Lincoln's Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, DC by Kenneth J. Winkle (review)

In 2003 book critic Jonathan Yardley declared that Margaret Leech's 1941 Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865—for which the novelist turned historian won a Pulitzer Prize, the first by a woman in history—was "still authoritative as history and . . . something of a masterpiece of storytelling . . . [that] portrays this city more vividly, accurately and thoroughly than any other book. Period."¹ Others have tried to match Leech's narrative success, some with more success than others.

Kenneth J. Winkle, the author of two other books on Lincoln, notes in his preface that Lincoln's Citadel aims to "probe behind the presidents and generals, the speeches and statues, and the moldering monuments to bring to life the human story of the war as ordinary men and women experienced it" (xi). For the most part Winkle succeeds—yet his portrait of the nation's capital during the Civil War is incomplete.

Winkle deftly describes a national capital that was woefully unprepared for war. At the time of the fall of Fort Sumter the city had one general hospital that admitted fewer than two hundred patients a year; following the First Battle of Bull Run, hundreds of homes were converted into temporary hospitals, with one generous family opening their abode to seventeen wounded soldiers. Housing for the thousands of troops who poured into the city was inadequate, with the U.S. Capitol forced to accommodate up to seven thousand troops at a time. The nearest fortress worthy of the name, Fort Washington, was located on the Potomac River some fifteen miles south of the city and "had sat ungarrisoned for years" (84). A mustering of the District of Columbia's militia in April 1861 yielded a disappointing turnout, partly because southern sympathizers within the militia resigned rather than take an oath of allegiance to the United States. All the while the city was maintained by an underfunded police force whose incompetence was matched only by its corruption and ethnic divisions. As recently as 1860 an armed "target company," consisting in part of local police, emerged to disrupt Republican Party meetings and help hand a highly suspect mayoral election to the Democratic candidate.

The story of the capital's metamorphosis during the war is largely a story of numbers—and the numbers are staggering. To cite a few: by the end of the war the Union army had constructed sixty-eight forts and ninety-three artillery positions in and around the capital. From 1860 to 1861 the population of Washington, D.C., more than tripled, from sixty-five thousand to two hundred thousand. The Washington Armory produced up to two hundred thousand cartridges a day. More than three thousand bales of hay to feed the growing horse population arrived from Baltimore every day—which contributed to the seven hundred tons of manure produced daily at the government corral in Giesboro Point, Maryland. If driven end-to-end the city's supply wagons would stretch for eighteen miles. The bakery at the Capitol produced more than three hundred thousand loaves of bread weekly. In the hands of a less capable historian, the plethora of such statistics would dull the narrative. But Winkle capably utilizes the numbers to paint a larger picture of a city transforming itself in wartime.

Part of this changeover involved the city's black residents, and it is here where Winkle is most effective. "Washington's greatest transformation" during the war, he notes in the preface, "was its gradual transformation from slavery to freedom" (xiv). This conversion was well under way by 1861, for the number of slaves in the District of Columbia, having peaked in 1830, had been declining for years. Congress's abolition of the peculiar institution in Washington in April 1862 was the coup de grâce in what had been a decades-long process. Yet Congress did not repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, the most notorious of the measures from...