Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865

Margaret Leech's history follows wartime Washington as a living, overcrowded city rather than a backdrop to battles fought elsewhere, tracking the capital from the anxious weeks before Lincoln's first inauguration through the war's end. She moves through the streets and drawing rooms as freely as through the White House and the War Department, following Lincoln, his cabinet, and his generals alongside ordinary residents, wounded soldiers, and Confederate sympathizers operating inside Union lines, most notably the society spy Rose Greenhow, whose intelligence passed to Confederate commanders before the First Battle of Bull Run. Leech treats the city itself, swollen with soldiers and refugees and thick with rumor, as a genuine character in its own right.

Leech had spent years writing popular fiction, including three novels published across the 1920s, before turning to history, and that training shows in Reveille in Washington's narrative pace: it reads with the momentum of a novel while resting on careful documentary research into diaries, letters, and newspapers of the period. She had also co written an earlier biography of the anti vice reformer Anthony Comstock, and she brings a similar interest in a colorful supporting cast, provost marshals, hospital matrons, boardinghouse keepers, to this larger canvas. She moves fluidly between grand political drama, cabinet meetings, and the maneuvering around emancipation, and the granular daily texture of a capital living under constant threat of invasion, never letting the sweep of the war eclipse the particular people living through it. It suits a reader who wants Civil War Washington rendered as a place, crowded and frightened and occasionally absurd, rather than as a sequence of policy decisions handed down from on high.