
  Women’s strong political stances often came to light. Divorce, extremely rare for the time, sometimes resulted when allegiances clashed, revealing the depth of commitment on both sides.
  • "It reveals the degree to which women had very pronounced political beliefs, which in the 19th century, they were not supposed to hold."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [27:12]
  • Example: A Maryland woman sued for divorce from her Confederate husband, arguing allegiance to the Union [26:11].
• Mail and Communication:
  Despite the war, mail often moved across enemy lines, keeping families in contact and providing documentation for historians.

The Scale — Myth vs. Reality

• Rarity of "Brother vs. Brother":
  Actual cases of brothers or close relatives fighting on opposite sides were newsworthy and heavily publicized, but relatively rare considering the scale of the war [31:27].
• The Power of Narrative:
  These stories were seized upon as tragic symbols, amplified by newspapers and later by postwar memoirs, monuments, and popular culture.
  • "The themes that resonate to us today. That's what's going to live, rather than necessarily the standard fighting forces that go out there and do their jobs."
    — Don Wildman [31:27]
• Generational Conflicts:
  Stories of sons turning against fathers were also common, particularly in border states. Younger men, radicalized or idealistic, left conservative homes to join the fight.
  • "These are men that sort of abandon their fathers and commit themselves to the Confederate cause...Americans read these stories as another version of a house divided."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [31:58]

Aftermath: Reconciliation and Lasting Ruptures

• Reunion, Romance, and the Lost Cause:
  Some families did reconcile postwar; others (like the Thomases) never mended. The trope of North-South marriages, especially Union officers marrying Southern women, became a symbol of national healing, popularized in the press.
  • Quote:
    "Rebuilding the family is a key part of rebuilding the nation, as it were."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [35:57]
  • Celebrating ‘intersectional romances’ (almost always Northern men marrying Southern women) was part of the process—but those who had fought for the Union from the South were branded "scalawags," never fully accepted [35:52].
• Historical Remembrance and the Lost Cause Narrative:
  The “brother’s war” language in postwar Southern memory, especially by Lost Cause proponents like Jubal Early, was used to downplay slavery and reframe the war as an honorable conflict between white Americans, facilitating sectional reconciliation and a narrative centered on white unity [37:31, 38:32].
  • Quote:
    "There’s a way in which brothers war becomes repurposed in the post war period to contain the revolutionary aspects of the war."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [38:32]

Modern Resonance and Reflection

• Persistent Divisions in American Life:
  Wildman and Sheehan-Dean note that division is a constant in American history, present from the Revolution through the Civil War and into the present day.
  • Quote:
    "The political divisions are always there. And I think the challenge for us, particularly today, in a time when we are divided quite sharply politically, is to sort of stay in politics...that we don't resort to violence."
    — Aaron Sheehan-Dean [22:03]
• Media and Education:
  The episode closes with reflections on how the theme has shaped everything from textbooks to popular TV, showing the depth of its imprint on the national consciousness [38:32–39:49].

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote/Insight | |-----------|------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:18 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "There were ministers...where Northern ministers turned to that [Cain and Abel] text almost as a way of saying, can you believe what's happening?" | | 05:21 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "Stories that people told themselves during the war were in some ways as powerful as the events of the war..." | | 13:21 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "Mary Todd has three brothers, all of whom fight in the Confederate army, one of whom actually dies in battle." | | 14:24 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "The loss of this favorite brother is devastating to her. And in a way, her husband is responsible." | | 21:17 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "Our brother died in 1861." (on General George Thomas's family's reaction to his death) | | 24:57 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "They often persist, that is, they have committed themselves to an army and to brothers in arms as against the blood brothers that...they might be in actual life." | | 27:12 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "It reveals the degree to which women had very pronounced political beliefs, which in the 19th century, they were not supposed to hold." | | 31:27 | Don Wildman | "That's what's going to live, rather than necessarily the standard fighting forces that go out there and do their jobs." | | 35:57 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "Rebuilding the family is a key part of rebuilding the nation, as it were." | | 38:32 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "...brothers war becomes repurposed in the post war period to contain the revolutionary aspects of the war." | | 22:03 | Aaron Sheehan-Dean | "The political divisions are always there...the challenge is to sort of stay in politics...and that we don't resort to violence." |

