Freedom Rising
Washington in the Civil War
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this luminous portrait of wartime Washington, Ernest B. Furgurson–author of the widely acclaimed Chancellorsville 1863, Ashes of Glory, and Not War but Murder--brings to vivid life the personalities and events that animated the Capital during its most tumultuous time. Here among the sharpsters and prostitutes, slaves and statesmen are detective Allan Pinkerton, tracking down Southern sympathizers; poet Walt Whitman, nursing the wounded; and accused Confederate spy Antonia Ford, romancing her captor, Union Major Joseph Willard. Here are generals George McClellan and Ulysses S. Grant, railroad crew boss Andrew Carnegie, and architect Thomas Walter, striving to finish the Capitol dome. And here is Abraham Lincoln, wrangling with officers, pardoning deserters, and inspiring the nation. Freedom Rising is a gripping account of the era that transformed Washington into the world’s most influential city.
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 Fr mont'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.
