Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War [Hardcover]

Ernest B. Furgurson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2004

Freedom Rising is a fresh, intensely human account of how the Civil War transformed the nation’s capital from the debating forum for a loose union of states into the seat of a forceful central government.
    
Before 1861, Washington was a dusty, muddy city of 60,000, joked about by urban sophisticates from New York and Boston. But at the onset of war, thousands of soldiers, job seekers, nurses, good-time girls, gamblers, newly freed slaves–all kinds of Americans–poured in. For days, Washington was cut off from the North, and no one was sure whether it would become the capital of the Union or the Confederacy.
    
Ernest Furgurson–author of the widely acclaimed Chancellorsville 1863, Ashes of Glory, and Not War but Murder–tells the story through the men and women who brought the city to rambunctious life. He re-creates historic figures such as William Seward, who fancied himself Abraham Lincoln’s prime minister; poet Walt Whitman, who nursed the wounded; and detective Allan Pinkerton, who tracked down Southern sympathizers; and he introduces intriguing others, such as Mayor James Berret, arrested for disloyalty; architect Thomas Walter, striving to finish the Capitol dome in the middle of war; and accused Confederate spy Antonia Ford, romancing her captor, Union Major Joseph Willard, operator of the capital’s premier hotel.  Here is Mary Lincoln, mourning the death of her son Willie, seeking solace from fakers who conducted séances in the White House. And here is the president–in all his compassion, determination, and complexity–inspiring the nation, wrangling with generals, pardoning deserters, and barely escaping death on the ramparts of Fort Stevens as Jubal Early’s Southern army invades the outskirts of Washington and fights the Union Army within five miles of the White House. For four years, the city was awash in drama and sometimes comedy, until the assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth became the tragedy of the century.
    
By the time the grand two-day victory parade of 150,000 troops surged along Pennsylvania Avenue, the men and women who had arrived in such great numbers at the start of the war had made Washington a capital to be reckoned with throughout the world. Freedom Rising is an invaluable aid to understanding the making of America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The journalistic parentage of this book is apparent. Anecdotes, interesting characters—some well known, others obscure—and facts abound, all presented with obvious zeal by an author who spent 30 years with the Baltimore Sun and has written three other books on the Civil War. What's missing is a structure to help Furgurson's exhaustive research, doled out in brief vignettes, cohere into a compelling narrative. The book is neither the promised urban history nor a history of the Civil War, which has certainly been abundantly documented elsewhere, including in Furgurson's other works (Chancellorsville; Not War but Murder). Instead, the reader gets confusing snatches of both. One chapter, for example, begins with a sequence of anecdotes about three young women who arrive in Washington by different routes; devotes a page to Mary Todd Lincoln's spendthrift ways; veers out to St. Louis and John Frémont's unauthorized freeing of Missouri's slaves; proceeds to a discussion of the imposition of martial law and the political discord it causes; and ends with Julia Ward Howe's penning of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Civil War buffs and Washingtonians well may find in all this more grist for their enthusiasms, but the general reader may grow impatient as the author ricochets from battlefield to ballroom. 16 pages of b&w photos, 3 maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Two images bracket this stirring history. The prologue recalls the arrival in 1859 of an 18-foot sculpture called Freedom, intended for the unfinished Capitol building in Washington, DC. At the book's conclusion, Freedom stands atop the magnificent dome in May 1865, while victorious Union forces parade proudly below and citizens mourn a president murdered barely five weeks earlier. Between these events, equally dramatic scenes played out in Washington, where political struggles could be as vicious in their own way as anything transpiring on wartime battlefields. Furgurson brings everything to vigorous life: Lincoln's indomitable character and his skill at manipulating friends and foes in his efforts to preserve the country; the partisan, sometimes corrupt news reporters driven by self-interest; idealists and healers seeking to do good; spies ferreting out secrets; complex and odd characters from all social strata who populated the city during the war years. The attention given to the experiences of mid-19th-century women and African Americans is notable, and as a whole the author's scholarship updates and complements Margaret Leech's Reveille in Washington (Simon, 2001), a Pulitzer Prize-winner long considered the standard work on this topic. Freedomis as readable as it is well documented.–Starr E. Smith, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (November 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375404546
• ISBN-13: 978-0375404542
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,142,449 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's OK to disagree with critics..., January 22, 2005

By 

Pookie "mstfmsgn" (VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (Hardcover)

I was very surprised to read the negative review of this book. I agree the "journalistic parentage" of this book is apparent, but I disagree with the "ricochet" comment. The book IS about Washington during the Civil War. The problem with any book about Washington D.C. is that, because of its status as the nation's capital, it's impossible to focus only on the city itself. Any book that did so would be seriously flawed and incomplete. A history of Washington must take into account, at least periodically, the effects that actions in Washington have on other parts of the country, and what events in other parts of the country do to change the situation in Washington. This is doubly true of the Civil War era.

