THE SIEGE OF WASHINGTON

A focused account of the nervous interim after the attack of Fort Sumter when Washington, D.C., was vulnerable to an invasion by the Confederates that never happened.

Why didn’t the newly emboldened rebel army fail to make good on their cries of “On to Washington!” and seize the capital when it was most vulnerable? Largely undefended, located 60 miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line in slaveholding territory, Washington consisted mostly of slaves, and had one rail line serving both north- and southbound traffic and an easily severable telegraph line. Possessing the nation’s capital would have instantly gained for the Confederate cause what Gen. Ben Butler described as “recognition as a power among the nations of the earth.” Since his inauguration several months before, President Lincoln did not heed the emergency of the seceding states, until the shock of Fort Sumter prompted him to issue a call for 75,000 volunteers. Moreover, warnings to reinforce Washington by the longtime commander of the U.S. Army, Gen. Winfield Scott had been ignored. The Lockwoods—John, the National Mall Historian, and architectural historian Charles (The Green Quotient: Insights from Leading Experts on Sustainability, 2000, etc.)—capture the sense of urgency that gripped the city during these 12 days when fear of rebel invasion was acute and the president waited anxiously for the promised reinforcements from the Northern states to arrive. The authors effectively employ correspondence and archives by Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay. Washington harbored pockets of Southern sympathizers, while the First Pennsylvania Volunteers were set upon viciously by a mob when they passed through Baltimore, wounding freed slave Nicholas Biddle, who “shed the first blood of the Civil War at the hands of the enemy.” With communication and supply lines blocked by Maryland, Washington was truly under siege, yet Lincoln did not flee the city and the Confederates still dithered about an attack.

An exciting blow-by-blow history of a tense, historically significant fortnight.