35 episodes listed below
The Civil War, one life at a time.
Christopher Moore's Portraits of Blue & Grey builds Civil War history around individual lives, with multi-part portraits of William Tecumseh Sherman, John Brown and Nathan Bedford Forrest. It also covers spy networks, cavalry raids, the Red River and New Mexico campaigns, and the Copperheads who opposed the war from inside the Union.
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Portraits of Blue & Grey, hosted by Christopher Moore, treats the American Civil War as a story best told through the people inside it. That idea shapes the catalog in two ways. Some figures receive full multi-part portraits. William Tecumseh Sherman, Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Brown each stretch across several episodes, following Sherman through the March to the Sea and Brown to Harpers Ferry. Other episodes are built around a campaign or a theme, and there the people arrive in clusters. The Red River series brings in Nathaniel Banks, Admiral David Dixon Porter and Lt. Col. Joseph Bailey, a Wisconsin engineer who built an improvised dam. 'Raiders of the Lost Cause; Part A' and its companion follow Jeb Stuart and Jubal Early to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The naval war appears through the commerce raider CSS Alabama and Captain Raphael Semmes. Espionage is covered from both sides. The Union episodes cover Allan Pinkerton's privatized operation, Colonel George Sharpe's Bureau of Military Information, Elizabeth Van Lew's Richmond network and Lafayette Baker's counterintelligence bureau in Washington. The Confederate material turns to cavalry scouting, the Signal Corps and the Secret Service. It also includes smaller, vivid stories, such as Jedediah Hotchkiss mapping the Shenandoah Valley for Stonewall Jackson and the Iron Scouts' Beefsteak Raid during the siege of Petersburg. The host is willing to rule on contested evidence. Sarah Edmonds' nearly two years as Private Franklin Thompson of the 2nd Michigan are treated as solid. The spy exploits in her best-selling account are judged to be fiction, and the host calls the decision to mix the two a mistake that undercut her real record. The hanging of Sam Davis, later sung as 'the boy hero of the Confederacy', is set beside the Confederacy's own stated position on enemy spies. Primary sources are read aloud at length, bracketed by a spoken 'quote' and 'end quote'. The Copperheads episode gives a long stretch to Daniel Voorhees' furious 1872 attack on Reconstruction, alongside Pomeroy's published invective against Lincoln. Diplomacy is part of the picture too: Seward's threat of war against Britain, Britain's declaration of neutrality, and the long game London played with the Union blockade. The tone is conversational and dry. The Copperheads episode starts with pit vipers and a minor DC Comics villain before turning to anti-war Northerners. Modern comparisons, such as strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, help place unfamiliar politics. Digressions are acknowledged rather than hidden, and the host invites listener questions and comments by email.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants Civil War history anchored in individual figures and who is glad to follow a subject across several parts. It also suits anyone who likes hearing primary sources read aloud and then openly weighed.
What sets it apart: The show organizes campaigns and themes around specific people, and the host rules openly on contested evidence. For example, it credits Sarah Edmonds' service in disguise while dismissing her spy tales as fiction.
Portraits of Blue & Grey, hosted by Christopher Moore, is a biographical Civil War podcast that examines the lives of the most prominent, interesting, and influential figures of the United States Civil War Era.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Christopher Moore makes Civil War lives legible by connecting personal choices, primary sources, political conflict, and the machinery of wartime intelligence.
Portraits of Blue & Grey: The Biographical Civil War Podcast builds Civil War history through people caught inside political, military, and moral pressure. Christopher Moore moves between figures such as Ulysses S.
Scout or spy? Christopher Moore makes you care why that distinction could mean the gallows.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A careful look at how Confederate scouts, spies, and cavalry blurred into one another.
Portraits of Blue and Gray makes a strong case for Confederate intelligence and espionage as a system built from cavalry, undercover operatives, and informant networks rather than isolated acts of daring.
A sharp look at how a wartime slur became a political threat.
Copperheads treats the Civil War label as more than a slur. It connects the snake imagery and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to anti-war northerners, then shows why the Lincoln administration saw them as a wartime threat.
A clear, uneasy look at Union intelligence and Lafayette Baker's troubling counterintelligence work.
Union intelligence comes through as a wide-ranging experiment in gathering, sorting, and making sense of information. The episode moves from a Richmond socialite spy ring that included current and former slaves to Lafayette Baker's counterintelligence work in Washington, giving…
A careful look at John Brown's radicalism, set against the abolitionist arguments around him.
John Brown is framed as a radical abolitionist whose egalitarian outlook placed him well outside much of the movement around him. The episode also moves through the arguments that shaped that world, including Garrison's attack on the Constitution and Frederick Douglass's…
A Civil War sea story that ties port visits and protocol to Anglo-American tensions.
This episode follows the CSS Alabama from Cape Town to Simon's Bay and back to sea, with British courtesy and official restraint giving the visit its shape.
Grant's rise starts in debt, pride, and the American habit of cheering for generals.
Portraits of Blue and Gray opens its Grant run by using Ulysses S. Grant to test an American habit: praising the self-made man while also trusting generals with the presidency.
Outnumbered units, remembered under fire.
Battle maps, war films, and patient context.
War news, tested against military reality.
Antique European history, read aloud.
Confederate intelligence in the Civil War depended on cavalry scouts, sympathetic civilians, and newspaper leaks more than on sophisticated machinery, even as telegraph lines and balloon observation changed the game.
Copperheads were Northern Peace Democrats, and this episode treats them as a Civil War faction that opposed Lincoln's conduct of the war rather than the Union itself.
Portraits of Blue and Gray: The Biographical Civil War Podcast examines Union espionage through Elizabeth Van Loo's Richmond network, Mary Bowser's contested identity, Lafayette Baker's counterintelligence work, Pauline Cushman's infiltration, and Sarah Emma Edmonds's adoption of the identity Franklin Thompson.
Portraits of Blue and Gray opens its John Brown series by framing his life through the lens of Kantian absolutism versus utilitarian ends-justify-means philosophy, asking whether violence to end slavery can be morally defended.
This is Part 2 of the Portraits of Blue and Gray podcast's series on the CSS Alabama, the Confederate commerce raider built in Britain that captured or destroyed 72 Union merchant ships during the Civil War.
This episode compares the contrasting careers of George McClellan and Ulysses Grant during the Civil War, using a quote about risk to frame McClellan's cautious approach.
This episode is Part 1 of a multi-part biographical portrait of Ulysses S.