Civil War Series

Read the history of the CIvil War from the perspective of the Washington DC capital.

When the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861, Washington, D.C., was a small, essentially Southern city. The capital rapidly transformed as it prepared for invasion--army camps sprung up in Foggy Bottom, the Navy Yard on Anacostia was a beehive of activity and even the Capitol was pressed into service as a barracks. Local citizens and government officials struggled to accommodate the fugitive slaves and troops that crowded into the city. From the story of one of the first African American army surgeons, Dr. Alexander Augusta, to the tireless efforts of Clara Barton, historian Lucinda Prout Janke renders an intimate portrait of a community on the front lines of war. Join Janke as she guides readers through the changing landscape of a capital besieged.

Abraham Lincoln spent much of his presidency traveling. His visits to Antietam to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and to Pennsylvania for the famed Gettysburg Address are well remembered. During the course of the war, Lincoln also traveled to West Point and Harpers Ferry. As hostilities drew to a close, he spent time on the Virginia battlefields, from Petersburg to Richmond and beyond. In this new edition of Lincoln's Wartime Travels, John W. Schildt details visits to wounded soldiers both Union and Confederate, conferences with generals and the logistics of getting a wartime president from place to place.

In the spring of 1864, a student of medicine from upstate New York joined the Union army and ended up stationed in Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. Over the next year and a half, Richtmyer Hubbell, in his early twenties, visited Washington several times a month, witnessed some of the most compelling events of the Civil War period, and kept an account of them in his diary. His entries are unique for their time as well as for ours. They chronicle not the military aspects of the war but the political and social events and anticipate the impact that those events will have on the war and on the nation. In Potomac Diary we witness Hubbell's three meetings with Pres. Abraham Lincoln. We go with Hubbell to the Electoral College balloting in the 1864 presidential election, to Lincoln's second inauguration, and to the New Year's Eve ball at the White House in 1865. In the most eloquent entry, which is both chilling and prophetic, we share Hubbell's grief and insight into the assassination of Lincoln.