| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War. By Ernest B. Furgurson. (New York: Knopf, 2004. xiv, 463 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-375-40454-6.)
This book is a well-written account of the Washington area during the Civil War. As every student of the Civil War knows, the national capital was transformed almost overnight from a relatively quiet southern city of 75,080 to the feverish, tension-filled center of the Union war effort. Though Freedom Rising does not replace Margaret Leech's Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865, it expands on some topics that were inadequately treated in the 1941 prize-winning book.	1
The author, Ernest B. Furgurson, provides new information and insights on the lives of African Americans and women of both races in Washington during the war. The war brought freedom and partial relief from the black code that regulated blacks, and it gave them a sense of pride that members of their race in the army had contributed to this freedom. Thousands of black refugees settled in the Washington area, notably on the former Custis-Lee plantation at Arlington, where they created the Freedman's Village. Furgurson skillfully tells the story of women who came to the city in large numbers to aid the war effort and to seek work and opportunities that were denied them at home. Some came as prostitutes; others as nurses and comforters for the sick and wounded in the hospitals that ringed the area and even occupied rooms in public buildings and churches. Some women were prewar residents who served as Confederate spies, such as the irrepressible Rose O'Neal Greenhow. A few used their feminine talents as lobbyists to secure lucrative war contracts for their male employers.	. . .

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