Aaron Sheehan-Dean

speaker

924 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 24 Aug

Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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American History Hit · Battle of Baton Rouge: Civil War on the Mississippi · 5 Feb 2026 podcast

So, you know, remember that the Confederacy is three quarters of a million square miles.

That's bigger than continental Europe.

It has a 3,000 mile coastline.

And the first enlistment authorization by the Confederate Congress calls for a 100,000 man army.

Now, by 1862, they probably have 600,000 men under arms.

But even still, that's not nearly enough to cover this much space.

Sure.

And so the vast majority of those troops have been positioned in that pivotal corridor between Richmond and Washington and then more recently in central Tennessee.

And the West, in a way, does not get the manpower that it needs.

And if it's a short war, that's not a problem.

But this is a much longer war.

And this is where I think historians today would argue that in many respects, the Union wins the war strategically by capturing parts of the West and then moving south through Georgia and then up the coast, of course, connecting as Sherman and Grant do in 1864, 65.

But sort of like a lot of, you know, readers today, it's important to keep an eye on the West because not everybody was at the time.

But those Union victories are really changing the landscape, literally, in the sense of the resources and manpower.

They do.

They have a very powerful ironclad ram.

This is the CSS Arkansas.

The ironclads are a brand new technology.

Listeners may know about the famous battle between the Monitor and the Virginia, also known as the Merrimack, in Hampton Roads, which had happened in the spring of 1862, a reasonably inconclusive sort of two hours of firing back and forth.

But it brought to people's public attention the fact that there is a new technology, ironclad ships that have these very low profiles with huge iron plating that can deflect cannon shot.

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