---

Main Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:04–02:00: Opening dramatization of a war-split family, introduction of the "brother against brother" theme
• 03:58–05:53: Discussion on biblical roots (Cain and Abel) and how Civil War America interpreted its own division
• 06:50–09:38: Geographic complexities, border states, and mixed allegiances
• 13:06–14:24: Lincoln and Mary Todd’s divided family
• 17:29–18:21: Ulysses S. Grant and other famous families divided by allegiance
• 21:18–22:03: The cost of division, with General George Thomas's family as tragic exemplar
• 24:47–27:17: Stories of brothers facing each other in battle, and how such accounts spread through newspapers and letters
• 27:38–29:39: The power of mail and communications, quantifiable examples of divided siblings—and how letter-writing reveals emotional complexity
• 31:58–33:58: Generational splits: sons vs. fathers, and the wider ideological divides of the age
• 34:11–38:32: Aftermath: efforts at reunion, intersectional marriages, the evolution of the “brother’s war” into the Lost Cause, and the shaping of American memory

---

Conclusion

The episode presents the “brother against brother” narrative as both a fact and a myth: real in some poignant family stories, but far more impactful as a cultural lens for understanding the fracture of the Civil War. Wildman and Sheehan-Dean show how this metaphor was forged in the fires of battle, sharpened by biblical and romantic symbolism, amplified by the press, and ultimately adopted by both North and South for different purposes. Its legacy, they argue, shaped both immediate postwar reconciliation and the longer process by which America continues to wrestle with its own, often divided, identity.

Transcript

[Verizon Advertiser]

Think Verizon is expensive? Think again. Anyone can bring their AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. So bring us your bill, walk in running, hogo, sticking teleport if you can, ride on the back of a rollerblading yak or fly in on the wings of a majestic falcon. Any way you can bring your AT and T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best Network based on RootMetric's best overall mobile network performance US 2nd/2025 all rights reserved. Must provide a very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. Additional terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Hey, this is U.S. olympic gold medalist Tara Davis Woodhull, and I'm U.S. paralympic gold medalist Hunter Woodhull. As athletes, our lives are about having a clear path and a team that you can absolutely trust.

[Verizon Advertiser]

So when it came to getting the.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Best mortgage, we chose PennyMac. PennyMac is proud to be the official.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Mortgage provider of Team USA and you.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Learn more at pennymac.com PennyMac Loan Services, LLC equal housing lender NMLS ID35953 licensed by the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation under the California Residential Mortgage Lending Act. Conditions and restrictions may apply.

[Don Wildman]

The battle is over. It is won. Now the field is quiet and still, save for the groans of the wounded and the slow work of collecting the dead. A Union soldier in dark blue slowly walks a line of captured men in Confederate gray, many injured, slumping against each other. All are caked in mud and blood, wearing expressions of defeat and defiance. The soldier moves along, counting each of these captured troops, readying them for transport. But for a brief moment, he hesitates, pausing, losing his count in that line of unfamiliar faces, faces that until hours ago were deadly threats, he sees a pair of eyes that look different, eyes he thinks he knows, that remind him of home, of cherished childhood, of someone long absent. Could it be?

[Jacob Goldstein]

No?

[Don Wildman]

During the Civil War and in the decades after, stories of family separation would come to define how Americans talked about the war. Brother against brother, family against family, a nation tragically torn in two. But how often did this really happen? And do such stories illuminate the agony of the war itself? Or just as much the way Americans have chosen to remember it? Greetings and welcome. I'm Don Wildman. This is American History hit the idea of the American Civil War as a family feud, a conflict of brother against brother, house Divided has endured to the present. It's a powerful image, but like so much else in history, it tells us as much about how the war has been remembered and reshaped over time as it does about the events themselves. The story of the Civil War has been influenced not just by what happened, but how it has been told. So to help us unpack where this brother versus brother idea came from and why it's proven so durable, we turn to an expert of those troubled times. Aaron Sheehandin is a historian of the American Civil War and professor of history at Louisiana State University. His work focuses on the lived experience of the war, how Americans north and south, understood and remembered the conflict. He is the author and editor of several major works of the Civil War era, including the Calculus of Violence, Harvard University Press, why Confederates Fought, University of North Carolina, and most recently, Fighting with the How Seventeenth Century History Shaped the American Civil War. Dr. She and Dean has joined us for several episodes in the past. I'll be sure to talk about it at our conclusion. Honored. You're back. I gave you the long bio. Dr. Xiandin, pleasure to be back and.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

I appreciate all of the celebration there.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. Brother against brother is a phrase that comes straight from the Old Testament book of Genesis. Cain and abel story, chapter 4 8, verse 8. Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. How fitting is this, this first murder, the first fratricide in characterizing the Civil War.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

It was certainly language that people on both sides used, especially Northerners. And so, you know, there were ministers in those early Sundays in April of 1861 where Northern ministers turned to that text almost as a way of saying, can you believe what's happening?

