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Radio War Nerd EP #516 — US Civil War, Pt 19: "Bread Or Blood" (Patreon)

Published:
2025-04-24 01:41:21
Imported:
2025-04
Tags:

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Content

Recorded: April 22, 2025

The War Nerd's latest US Civil War installment investigates why the farm-rich Confederacy couldn't feed itself, Lucius Northrop, and the Richmond Bread Riot...

Check out the RWN US Civil War collection

Total time: 1:46:58Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Sound production by Telescope Audio

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Comments

HeyB00B00

Let's fucking Go. Historical War Nerd. Us Civil War war nerd! 🤓

William

Oh boy; if Lucius Northrop has any connection to Northrop Grumman, there may be some irony too sweet to handle

HarshMalarkey

As am amateur war nerd from Northern Virginia, new RWN civil war episodes make me feel especially warm and fuzzy inside

NYCM&AHole

You could say the south got de-ported.

NYCM&AHole

There will be bread or blood

Doc Adna

The anecdote about southern elite women smuggling opium reminded me about that bit in The Tin Drum, where the German grandma hides the Polish arsonist in her thick skirts

Pete

Regarding mozzie bites, this is going to sound like quackery, but I've found an "electrostimulator" clicker called Mozzigear actually works really well. My kids have used it a lot and stopped complaining instantly. Much less painful than scalding hot water too. They're made in Italy, so no wonder they work.

xnfec

The comments about Claret Soup reminded me of some ancedotes I heard. In the Sunday Telegraph back in the 80's when it was a well known bastion of the Left, they printed a memoir from Barbara Cartland in which she recalled her youth in the 30's at the time of the Jarrow March. She and her friends were dining at the Ritz Hotel when some of the marchers wandered in, the management not trying to stop them. Cartland recalled the stunned look on the faces of those men on seeing the opulence on show in the dining room and wrote, to her credit in my view, in an aside that they (the rich) deserved everything they got at the hands of the Unions. This was in the time of Thatcher. Further, I've read that Louis XVI, at the last petrol station before arriving at revolution city tried in vain to get the rich landowners to pay any tax at all. Lastly, the government here (UK) recently announced the start of some breakfast clubs here by which means school children can get some food at school thus saving their poor parents some money and getting some nutrition. They were quite proud of this and were doing the rounds of the TV studios announcing this triumph. Some were quick to push the line that the money would be better spent on a campaign to remind parents of their duty to feed their children and not expect the (rich) taxpayer to bail them out. It was quite revolting to watch. Plus ça change and all that.

William

I don’t think they’re related, but it’d be incredibly funny to see the northrops just fleecing their government for over 100 years

William

Perhaps an obvious observation, but the north having depth in their roster of administrators who could easily manage multi-state logistics was a huge advantage. Railroads were the precursors to modern corporations and based their structure on military hierarchies, so in a way, they had been training for this for decades and didn’t know it.

Terry Dunk

An underrated crime of the Columbian conquest of the New World is the introduction of mosquitos, an old world blight that did not exist in the Americas prior to c. 1500

cam

another mosquito tip is to heat a metal spoon in hot water, then hold the spoon directly on the bite for a few seconds

hamburglar

I did not know this. I will never forgive them. I live in the Michigan, every puddle is a breeding pool in the summer.

hamburglar

I assume management of industry also played into it, the same type of supply chain and resource management that was being developed in industrialization lends itself well to military administration. Although I doubt many of the West Point groomed leadership had much experience there

hamburglar

I adore how deeply evil dead/army of darkness is burrowed in both of your minds. Mine too

William

Well a lot of west pointers became heads of these railroad corps. Certainly more engineering focused than tactics and strategy, more manners and shit

William

The south is proof that libertarianism doesn’t work on a mass scale

Elmer Studd

I’m dreaming of a 6-part 10+ hour “Annibale’s 100 Years War” style extravaganza featuring Matt Karp when his new book comes out

NYCM&AHole

Hell, China is proof that the free market needs a couple good kicks to the head to pacify it. Imagine if the Soviet Union didn’t exist and there had been no ideological counterbalance in the 20th century -

triplevalaska

Not to be that guy but there where misquitoes in the new world before Columbus, do you mean malaria?

