Ruminations of the Civil War and Reconstruction typically involve an assortment of long-bearded West Point graduates, the astute political maneuverings of Abraham Lincoln, droves of enslaved African Americans determined to transform what began as a war to preserve the Union into a death knell for the institution that held them in bondage, hundreds of thousands of men cut down by armament and disease, or a narrow opportunity for Republican-led racial progress foiled by white supremacy. Despite service as the nerve center of the Union military effort and of radical political policy in the postwar period, the District of Columbia – alias Washington, DC – is generally (and unfortunately) lost in the shuffle. Historian Robert Harrison appropriately sets out to remedy this neglect; his posthumously published Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction contends that the oft-overlooked capital city had actually functioned as the prime testing ground for Reconstruction policy, interracial democracy, and African American citizenship.
Two underlying assertions are fundamental to the portrait of Washington, DC that Harrison painstakingly pieces together with Freedmen's Bureau records, congressional records, government documents, media accounts, and myriad correspondence. First, the city, unlike New York, Boston, or even Atlanta, was born of political convenience rather than financial necessity. This seemingly “genetic” characteristic accounted both for the city's lackluster appearance (which Harrison offers as a metaphor for the fractured state of the Union in 1860) and for the fact that the District's federal overseers did not answer to a state government. Second, Harrison is adamant from the start that antebellum Washington was essentially a southern city – replete with kinship ties to Virginia and Maryland, linguistic drawls, racial animosity, and the very visible presence of slavery. Collectively, these traits explain how the capital city found itself uniquely qualified to serve as a congressional laboratory in the early phases of Reconstruction.
According to Harrison, the Civil War literally altered the face(s) of Washington. In addition to an influx of federal soldiers and white northern entrepreneurs, an explosion in the free black population permanently changed the city's demographic breakdown. Given the exponential growth of the African American population during and after the war and the city's affiliation with Radical Republicanism, Harrison provides a tedious but worthwhile reassessment of the much-maligned Freedmen's Bureau. He argues that historians writing in the 1970s and 1980s unfairly saddled the bureau with their own anachronistic and thereby unrealistic expectations – expectations that failed to reflect the dire social and economic circumstances faced by the bureau in the late 1860s and 1870s. In the process of reassessing the bureau's story, Harrison highlights how black Washingtonians took an active role in bureau affairs and how the bureau did manage to relatively improve sanitation, housing, and health care in the city. Most importantly, Harrison reveals how “aspects of the bureau's character and purpose are only revealed by considering its work in the cities” (107–8).
The main thrust of Washington during the Civil War and Reconstruction revolves around the idea that Radical Republicans consistently tested their policy reforms – which ranged from emancipation to black suffrage to railway desegregation to black public schools – in the District of Columbia before enacting them at the national level. Under these arrangements and prior to Congressional usurpation of political authority in Washington, African Americans mobilized, flourished as activists and politicians at the grassroots level, and harnessed political participation to shape their own lives like never before. In these chapters, arguably the best in the book, Harrison underscores how Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson were, albeit very briefly, able to offer African Americans in a southern city the core elements of American citizenship. And while Republican success in Washington was clearly short-lived, it stands to remind readers of what potential had actually existed and to reinforce how much progress was actually squandered.
In the end, the book is not without issue. Just how precisely the wartime and Reconstruction experiences of Washingtonians and their city could have realistically mirrored those of southerners in defeated and then heavily occupied locales may bother some readers. Even still, Harrison's use of Washington as a forerunning case study for the early successes and much broader failures of Reconstruction in the South is both innovative and generally very convincing. With this in mind, Washington during the Civil War and Reconstruction, sporting its intended emphasis on black agency and a “grassroots” perspective of the immediate postwar years, is an excellent – though quite pricey at ninety dollars – addition to Reconstruction scholarship.