[Don Wildman]

Yes.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

That by merely reciting it, you would be able to basically call Southerners back to their senses, that you are reenacting the cardinal trauma, one of the cardinal sins in the Bible, this original murder, fratricide, but now on a national scale and. And Southerners make less recourse to it, though, is that the brother versus brother rhetoric is laced throughout, often in a more kind of wistful or almost elegiac tone in the south, but Northerners throughout, particularly Northern ministers. But, you know, as in the 21st century, not everybody reads the whole Bible, but a lot of people have read those first couple of chapters.

[Don Wildman]

Right.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And so you don't have to get very far, as you noted, to reach this as a story. And your opening, I. I would amend your opening. You talked about the way in which how we have spoken about the war influences what we think of it. This Happened in real time, too. I guess I would remind listeners that is, the stories that people told themselves during the war were in some ways as powerful as the events of the war in determining how people understood what it was. Yeah, so this is sort of key metaphor here is. Is the Cain and Abel story. Yeah.

[Don Wildman]

I just want to root this conversation in that biblical reference stuff, you know, because we're going to get into a factual conversation about, in fact, brothers did fight brothers, but it's so big time. The epic themes that are discussed at the right at the outset of this war that it's so interesting and how they frame it is so fascinating in the American story. Geography plays a big role in this, obviously, because the nation itself was divided and long before the Civil War by the Mason Dixon Line, which was a surveyed border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, only a couple hundred miles long, which then extends as the. As the nation does with the Ohio River. And that creates the legal boundary between. Not the legal boundary, but the, in effect, the boundary between north and South. Slavery back in those days didn't have anything to do with it. That was everywhere in the 18th century. But it then becomes this kind of, in effect, moral and political division as abolition rises and then secession. But geography is central as well.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

It is, we tend to imagine, certainly when we talk in sweeping terms about a North and a South, I think a lot of people imagine a very clean and bright line between those two regions. And there's several important things to remember. One, and I think we're going to talk a lot about the sort of very messy middle, blurry middle of what becomes the border that is, as you said, the Ohio River Valley. States like parts of southern Illinois and Indiana and Ohio and then the northern tier of Kentucky and all of Missouri. And that these are states where people are sort of hopelessly mixed in ideological and familial terms. But also remembering that throughout the 1840s and 1850s, there had been a lot more mobility among Americans, many of them moving west to pursue sort of settlement opportunities. White Americans moving west to pursue settlement, but also north and South. So Southerners, elite Southerners, when they're being educated, are going to Yale and to Princeton. Northerners, particularly Northern women who might work as tutors when they're young, are coming into Southern households. So there is also a big flow of people born and raised in one section who move to the other. And then all of a sudden, as the war sort of crystallizes in 1861, those people find themselves, in essence, kind of stranded, or maybe they have actually Embedded and married people and built lives there. And it brings those value conflicts into much sharper relief. So both regions are much more sort of densely settled with people not born in those regions. And there are books on, you know, Yankees in the south and Southerners in the North. So migration and mobility is indeed sort of the backdrop to understand how this becomes such a fratricidal conflict.

[Don Wildman]

Yes. And it's. I mean, let's name the border states, which is what this. This border creates. The Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, later West Virginia. Those slavery states that choose not to secede from the Union become those border states. And they have a tremendous mixed population in terms of allegiance to one side or the other. And that becomes the story, really, of how the most interesting surprise to me was how these troops were who fought for one side or the other within these states. I mean, you start going through the facts. In Kentucky, 100,000 people fought for the Union, 35,000 fought for the Confederacy. The Battle of Culp's Hill, which is in July 2nd and 3rd of 1863. At Gettysburg, the Union's 1st Maryland Battalion fought against the Confederate's 1st Maryland Battalion. Oh, my gosh. I mean, you can only imagine many of those soldiers on both sides weren't so far from home. And many of them might have known.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Each other, Bill, to be sure. No, I. This was one of my chief confusions when I started studying Civil War soldiers, before I really understood the scale of things was clocking that many of those border states had first infantry designations on both sides. And it was very important to know, in fact, which first Maryland or which first Kentucky or even which first Tennessee you're talking about. Regiments are organized locally, and in a way, you can see, let's say, the first Marylands at Culp's Hill as kind of mirrors of each other, but certainly drawn from the same place. Certainly men who knew one another and at the very least would have been probably cousins, if not literal siblings. And that problem of literal siblings turns up on a number of battlefields in different places.

