Mark N. Ozer is the author most recently of the books Washington D.C. and the Civil War and Boston: Persons and Places. His many other books include Baltimore: Persons and Places, Washington D.C. and the War of 1812 and Washington D.C.: Politics and Place. A former professor of neurology at the Georgetown University Medical School, he is based in Washington, D.C.
Q: You describe the Civil War as "the central event in
the history of Washington, D.C." How did it change the city?
A: The Civil War was the central event in the history of
Washington, D.C. The city grew both in size and diversity as well as
importance. Still a straggly "Federal City" of about 60,000 in 1860,
it tripled in population by 1870.
The original local Tidewater slaveholding landowners left,
while a much larger number of new Union men came from the West and North. The
local black population, made up of a small number of locally born freedmen
and slaves (freed in 1862), tripled by persons coming from rural
northern Virginia and southern Maryland.
The original "City of Washington," as laid out by
Peter L'Enfant, ending at Florida Avenue, became amalgamated with the existing
town of Georgetown and the rural County of Washington to form a government
of the entire District of Columbia.
The city had become a major focus of the war and had risen
to be seen as the "capital" of a nation-state rather than the mere
"Seat of Government."
President Grant overcame all objections to insist that the
government would not move elsewhere, perhaps to a more central site like St.
Louis. To assure that, he supported the building of the enlarged State, War and
Navy Building (now the Old Executive Office Building) on 17th Street adjacent
to the White House.
The capital of the victorious Union and the Republican
Party, memorials and statues filled the streets and parks to embody the story
of the Civil War.
Q: How many forts were constructed around the city during
the war and what was their impact?
A: Washington was a major war objective. By 1863, there was
an entire perimeter of 63 forts, 93 batteries and over 800 guns manned by
25,000 men. Its defense was also one of the tasks of the Army of the
Potomac.
The offensive strategy of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia
had to be responsive. Because of the extensive defenses, Lee could not attack
the city directly.
He attacked at Antietam in September 1862 and again at
Gettysburg in July 1863 in an attempt to lure the Army of the Potomac into
battle with the aim of defeating it, thus leaving Washington relatively
undefended.
Q: What are some of the most important legacies of the war
for the city, both architecturally and historically?
A: The war created a nation-state whose capital became far
more important than heretofore. The federal government increased in size and
responsibility, with the city becoming larger and more prominent in the life of
the country.
In addition to the many statues and other mementos of the
war were the buildings, such as the Federal Pension Bureau, which illustrated the significance of the entire
pension system.
Q: As someone who's written many books about D.C.'s history,
what particularly interests you about the city?
A: No less than the American flag "stands for the
republic" in the Pledge of Allegiance, so does the city. It is the symbol
of the country.
Its streets streaming from the U.S. Capitol, with the
prominent building on the hill that represents the legislature and Article I of
the Constitution connecting with the home of the executive in the White House;
the avenues named after the states; the streets named after famous Americans
and the geography of the country.
The buildings, where they are, what they look like, are all
symbolic. It is a city, but also a national shrine that has evolved as the
country has evolved into a more diverse place.
Q: Looking at a different city you've written about, how does Boston’s
history affect the city today?
A: Boston 's origins very much continue to
affect the city today. Uniquely settled by educated persons, the Puritans
fostered education from the start.
They founded a
college to train their ministers in 1636. Having received a substantial bequest
and half of the mainly theological library of a graduate of Emmanuel College in
Cambridge called John Harvard, they named their college for him in gratitude.
The library so
started has been continuously the largest of its kind in the country, if not
the world. In the late 17th century, Cotton Mather was a minister and graduate
of Harvard who was also a member of the Royal Society in London. Amassed over
several generations, his library in Boston was the capital of the
"Republic of Letters" in North America.
Boston was the source
in the 18th century of much of the political thinking that brought about
the American Revolution; there also in the 19th arose many of the reform
movements of the antebellum era and the foundations of American literary
culture.
Boston acceded its
primacy as a city to the greater physical growth of New York, Philadelphia
and Baltimore, while retaining much longer primacy in cultural leadership.
Harvard College remained their educational bastion.
After the Civil War,
literary trends began to arise elsewhere, as did art and architecture. There
was a short burst starting in the 1870s evidenced by the Museum of Fine Arts
and the great Boston Public Library. The residues of that efflorescence have
maintained the city's standing among the great cultural centers of the
world. …
Boston fell behind other
cities in the era of large-scale industrialization both in wealth and
influence. It leads once again now when the Information Revolution takes the
place of the earlier one based on energy and machines.
The city and its
region's highly educated population in the 21st century continue to
make an ongoing contribution to intellectual innovation in the age of the
computer and biotechnology. In 2010, for the first time since the 1870s, the
population rise in the core city has been greater than in the surrounding
suburban belt.
From its start, the
words of the founder of the Lowell Institute at the time of its formation in
1836 still ring true that “the prosperity of New England, an otherwise barren
and unproductive land, is based on the intelligence and information of its
inhabitants.”
Q: Now, moving on to Baltimore--you describe
Baltimore as both a southern and a northern city. In what ways does it
fit into each of those categories?
A: Baltimore is both
a southern and northern city. That dichotomy has lent to its charm and
livability, but has also been one of the drawbacks to its ongoing viability. It
is known as a city of neighborhoods that engender great loyalty and commitment
by inhabitants to their own specific locales.
It is a Southern city
in that it lies in a colony first established in the 17th century based on
slave-based tobacco plantations in southern and eastern Maryland.
In the 18th century,
Baltimore grew as a town based on the grain trade. The wheat came from
non-slaveholding small farmers in the west and north, and was ground into flour
by water-powered grist mills. It was then carried by ship built there from
its excellent ice-free port. Baltimore was in Maryland but not entirely part of
it.
However, the
slaveholding landowners made up much of the city's early political, economic
and social elite. Their attitudes pervaded the city's culture. Antebellum, the
city had a large poorly housed black population both slave and already
freed.
For example,
Frederick Douglass, born a slave on a tobacco plantation on the Eastern Shore
of Maryland, worked in the city shipyards as a laborer for wages before
escaping to freedom in the North.
It remained in the
Union during the Civil War, if only precariously, as exemplified by the attack
on Union troops on their way to relieve the national capital in April 1861. Not
being "in rebellion," the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 did not
officially apply.
Nevertheless, the 1862 emancipation
in the neighboring District of Columbia effectively nullified the Fugitive
Slave Act. Slaves began to escape across the border to seek freedom.
In 1864 prior to the
13th Amendment, Maryland emancipated its black slaves. Nevertheless, never
having seceded, the state never underwent Reconstruction. It failed to ratify
or implement the 14th Civil Rights and 15th Voting Rights Amendments.
By its site on the
Chesapeake Bay, commercial ties after the Civil War remained closely connected
to the South, evidenced by the very large-scale wholesale "Baltimore
Bargain House." …
It grew as a large
commercial and industrial northern-type city in the 19th and 20th century. It
had important railroad ties to the West and North as well as to the South. Following
the path of the National Road, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) was
the first and remained the shortest route west….
The Baltimore region
retains its divided nature that reflects its historical dichotomy. For example,
its schools remained for long segregated and are still of poor quality. In the
21st century, industry has fled and the tax-paying population has largely
shifted to the suburban fringe, firmly separated from the city.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For an earlier version of this Q&A, please click here.
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