CR

Every time I listen to a Civil War episode I think a) mercy and magnanimity is for suckers, and b) I wonder what would happen if we sent JD back to 1860 and attached him to Lincoln's hip. Assuming he doesn't immediately shit himself to death, which is his real superpower that he has managed to survive everything, I think the war would have been hugely different.

CR

No, that would be the typical Union soldier. The confederate soldiers were the bog standard soldier of every army for ten thousand years

CR

Jack Northrop was born in Newark.

JoR

Happy Draft Day! Praying they don't fuck it up as usual lol

Methew

Damn dawg, flaming me with the joy division - Lincoln line

a clash of purple

The opposition to capitalism grew from inside capitalism as people tried to solve its inherent contradictions, and it had to set up headquarters in Russia because that was the only country where the regime was so weak that it could be toppled in the face of near-universal reaction. I think the existence of the Soviet Union, in one form or another, was overdetermined. If anything, it all went wrong when Trotsky was defeated in Poland while trying to march west and support the German workers' revolution. If the revolution had succeeded in Germany, then the history of the 20th century would probably have turned out *very* differently. But the goddamned Poles ruined everything, as usual.

a clash of purple

We need a Civil War film where the Confederates are straight-up depicted as Tolkien orcs and goblins. Just veer as far in the opposite direction of the Lost Cause myth as possible and portray them as filthy inhuman demons with no redeeming characteristics. The white South has gotten away with denying their orcishness for too long, in my opinion.

a clash of purple

The Union Army's cause was betrayed by their leadership after the end of the war, but they killed an awful lot of Southerners and freed the slaves. It's not their fault they didn't kill *enough* Southerners to properly finish what they started.

Lord-Admiral of the Pyrenees

How so? The Southern soldiers served in a war that purely benefited the upper class elites who drank champagne while they had to to scrounge for their own food

Andrew

Scalding off mosquito bites is certified tweaker behavior.

Schaeffer Mallory

This is reminding me I need to make a bumper sticker that says "The South Will Fall Again"

Jeremy

John: "I pour boiling water over my mosquito bites because it temporarily or permanently kills the nerves in the surrounding area" mark: "that must be excruciating!"

PW

I'm against comments so I won't be leaving any!

Benjamin Glover

oh lord john or anyone else don't pour boiling water onto bites if you can't get to a pharmacy for some ointments what you do is put one end of a metal teaspoon in a cup of hot water (preferably from the kettle or as hot as the tap will allow - be careful of heating water in the microwave) then take the teaspoon off, allow it to dry for a couple of seconds and apply that teaspoon directly on to the bite. You don't need to push it but holding it there for a few seconds does the trick. It will still hurt (less so than pouring boiling water!) but the point is the reason for the bite itching is because there is an enzyme from it still present in your skin, which makes you scratch and rupture the skin around it leading to infection. The heat of the spoon denatures or "kills" the enzyme, thus stopping the itching, but this won't be immediately obvious because you've put a hot object there. Two or three applications of a spoon do the trick for me.

Mat LaPoer

I probably don't remember right because my memory was sure it was him himself until I stopped to notice the word "grandma", but if I remember right wasn't that Polish arsonist incident also the story of how one of the protagonist's parents was conceived?

Mat LaPoer

BTW, it's a nice bonus that, aside from being reliably excellent in themselves, new RWN Civil War episodes always bring to mind a certain Fall song. o/~ We shot dead a stu-pid sergant o/~ But I got hit in-the-cross-fire o/~

Doc Adna

Yup, the protagonist's mom's conception

Miguel Duarte

Would love an episode on concurrent developments in the northern economy such as the introduction of the greenback and the income tax. Also would love to hear the RWN take on the Confederacy's failed cotton embargo / foreign policy approach in 1861-62. They thought they'd bring Britain to its knees by withholding cotton exports. Turns out they unintentionally helped legitimize the north's blockade. Just another example of the south consistently overplaying their hand.

Jerry McKenzie

Studebaker got its start during this time. The brothers were able to manage the increasing demand for wagons.

Jack Straub

Europeans introduced Aedes Aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito to the Americas. There were already indigenous mosquitoes in America but none that lived so close to, and preyed so regularly, on human blood. This is what makes them such great disease vectors. I heard them described as "domesticated" in a way.