Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865

Margaret Leech

iyn, 2011 · New York Review of Books

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Featuring a foreword by Battle Cry of Freedom author James McPherson

A vibrant portrait of Civil War-era Washington, D.C. that is “packed and running over with the anecdotes, scandals, personalities, and tragi-comedies of the day”—from the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for History (The New Yorker)
 
1860: The American capital is sprawling, fractured, squalid, colored by patriotism and treason, and deeply divided along the political lines that will soon embroil the nation in bloody conflict. Chaotic and corrupt, the young city is populated by bellicose congressmen, Confederate conspirators, and enterprising prostitutes. Soldiers of a volunteer army swing from the dome of the Capitol, assassins stalk the avenues, and Abraham Lincoln struggles to justify his presidency as the Union heads to war. 

Reveille in Washington focuses on the everyday politics and preoccupations of Washington during the Civil War. From the stench of corpse-littered streets to the plunging lace on Mary Lincoln’s evening gowns, Margaret Leech illuminates the city and its familiar figures—among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, William Seward, and Mary Surratt—in intimate and fascinating detail. 

Leech’s book remains widely recognized as both an impressive feat of scholarship and an uncommonly engrossing work of history.


“The best single popular account of Washington during the great convulsion of the Civil War.” —The Washington Post

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Margaret Leech (1893–1974) was an American novelist, biographer, and historian. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for History and one of only two people to win it twice, first in 1942 for Reveille in Washington and again in 1960 for In the Days of McKinley (for which she also won the Bancroft Prize). Leech was born in Newburgh, New York, and graduated from Vassar College in 1915. She then moved to New York City, where she found work in the advertising and publicity departments of Condé Nast. Following World War I, she served on the American Committee for Devastated France and took up journalism and fiction, eventually publishing three novels, The Back of the Book (1924), Tin Wedding (1926), and The Feathered Nest (1928), before turning to history. A member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, where she was known for her sharp tongue, she collaborated with Heywood Broun on a biography of Anthony Comstock (1927) and with Beatrice Kaufman on a play, Divided by Three (1934). In 1928 Leech married Ralph Pulitzer, editor and publisher of The New York World. At the time of her death Leech had begun work on a new history, The Garfield Orbit. Completed by Harry J. Brown, the book appeared in 1978.

James M. Mcpherson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Among his other books are For Cause and Comrades, Drawn with the Sword, What They Fought For, Gettysburg, and Fields of Fury. A professor at Princeton University, he lives in Princeton,
New Jersey.