Lincoln's Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, DC
During the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was a boomtown. Against the distant sound of cannon fire, the city multiplied in size as various groups of people flowed in. Office seekers, military casualties, and escaping slaves lent the city a turbulent wartime sociology that Winkle probes. First, however, he depicts antebellum Washington during Abraham Lincoln’s 1847–49 term in Congress. Recounting Lincoln’s and fellow antislavery politicians’ encounters with the peculiar institution, Winkle underscores the complicated legal conditions imposed on blacks, free and enslaved. He carries the legal scaffolding of D.C. slavery into the war years, when Congress abolished it by gradations, and details each step’s ramifications on Washington’s blacks and whites. Lincoln’s personal and political part in these proceedings does not dominate but rather supplements Winkle’s narratives of people drawn into the city as battle casualties or fugitives from slavery. His anecdotes of individual cases usefully illustrate his deployment of statistics about hospitals and refugee camps. Reminiscent of Margaret Leech’s classic Reveille in Washington (1941), Winkle’s history modernizes a story ever attractive to Civil War readers. --Gilbert Taylor