I found the mix of local and national issues and events not at all confusing and in fact, quite palatable. Furgurson seamlessly weaves in events such as John Fremont's action in Missouri and Ben Butler's actions on the Virginia Peninsula, for example, with local events in Washington. The importance of the interaction between these events is self-evident. Indeed, such masterful weaving is half the book's charm.

_Freedom Rising_ is not meant to be a source for report writing (although it works as background reading); it's meant to be an enjoyable read, and at this task Furgurson succeeds masterfully. I would recommend this book, and I will be more likely to read Furgurson's other books in the future.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freedom Rising - The Capital in Crisis, January 16, 2007

By 

B. G. Burton - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (Hardcover)

Ernest Furgurson uses the statue atop the Capitol as a metaphor for the survival of the U.S. and the liberation of African-Americans. Even throughout the turmoil of the war, construction of the Capital continued, albeit haltingly, its progress symbolizing the triumph of the Union. This book is a must read for anyone who lives or works in the capital.

Riddled with southern sympathizers and spies, the capital nevertheless became a truly federal city. Slave markets stood on the south side of Independence Ave, now a two-mile-long chain of government departments, and even on Lafayette Square. D St. and 21st, the present location of the State Department, was a huge stables; on Boxing Day, 1861, a fire broke out that killed thousands of horses and sent thousands more running through the city. For days afterwards, the city stank of burned horse meat. Present day conservatives would say that they still haven't cleaned out all the horse---- from the area. Federal Triangle was the red light district, catering to all tastes; digs have found piles of bottles of expensive French champagne where the bawdy houses one stood. Constitution Avenue was a canal -- Tiber Creek -- and all of the mall west from the Washington monument was the Potomac. Within months of the outbreak of war, Washington saw a string of firsts -- the first use of trains for strategic mobility, the first use of aerial reconnaissance, the first machine gun, the first suspension of habeas corpus, the first nursing corps, the first aircraft carrier (a balloon moored to a boat in the Potomoc that allowed the feds to observe the Confederate withdrawal from Occoquan and the Pohick Creek area where I now live). Furgurson writes of Lincoln, Stanton, Seward, Chase, Winfield Scott, Grant, and McLellan; of Confederate spies such as Antonia Ford; of dozens of soldiers and nurses, poets such as Whitman, and others who created the rich fabric of a capital at war, surrounded by hostiles. Washington, Furgurson writes, went from a town divided and fearful in 1861 to a "place of focused and confident power" in 1865. He does a superb job of reporting this huge political and physical transformation.

Some other notes. George Washington's grand-nephew fought on behalf of the Confederacy, and was killed in September 1861. Some vengeful Northerners wanted to confiscate Mt. Vernon but a collection of women persuaded the military authorities to let them retain it as a national historic landmark. If the hallmark of sharp political speech is that it remains as relevant today as when it was uttered, these words of Lincoln to a crowd celebrating his re-election bear diirectly on the calls of some to postpone the Iraqi elections of January 30, 2005. "We cannot have free government without elections, and if the rebellion could force us to forgo or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

"Freedom Rising" was enlightening as well in how deeply runs the Democratic Party's visceral distrust of the federal government, whether as a player on the national stage or more currently in the international arena. The Democratic platform in 1864 "shrugged at slavery" and all but assured Lincoln's reelection. Gideon Wells described the platform as "unpatriotic, almost treasonable to the Union. The issue is made up. It is whether a war shall be made against Lincoln to get peace with Jeff Davis. Those who met at Chicago prefer hostility to Lincoln rather than to Davis." Democratic Party leaders still struggle with the dilemma of supporting a Republican leader in time of war.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Street-wise, street-level history, January 29, 2005

By 

The Don Wood Files (Fredericksburg, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (Hardcover)

This is a masterful book - a street-level, street wise view of the Civil War from Pennsylvania Avenue and its tributaries. Furgurson writes of all the high and low lifes, generals, prostitutes, slave pens, piles of amputated limbs, mud, malaria, con men and spies that invaded Washington during the 1860s. The City was part morgue, part hospital, completely political and closely allied to the Southern cause.

Furgurson writes this book like a forensic detective with the flair of a novelist. Here is a sample:

"On a given evening in the early summer of 1861, toward midnight, no one stirred at William Seward's house on the east side of the square, where Lincoln often came to talk strategy and swap stories....The windows were dark at Gideon Welles's home, looking south from H Street toward the White House. The entrance to St. John's Church, Benjamin Latrobe's little 1816 gem, where every President since Madison had worshiped, was shut against the night. But across Sixteenth Street, so close to all this quiescent power and anxiety, a portly senator range the bell of a brick townhouse, and a hall lamp briefly lit his eager face as he was admitted to the presence of Rose O'Neal Greenow."

That paragraph could have been a dry recitation of events. But in Furgurson's hands, the tale is a 'little gem,' like St. John's Church, of a Senator unknowingly sleeping with, and spilling secrets to, a Southern spy. This is "you are there" journalism at its best.

If you live or work or visit Washington DC in search of the Civil War's legacies, you will take Furgurson's visions with you when you walk its streets. All the people and many of the buildings are long gone, but Furgurson's book has stemmed history's tide for a long time to come.