[Don Wildman]

Sure. It also talks about the split allegiance within even Southern states. I mean, Tennessee very much a split state. East and west are two different kind of places even today. Virginia, of course, then becomes West Virginia because there's such a split there over slavery. North Carolina has a lot of people that are. That are going for the north as well. And some of these things actually play through to today. It's amazing.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yes. I mean, there are Unionists in every capital. U. Unionist, the designation we use to describe people who support the north in the war and yet live in the South. There are Unionists in every state, some of them in rural areas. Western North Carolina is famously. And eastern Tennessee, that sort of Appalachian mountain region is famously settled by Scots Irish in the 18th century who have little investment in slavery and really resist the Confederate as a political experiment and also just generally want to be left alone.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

So they're sort of non compliant. But even in southern cities, it's not exclusively a rural phenomenon. Are pockets of unionist resistance in Atlanta, in New Orleans, in Mobile. And those pockets are sometimes drawing husbands and wives against each other, sometimes siblings against each other. And you know, so it's not. It is in fact a family conflict. Fratricidal as a way to describe it, in fact limits the scope of the degree to which it is a family war. And part of what we're talking about here is the challenge of loyalty.

[Don Wildman]

Right.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And to whom you owe loyalty and the ways that. That this war then complicates all sorts of political and social arrangements.

[Don Wildman]

The only kind of pure culture in this regard is South Carolina. There's no record of people going and serving the Union from there. And it's amazingly unique in that regard. But there you go.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

I usually fall back on William Gilmore Sims, the South Carolina writer in the antebellum era, who describes South Carolina as too small to be a nation and too large to be an insane asylum.

[Don Wildman]

Okay.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

He said that, not me.

[Don Wildman]

Interestingly, it's where many northerners are moving these days because they like what they see down there. And it's changing the culture of South Carolina a lot, from what I understand, in certain pockets. So let's go down to actual brothers or family connections who were known to fight against each other on the field of battle or in military leadership. These are some of the most famous names. And we can actually start with Lincoln himself. Not in either of those. Well, I guess military leadership, sure. He married a Southerner, Mary Todd Lincoln, whose siblings were. Sided with the Confederacy, whose family was enslaving and so forth. And I mean, Lincoln was. He's a great example. No wonder endless books are written about the man of how so much of the American story courses through his own life.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And the fact that. That Mary Todd's family is from Kentucky and Lincoln's family had been in Kentucky sort of briefly as they're moving across originally Virginia. And Lincoln is born in Kentucky. He and Jefferson Davis are actually born the same year, not that far from one another.

[Don Wildman]

Right.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And you're right, Mary Todd has three brothers, all of whom fight in the Confederate army, one of whom actually dies in battle. This is Alexander Todd, her sort of favorite brother. He dies in battle in the Battle of Baton Rouge, which is where I'm calling from. He dies not a half a mile from where I currently live and where I'm recording right now. He was killed here in Baton Rouge in that battle, August 5th of 1862, and then his body returned to their family home and he's buried in Kentucky. But Lincoln has today, we would say that Lincoln has to compartmentalize, yes, that, you know, he is managing this conflict and yet his wife and his familial attachments are drawing him towards the tragedy of this and the immense personal cost. You know, Mary Todd is uncharitably often characterized as being hysterical, but she has some serious sort of challenges, emotional challenges during the war, most famously the loss of her son. But the loss of this favorite brother is devastating to her. And in a way, her husband is responsible.

[Don Wildman]

Yes, indeed. And she was always so pitted against Robert fighting in the Union, and she desperately did not want him to join for obvious motherhood reasons, but also all these torn allegiance, this feeling of fighting against her own family. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Think Verizon is expensive? Think again. Anyone can bring their AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. So bring us your bill walking, running, Hogo stick and teleport. If you can ride on the back of a rollerblading yak or flying on the wings of a majestic falcon. Any way, you can bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best network based on RouteMetric's best overall mobile network performance. US second half 2025 already preserved must provide a very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. Additional terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out odoo@o d o o dot com. That's o d o o dot com. This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem Business software is expensive. And when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing. Slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting. All linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com that's o d o o.com as.

[Dr. Kate Lister]

The saying goes, if these walls could talk and on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors and even more importantly, in the big bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history. With me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts brought to you by the award winning network. History hit.

