| abstract
| - Faced with an open rebellion that had turned hostile, President Abraham Lincoln began organizing a military force to protect Washington. The Confederates desired to make Washington their capital and massed to take it. On April 10 forces began to trickle into the city. On April 19, the Baltimore riot threatened the arrival of further reinforcements. Led by Andrew Carnegie, a railroad was built circumventing Baltimore, allowing soldiers to arrive on April 25, thereby saving the capital. Thousands of raw volunteers (as well as many professional soldiers) came to the area to fight for the Union. By the mid-summer, Washington teemed with volunteer regiments and artillery batteries from throughout the North, all serviced by what was little more than a country town of what had been in 1860, 75,800 people. George Templeton Strong's observation of Washington life led him to declare Of all the detestable places Washington is first. Crowd, heat, bad quarters, bad fair [fare], bad smells, mosquitos, and a plague of flies transcending everything within my experience... Beelzebub surely reigns here, and Willard's Hotel is his temple. The city became the staging area for what became the Manassas Campaign. When Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell's beaten and demoralized army staggered back into Washington after the stunning Confederate victory at the First Battle of Bull Run, the realization came that the war might be prolonged, and efforts began to fortify the city in case of a Confederate assault. Lincoln knew he had to have a professional and trained army to protect the Capital area, and therefore began by organizing the Department on the Potomac on August 4, 1861, and the Army of the Potomac 16 days later. Most Washington citizens embraced the arriving troops, although there were pockets of apathy and Southern sympathy. Upon hearing a Union regiment singing "John Brown's Body" as the soldiers marched beneath her window, resident Julia Ward Howe wrote the patriotic "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the same tune. The significant expansion of the federal government to administer the ever-expanding war effortand its legacies, such as veterans' pensionsled to notable growth in the city's population, especially in 1862 and 1863 when the military forces and the supporting infrastructure dramatically expanded from early war days. The 1860 Census put the population at just over 75,000 persons, but by 1870 the District population had grown to nearly 132,000. Warehouses, supply depots, ammunition dumps, and factories were established to provide and distribute materiel for the Federal armies, and civilian workers and contractors flocked to the city. Slavery was abolished throughout the District on April 16, 1862 — eight months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — with the passage of the Compensated Emancipation Act. Washington became a popular place for freed slaves to congregate, and many were employed in constructing the ring of fortresses that eventually surrounded the city.
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