Reveille in Washington, 1860-1865

A country capital stretched in a muddy valley along the Potomac, became in the spring of 1861 a symbol of Federal prestige, a prize for which two armies contended. Centered in the Atlantic sea-board it was abruptly transformed into a border town, perilously situated between the warring sections. The demand for its protection hampered the movement of the Army of the Potomac. On its little stage was played the mighty political drama of a nation divided by rebellion. It was thronged by soldiers, anxious relatives, foreign adventurers, crooks, contractors, reporters, spies and harlots. Through the pages of this book walk the political figures of the day: the Union generals, from Winfield Scott to Ulysses S. Grant; the lady spies Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd; Andrew Carnegie, Walt Whitman, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, Louisa M. Alcott, John Wilkes Booth and a host of others.

At the opening of hostilities Washington was not only the capital of the United States, but a community startled out of its leisurely Southern existence. War made it successively a village deserted in panic, a barracks overrun by soldiers, a vast base hospital for broken men, a gay resort in which people left and danced and drank champagne in the prosperity and hysterical reaction of prolonged conflict. War brought Washington thronging crowds and Yankee efficiency and, through the great centralization of Federal authority, an importance of which the capital had never dreamed.

Reveille in Washington portrays a half-loyal City, from the doubts of the secession winter to the triumphant grand review of the armies of the republic in the spring of 1865—its political leans, its social life, its press, its crime wave and its Negro problems. The book described the life in the White House, and the struggle of Mary Lincoln, a proud and wretched woman in an unfriendly community. This was the house where, for four momentous years, Lincoln lived; these were the streets in which he walked, the soldiers he reviewed, the receptions at which he interminably shook the people's hands. Here he was despised before he was honored, here he was plotted against and murdered. The story of the Federal City, drawn mainly from contemporary accounts, is an important contribution to the history of the period.