[Don Wildman]

Ulysses S. Grant, father in law Frederick Dent, prominent Southern Democrat. Same problem.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yes. Slaveholder and. And someone who is sort of publicly and politically aligned against his son in law. Grant and his wife Julia had this wonderful loving marriage and a lot has been written about the affection that they showed one another. But sort of just outside of that relationship stands these much more fraught tensions. And particularly, I mean this, it is a theme and listeners should know that this is a problem. The problem of these families, broken families that the Civil War media announced frequently. This is not something that sort of historians figure out later. Confederates often refer to Lincoln's relatives, they refer to Grants. Northern newspapers do the same. So newspapers are always full of stories.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And it's a very curious form of rhetoric because it doesn't necessarily. There are forms of rhetoric that easily bring you to demonize your enemy and to kind of embolden your fighting spirit. And I'm always struck by the degree to which this is just sort of horrible and it does not necessarily make you want to kill your enemy more. It reinforces the sense of the war as a tragedy and an unproductive tragedy. But as I say, that's those stories are told in the newspapers and retold and copied. You know, anytime you can find two brothers on the same battlefield, you know that story is going to.

[Don Wildman]

And there's a gotcha aspect to it, you know, as they're calling out, you know, so you're all high and mighty up there in the north, but you're actually married. You know, your family connections are all mixed up with this very life we're living. Thomas Stonewell Jackson, famous southern general. His sister Laura was an outspoken unionist. Jackson was a lieutenant general in the Confederate army. His sister cared for sick and injured Union soldiers. General George Thomas, who was a Virginian, stayed with the U.S. in the war. Tell me about General George Thomas. I'm not familiar with his story.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Thomas is like many men who come of age in the 1840s and 50s, he's somebody who goes to the, to West Point and is part of this huge officer cadre. There's a great book written about, I want to say the class of 47 of whom there are, you know, a dozen Civil War generals later and sort of mature in the US Army. And in doing so, like Robert E. Lee and Thomas and Lee are both native Virginians, unlike Lee, Thomas sort of commits himself to the protection of the United States even through secession and beyond. And so at the crisis of secession, Thomas commits himself to staying in the US Army. He will most famously be his. His nickname is the Rock of Chickamauga. So he was one of the army commanders at the battle of Chickamauga. Provides in a central. That's a kind of disastrous battle for the Union. But Thomas's role in building a defensive line about halfway through that conflict allows the main Union army to escape back to Chattanooga and then to fortify itself in Chattanooga from which they will re emerge under Grant's leadership at the Battle of Missionary Ridge and pushed back south. So Thomas is really celebrated as a hero among northerners and especially because he was a southern born hero. But as you noted, his family is profoundly Confederate. And the war, as in Jackson's case, that is Stonewall Jackson's case, the war creates a profound rupture between brothers and sisters. And this emerges most famously. Thomas dies early into reconstruction. 1870 maybe. I don't remember exactly. But famously when federal agents go to his sister's home in Virginia to inform them that their brother has died, what they say in response is our brother died in 1861. They sort of close the door. None of them go to his funeral services.

[Don Wildman]

Oh my God.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Right. So it's a permanent and lasting alienation from your natal family. And, you know, this is the sort of. This is the sort of rupture that people worried about with the Civil War and the. And the family separations and the family collapse. Make it real and personal and emotional.

[Don Wildman]

Aaron, I have other lists, other names on this list, but before I forget, I'm going to ask you this question that really belongs at the end of this interview. As a. As an academic, a scholar who studies this era and the divisions that are implicit in it, do you ever wonder why Americans don't more readily accept the fact that we've been divided forever, like this is a normal part of life, from the Loyalists to the, you know, all the way back to the Revolution. It's always there, isn't is?

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

I mean, I. The political divisions are always there. And I think the challenge for us, particularly today, in a time when we are divided quite sharply politically, is to sort of stay in politics. That is to believe that politics is a sphere within which we can reconcile these problems and that we don't resort to violence. I mean, the Civil War, I would argue, is really the collapse of that idea. It's the collapse of the democratic order, which is why some historians talk about a sort of first American republic and a second one that emerges from the war and. But we sort of overlook that interval, what Roy Nichols, a famous Civil War historian, called the disruption of American democracy. When the civil order fails, you turn to violence. And as you noted, that was certainly the case in the American Revolution, which existed as a civil war within an imperial conflict. And it is important for us to be very careful about understanding what are those features of the Civil War that brought Americans to violence so that we can stop ourselves today, we can kind of check ourselves short of that, while still recognizing profound political disagreements. I'm not encouraging people to necessarily give up on their ideologies or somehow agree, but to recognize that we use politics to solve those disagreements.

