Episode 16: Mad Cossack: U.S. Gen. John B. Turchin—His Life, His Wife, and the Sacking of Athens (Alabama, That Is...)

“I shut my eyes for two hours.”-John Basil Turchin (born Ivan Vasilyevich Turchaninov, 1821–1901)

In this long overdue episode of The Civil Weird Podcast, we unravel the story of Gen. John Basil Turchin, a Russian-born soldier who fled the autocracy of the Tsar and found himself in Abraham Lincoln’s army. Once an officer in the Imperial Guard, Turchin carried with him the brutal lessons of European warfare, lessons that would explode into controversy in Athens, Alabama, in 1862.

When his Union brigade occupied the Confederate town, chaos followed. Accused of letting his men “do as they pleased,” Turchin’s actions marked a first in the "war without gloves" in the western theater of the Civil War, when moral restraint gave way to the total destruction that would later define Sherman’s march.

Beside him stood his wife, Nadine Turchin, a radical diarist, leader, and fierce believer in her husband and liberty; she chronicled the war with intelligence and passion. Together they challenged the old order: a foreign-born general and his outspoken wife, fighting not just for the Union but for a new kind of justice.

Was John Turchin a war criminal, a radical abolitionist, or simply the first man to see that it would take "conquest, not conciliation" to end slavery once and for all?

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