"Lincoln’s Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, D.C" Topic

by Kenneth J. Winkle.

"Owing to the tangled sequence of congressional maneuvers, backroom bargaining and presidential fiat that placed the federal city on the banks of the lower Potomac River, Washington became, in the years 1861-65, the most peculiar war capital in the history of war capitals. Sitting only 100 miles from the Confederate seat of power in Richmond, Washington had spent 70 years in a state of arrested childhood and numbered only 75,000 residents, one-12th the size of New York City and far short of what its builders had intended. Possessed of one paved street in 1861 — Pennsylvania Avenue — and bisected by an unsightly and fetid canal that traveled the route of today's Constitution Avenue, the half-baked capital was routinely mocked by domestic and foreign visitors alike.

By 1865 and the end of the Civil War, however, the world had begun to see Washington in a new light. The danger posed by advancing Southern armies, the need to use the city as a staging ground for massive Northern military efforts and, not least, Abraham Lincoln's astonishing growth in stature and gravitas between his first inauguration in March 1861 and his assassination in April 1865 — all combined to snap Americans to civic attention. The capital, seemingly so often on the brink of occupation or destruction during the war, became a place worth defending, an idea worth cultivating and a story worth telling…"

Full article here
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Hope you enjoy!.

Amicalement
Armand

Thanks for calling this book to my attention. Although I read the Post almost every day, I had missed this review.

Rick

Happy for that my friend!. (smile).

Amicalement
Armand

Interesting, thanks!

A votre service mon cher ami!.

Amicalement
Armand