[Don Wildman]

Yes, exactly. Senator John J. Crittenden famously had two sons who became major generalsone for the Confederacy and one for the Union. George Crittenden was the Confederacy, Thomas Crittenden for the Union. When you look at these conflicts within families, did they. Are there stories that you know of where they actually did fight each other?

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

There is sort of verifiable evidence of brothers fighting brothers. Some of these are famous, you know, officer level, and others are common soldiers. I mean, I was just reading earlier this week about an episode of brothers fighting on the battlefield, and one in. In awareness that they were fighting each other, and one basically delivering a Fatal blow and then abandoning the field, only to then return later in the evening to kind of hold his brother as he actually died. You know, very few Civil War. A lot of Civil war battlefield injuries are not fatal at the moment. It's sort of you, you know, you bleed out and. And other problems. And, you know, there is this moment of him delivering that blow and leaving and reinforcing for Confederates. This is a Union soldier. The cruelty of the Yankee that would murder his own brother. And then the fact that he returns the recognition for northerners that, you know, family will out and he tendered his brother in his last moments and heard his final words. So there are occasions where people come to awareness that they are literally fighting each other.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And they often persist, that is, they have committed themselves to an army and to brothers in arms as against the blood brothers that, you know, they might be an actual life.

[Don Wildman]

Battle of Front Royal, 1862. Captain William Brotherton of the Union 1st Maryland infantry captures his own brother, a Confederate soldier in the 1st Maryland Division. Same kind of story as before we were talking about, but the Conley brothers. Cornelius, a unionist. Harry, a Confederate guerrilla fighter, met in conflict. Aaron, how do we know these stories? Where do we learn about these brothers stories?

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

So we learn about them mostly from the newspapers, which have reporters from both north and south, have dozens and in the northern case, and hundreds of reporters following them. But people also chronicle them themselves. And as I say, newspapers reprint these stories. Some of the. The conflicts within families grow quite public. You know, we've been talking mostly about brother versus brother. There are famous episodes of conflicts between husbands and wives that spill out into the public. There's the Maryland case where a wife actually sues for divorce because her husband is a confederate or a pronounced secessionist. This happens in 1861, she's a Unionist. And you know, those papers go to court. And I mean, divorce in the, in the 19th century is a very complicated affair, but it becomes a very well known story publicly.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Partly because it's a legal process in which you have to actually sue for divorce or get a private act from the state legislature. And the husband alleges that his wife is basically under the influence of her unionist father and that these aren't her real beliefs. She's quite insistent that they are her actual beliefs. And I would note, you know, part of what is so fraught in the context of husbands versus wives, and we have a lot of cases of husbands and wives disagreeing, not many to the point of suing for divorce is that it, it reveals the degree to which women had very pronounced political beliefs, which in the 19th century, they were not supposed to hold. This is before women have the right to vote. The idea is that the man is the political head of the household. He's certainly the voting head of every household, because women can't. And yet, all of a sudden, the war exposes the degree to which everybody has political views, and they hold them quite strongly, and it threatens masculine authority over the household. Right. It sort of reveals the fragility of the sort of social order in a way that the war on its own doesn't.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And so I think that's part of why Americans sort of cotton to these stories and, as I say, replay them over and over again. You can imagine the kind of YouTube view clicker running up and up and up on these stories. People are satisfied in what strikes me as almost a kind of perverse way, because it is really sort of telling them how horrible this conflict is.

[Don Wildman]

Right.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

How corrosive of the social order, not just in political terms, but in literal familial terms, that wives are now free to disobey their husbands.

[Don Wildman]

Did the mail keep working throughout the Civil War? Were people just sending letters back and forth between the north and South?

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

It does. And, I mean, it's harder to get mail across the border. Certainly, if you're a soldier, you have a. There's a military mail system on both sides, but there is also a fairly heavy traffic, certainly along the border states. And, you know, mail was one of the few things that didn't really count as contraband. There are famously Confederate women in places like Memphis who cross the border and are given surprising leeway to do that. Some of whom get captured carrying things in their skirts. But mail would have been something that they could legitimately carry back and forth. And so this is part of the way that families actually know who's remained a Unionist and who's, in fact, converted to the Confederacy. If it's a, you know, Northern woman who's come down as a. As a tutorial and Alabama or something.

[Don Wildman]

And has been the record pass that we now have today. I mean, a lot of these. These letters are between these people, and we understand.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah.

