Lincoln's Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, DC
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The stirring history of a president and a capital city on the front lines of war and freedom.
In the late 1840s, Representative Abraham Lincoln resided at Mrs. Sprigg’s boardinghouse on Capitol Hill. Known as Abolition House, Mrs. Sprigg’s hosted lively dinner-table debates of antislavery politics by the congressional boarders. The unusually rapid turnover in the enslaved staff suggested that there were frequent escapes north to freedom from Abolition House, likely a cog in the underground railroad. These early years in Washington proved formative for Lincoln.
In 1861, now in the White House, Lincoln could gaze out his office window and see the Confederate flag flying across the Potomac. Washington, DC, sat on the front lines of the Civil War. Vulnerable and insecure, the capital was rife with Confederate sympathizers. On the crossroads of slavery and freedom, the city was a refuge for thousands of contraband and fugitive slaves. The Lincoln administration took strict measures to tighten security and established camps to provide food, shelter, and medical care for contrabands. In 1863, a Freedman’s Village rose on the grounds of the Lee estate, where the Confederate flag once flew.
The president and Mrs. Lincoln personally comforted the wounded troops who flooded wartime Washington. In 1862, Lincoln spent July 4 riding in a train of ambulances carrying casualties from the Peninsula Campaign to Washington hospitals. He saluted the “One-Legged Brigade” assembled outside the White House as “orators,” their wounds eloquent expressions of sacrifice and dedication. The administration built more than one hundred military hospitals to care for Union casualties.
These are among the unforgettable scenes in Lincoln’s Citadel, a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington. Here is the vivid story of how the Lincoln administration met the immense challenges the war posed to the city, transforming a vulnerable capital into a bastion for the Union.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though one might assume the man atop the eponymous citadel would get the most attention, the newest from Lincoln biographer Winkle (The Young Eagle) is really about the nation's capital how it weathered and changed during the Civil War and the citizens, slaves, and soldiers who lived in and moved through it. He describes his account as an "interior history" of Washington, D.C. a phrase borrowed from Walt Whitman, from when the poet was in the city to find his brother George, who had been wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg and that description is right on the money. Beginning with a portrait of the city before the war, Winkle examines the capital's conflicted relationship with slavery, as well as the political implications of its unique geographical location it's not quite the North, and it's not quite the South. When the Civil War finally starts, Winkle hits his stride, describing a community far more divided and dangerous than most people today can appreciate. Far from being a unified bastion of antislavery pols, the capital was plagued with interior troubles and threatened by encroaching Rebel forces. Well-researched and thoroughly engaging, Winkle's history is a welcome addition to a body of Civil War literature that too often privileges men and massacres.
