Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Reveille in Washington 1860-65 by Margaret Leech Reveille in Washington. Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington is more than a classic work of history: it is a piece of history in its own right. Leech was a fascinating woman and trailblazer: a 1915 graduate of Vassar, a devoted volunteer during the First World War, a New York magazine writer and participant in the famous Algonquin Table. A prolific historian, she was a woman with a remarkable affinity for Pulitzers: Not only did she win the Prize twice (the first woman ever to do so), but in 1928 she also married a Pulitzer, Ralph, publisher of the New York World and son of the Joseph Pulitzer who founded the Prize. Reveille is the book that won Leech her first Pulitzer, and you can see why: It is a riveting history of the capital city at war, with a brilliant eye for every detail, from the methods of military government in the capital to the location of the brothels, from dance steps to labor strife, from the rise of a black middle class to fashions in catering. Leech’s book takes on additional power from the date of publication: 1941. We read Leech’s account of a capital transformed by war in the knowledge of the imminence of another war, and another transformation of America’s odd and unloved capital city. Reveille can be read as an extended footnote on that impromptu address of Abraham Lincoln’s I quoted in Bookshelf 54: What has occurred in this case must ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged. Leech’s characters are just as Lincoln described them: weak and strong, silly and wise, bad and good. For every self-abnegating Clara Barton, there is a self-aggrandizing Joe Hooker; for every patriotic Edwin Stanton a treacherous Rose Greenhow. (Greenhow was a wealthy widow and popular hostess in the Washington of the 1850s. Her house stood about where the Hay-Adams hotel now stands — just off Lafayette Square, across the street from St. John’s Episcopal Church. Greenhow was no very great beauty, but she was a supremely gifted flatterer — a much more valuable attribute in Washington, then as now. According to Leech, Greenhow carried on flirtations, and probably much more than flirtations, with a number of important Republican leaders. One of them shared with her the Federal plan of march in advance of the Battle of Bull Run. Greenhow passed this information to the Confederate army, contributing to the first terrible Union defeat. She was detained as a spy, but treated remarkably leniently, possibly because of her sex, possibly because of her social standing … also possibly to shield her paramours.) The pompous, the corrupt, the vindictive, the incompetent, and more of the corrupt … these filled Civil War Washington — and indeed the Civil War White House. The White House head gardener was on the take, the guest rooms were filled with secessionist sympathizers, and the first lady was a compulsive shopper who failed to pay her bills. Gambling, whoring, drinking, opportunism, hysteria are not shown in the white marble monuments with which we commemorate the generation that saved the Union and overthrew slavery. Their latter-day equivalents in the “greatest generation” are likewise fading out of memory. This forgetfulness lends glory to the past — but often betrays us into error in the present. I remember reading some time ago a blogpost — I forget exactly where and cannot recover the cite — about some veterans of World War II intelligence-gathering who solemnly insisted that they never, ever resorted to rough methods. Not them! They were too fine and high-minded. Then I read in Max Hastings about an interrogation that went as follows: In the terrible winter battles of 1944-45, six captured German officers are led into a little house in eastern France. One chair was placed in the center of the main room. The first is seated in the chair. He is asked: “How many men and guns do you have in the town up ahead?” The German refuses to answer. His American interrogator does not repeat the question. He pulls out his pistol, shoots the officer in the head, and pushes the body to the floor. The next officer is seated in the same chair. “How many men and guns?” He talked. The evils of the past do not excuse the evils of the present. But accurate knowledge can at least protect us from naivety, impossible standards, and equally impossible ancestor-worship. Margaret Leech’s classic history is as fresh and lively today as in 1941 — and the shadows of the past deepen the interest of a book about a capital waging one desperate war, written on the eve of another, and read by this reader in the midst of a third. "Reveille in Washington": The city that shaped the Civil War. Margaret Leech's masterpiece explores the ways Washington's instability affected military strategy. By Katherine A. Powers. Published June 21, 2011 12:30AM (EDT) Shares. This year, as you know, marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Setting aside the brutal, drawn-out war waged against Native Americans, it was the most destructive conflict in American history. Over 625,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate, died through combat, disease, or mischance -- 100,0000 more Americans were killed in the War Between the States than in World Wars I and II combined. This four- year internecine struggle has been examined as history from countless angles, in its every aspect, and with the most diverse intent. And, of course, novels about it are legion: Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" is certainly the most famous, but, by my lights, Gore Vidal's "Lincoln" is the greatest. Now, having just read Margaret Leech's 1941 Pulitzer Prize-winning "Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865," it does not surprise me to learn (from James M. McPherson's fine introduction in a new edition from New York Review Books) that Vidal drew on Leech's brilliant history in writing his splendid novel. In addition to displaying a deep admiration for Lincoln and his complex nature, the two writers share a sardonic sensibility that expresses itself in a dark wit and festive appreciation of character grown rotten with power, of vanity, self-delusion, and folly -- all traits very much in evidence in Washington during the bungle and stall that marked much of the Union's campaign against the Confederacy. Leech gives us Washington's Civil War, showing both the profound ways the town changed during the course of the conflict and, most crucially, how its ever-precarious state -- internally and externally -- affected the war's conduct. In 1861, Washington was unfinished, filthy, and foul smelling. In its six decades as the nation's capital, only half a dozen official government buildings had been built; and they were separated by vast stretches of mire. The dome of the Capitol was represented by scaffolding, and the vista from that building down Pennsylvania Avenue ended in a red-brick barn. Flocks of geese joined congressmen on the thoroughfares, and hogs congregated on Capitol Hill and in Judiciary Square. "It was a Southern town," Leech writes, "without the picturesqueness, but with the indolence, the disorder and the want of sanitation." As Lincoln took office, Southern states continued to secede; when war broke out, the sympathy of a great and unknown number of Washington's inhabitants lay with the Confederacy. Rumors of conspiracy abounded, spies were busy as termites, and such unsavory characters as secessionist Baltimore "plug-uglies" roistered into town. The appalling prospect of the Union capital falling into Confederate hands brought military relief from the North, first in the glorious shape of "the kid-glove" 7th Regiment of the New York Militia. On their arrival, Leech observes with characteristic tartness, "the young gentlemen had had several days' experience of the inconvenience of war . The sandwiches prepared for them under the supervision of Delmonico, had long ago been eaten; and they had had to leave at Annapolis a thousand velvet-covered camp stools." Still: "They had come to save the capital, and were proudly aware of their own pluck and perseverance." In the words of one, "We all feel somewhat as Mr. Ceasar Augustus must have felt when he had crossed the Rubicon." Leech's description of the high spirits, color, and dash of those early volunteer regiments in all their exotic plumage takes on a hectic sparkle against the bleakness and misery we know is to come. As the wounded and captured began to flow into Washington from bloody and futile encounters with Confederate forces, public buildings not already transformed into barracks became prisons and hospitals. In the Patent Office, "[l]ike some new exhibit of ghastliness, waxy faces lay in rows between the shining glass cabinets, filled with curiosities, foreign presents and models of inventions. The nurses heels clicked on the marble floor, and all over lay the heavy smell of putrefaction and death." The city became crowded not only with troops, hale and convalescent, but with Confederate deserters, prisoners of war, quacks, prostitutes, gamblers, place seekers, profiteers, souvenir hunters, war correspondents, closet secessionists, abolitionists, fugitive slaves or "contraband," and the laborers who continued throughout the war to work on finishing government buildings and "Armed Freedom," the bronze statue destined for the Capitol dome.