[Don Wildman]

And then you have the political argument, which is going on, you know, while they're on opposite sides of the war. There's an example. After Secessionville outside Charleston, 1862, Confederate James Campbell wrote to his federal brother Alexander. I was astonished to hear from the prisoners that you were the color bearer of the regiment that assaulted the battery. At this point, the other day. I'm obviously quoting from the letter. I was in the breastwork during the whole engagement, doing my best to beat you. But I hope you and I will never meet face to face as bitter enemies on the battlefield. But if such should be the case, you have but to discharge your duty for your cause. For I can assure you I will strive to discharge my duty for my country and my cause. All right. Those are fighting words.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah. I mean, that's fair. Notice that we are military enemies here.

[Don Wildman]

Exactly.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

And I think it helps reinforce the importance of oaths, the degree to which as people who committed themselves to this cause, you know, for Americans certainly, or other people in the Western world in the 21st century, making a promise or taking an oath, we take very few oaths, and I think it's hard to appreciate the significance of those. But. But he is quite clearly committed and has committed and also expects that his brother has committed in a way that might lead them to kill one another.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. I'll be back with more American history after this short break.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Think Verizon is expensive? Think again. Anyone can bring their AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. So bring us your bill. Walking, running, hogo, sticking, teleport, if you can ride on the back of a rollerblading yak or flying on the wings of a majestic falcon. Any way, you can bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best network based on RouteMetric's best overall mobile network performance. US second half 2025. All rights preserved. Must provide very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. Additional terms, conditions and restrictions apply.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's O D O o dot com exclamation.

[Don Wildman]

Important to realize. You know, we've talked about some of the number the massive amounts of troops involved in the Civil War. This is a small sliver of this, the military effort. It wasn't A lot of these stories, but it was made a lot more of, is the point of this episode, I suppose, of by the media and by the records that we've read down the road. And the intimacy of it, the, the, the themes that resonate to us today. That's what's going to live, rather than necessarily the standard fighting forces that go out there and do their jobs. That's what's so poignant about it, I suppose.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah. And I think that's what was useful for Civil War Americans. I mean, so one of the key fault lines here is actually father, son. So particularly along those border states in places like Kentucky and Maryland, there are fathers who are more politically conservative and they tend to be Unionists and sons who have been reared in the 1840s and 50s in the kind of hot house of anti slavery critiques of their, their region, who will actually leave their households and move into Tennessee and enlist in regiments there. And this happens in Virginia as well. And those are stories that are publicized quite widely, you know, as examples of a kind of fracture in the social order. Sons are supposed to obey their fathers. The, the late historian, my friend Peter Carmichael, wrote a book called the Last Generation about the young men who came of age in Virginia in the 1840s and 50s. And they referred to their father's generation as the old fogies. These were men who had lost, who had basically given up Virginia's mantle of leading the United States. This is the generation after Jefferson and Madison and Monroe, and the sons wanted to reclaim it. They were firmly committed to slavery in its defense, and their fathers move far too cautiously. They're wetted down by a kind of just older conservatism that is as you age and you own property, you become less willing to do things like engage in a war. And these are men that sort of abandon their fathers and commit themselves to the Confederate cause. And as I say, this happens all the way from the east in Virginia, across Kentucky into the west and Civil War. Americans read these stories as another version of a house divided. Not just divided brother versus brother, but from the natural allegiance that you owe Father Abraham. Right in the language that that was sometimes used to describe Lincoln, that a father as a king had been, is the head of a nation. And there's a kind of natural loyalty owed there. And the war proves that a lie or at least disrupts it profoundly.

[Don Wildman]

Were there memoirs written about the return, you know, after the war is over, how these Unionists or Confederates returned these families that they had either turned against or, you know, these ruptures had to be healed.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

There are occasions where people are able to reconcile, where families sort of welcome people back and move basically through the process of reconstruction into a kind of genuine emotional reconciliation. And then there are others. I mean, George Thomas, we've already discussed, is one where even at his death, his family is unwilling to acknowledge him anymore as a part of their family. And they've made that. They make that sort of publicly clear. One way in which this manifests is intersectional romances. And Nina Silber, the historian of Boston University, has a brilliant book on this. The Romance of Reunion is her book, and it takes a lot of a handful, but as you know, it's sort of a handful that are replayed in the newspapers and have profound importance of intersectional romances. Almost always a former Union officer marrying a Southern woman in the 1870s or 1880s. And these stories are trumpeted by the press on both sides as a way of demonstrating that America has healed and moved on. That unlike there's a famous folk song, a Southern girl's Lament, where she is writing, singing to her lover who was a. A Union soldier, the reason she can't be with him. Because you may have dashed my brother's brains out, she says. And yeah, what's a really grotesque imagery in a. In a love ballad. And the public stories, the romance of reunion is the sort of opposite of that. The ways in which America comes to reconciliation, and it's personified in these romances and marriages between Northern and Southern men and Northern men and Southern women. Less often Southern men and Northern women as a way of showing the healing that's going on.

[Don Wildman]

Right.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

So it is. Rebuilding the family is a key part of rebuilding the nation, as it were.

[Don Wildman]

You were called a scallywag or a Tory in the South. Right. That was the. If you had fought for the Union. Yes.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

By the. The. In the Reconstruction era, both those terms are. Are heard. They're, you know, horrible and ugly terms. And this is part of why. In fact, it's interesting that you raised this. I have never read of a kind of public celebration of the marriage between a Southern unionist and a Southern Confederate. The stories are always. That is, there's still an intersectional tension there. To have been a traitor during the war, that is a white Southerner who fights for the Union, is sort of unforgivable.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

To have a Northerner who held to his cause and did his duty as a kind of citizen, he's somebody that you can respect. And this is part of the lost cause. I mean, the romance of reunion is sort of deeply implicated in the lost cause vision of a brother's war in which those brothers eventually heal. Yes. And they may not literally, but their sons and daughters might, you know, over time find their way to heal together.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah. I was so surprised by the themes involved in this as we began looking into the biblical roots of a lot of this. But also I had assumed that this brother versus Brother was more of a. Of a Southern lost cause theme, when actually it was kind of more of a. Of a northern aspect of it. But it was used also as a lost cause element, a plank in the platform, if you will. Right. Of hey, let's. This is a. Let's get the white family back together. It becomes more about that and kind of adds to the element, another element and pushing slavery to the side.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah. No, it's certainly important to recognize that in the context of the post war rhetoric and the post wars history being written by people like Jubal early, one of Lee's lieutenants, that they're writing in the 1870s and the 1880s when they write about a brother's war. They are trying to confine the war narrowly to a kind of constitutional conflict between white men that was fought honorably and nobly. And although they disagreed, both sides had high minded principles for which they fought nothing so mercenary as defending slavery itself. And that that conflict ended. And Southerners may have lost, but everybody respected everyone's bravery. And so that provides a platform for sectional reconciliation, meaning a reconciliation built around union and ignoring emancipation and the social and political implications of emancipation. So there's a way in which brothers war becomes repurposed in the post war period to contain the revolutionary aspects of the war.

[Don Wildman]

Yeah, I'm a walking laboratory of this because I was educated in the early 1970s. That would be when I was absorbing most of this stuff. And I remember those fifth grade classes about the Civil War and brother versus Brother resonates to this day, you know, but it was also part of the whole thing that was happening out of the twenties with the monuments of great Southern generals and so forth that was happening as the retelling of this story. So that was obviously why I was tilted that way, only to realize that this was largely framed by northern preachers.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Yeah. And I think it is important and it's useful that I think we've clarified the sort of different registers at which a brother's war quote. Quote operates because people really don't, I think today appreciate the success of the Lost Cause at. At embedding in American culture. All the way into the 1970s and the 1980s. Right. I grew up just a few years later, maybe watching Dukes of Hazzard on TV. Although I think that starts in the late 70s, right, with the General Lee and the the Confederate battle flag on the top of that, as a way of like real mass appeal for this nostalgic kind of sympathetic view of the Confederacy, which is only possible if you imagine the war within these tight boundaries that don't really have political and social impact, that it was a sort of mistake that, you know, transpired and we've gotten beyond it.

[Don Wildman]

Lynyrd Skynyrd was really good, though I hate to admit. Professor Aaron Shendean is a friend of our podcast. Thankfully. I don't know what exactly gets you that title, but as of today, you're on five episodes that I know of. Listeners can find them wherever. Get your podcast, just click the See all in our back listing. Go to episodes I will tell you right now, 109, 258, 260 and 306 for more civil War history via this good man. Thanks a lot. See you again soon, I hope.

[Aaron Sheehan-Dean]

Thank you, Don. It's a pleasure.

[Don Wildman]

Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.

[Verizon Advertiser]

Think Verizon is expensive? Think again. Anyone can bring their AT&T or T Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. So bring us your bill. Walk in. Running pogo sticking teleport. If you can ride on the back of a rollerblading yak or flying on the wings of a majestic falcon. Any way you can bring your AT and T or T Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the the best network based on route metrics. Best Overall Mobile Network Performance US Second Half 2025 all rights reserved. Must provide very recent postpaid consumer mobile bill in the name of the person redeeming the deal. Additional terms, conditions and restrictions App.