When Abraham Lincoln came to Washington in February 1861, the city extended only a few blocks from the White House.
Constitution Avenue was an open sewer filled with dead animals; pigs scavenged for garbage in the streets. The newly arrived president got sick from eating Potomac River fish.
“Washington is but a ragged, unfinished collection of un-built broad streets,” British novelist Anthony Trollope wrote after a visit that year. “Of all places that I know it is the most ungainly and most unsatisfactory.”
Lincoln’s presidency changed not just the direction of the country but the fate of the capital city, too.
First, there was the mass exodus of congressmen from the Confederate states, who abandoned their mansions and took the city’s sleepy Southern air with them. Then the start of the Civil War brought legions of troops, war contractors and government employees to the capital.
D.C. became the site of large Army barracks, heavy military fortifications and medical facilities for wounded soldiers. Civil War-era forts and encampments still mark the area landscape, from Battery Kimble Park in Northwest to Fort Ward in Alexandria.
Fort Stevens off Georgia Avenue offers a unique reminder that Washington was, in fact, a battlefield during Lincoln’s presidency. It was there that Lincoln watched the only battle to unfold in the District, and he came under enemy fire for a brief time. A plaque marks the rampart where the president stood for a view of the fighting.
Lincoln’s legacy can also be found in several of Washington’s most famous landmarks, from the park that bears his name near the Capitol to Arlington National Cemetery.
National Park Service spokesman Bill Line said Lincoln deserved credit for the Capitol building. While the war raged, some public figures argued that the Capitol construction ought to be halted.
“Lincoln ordered it to continue as a symbol of national unity,” Line said.
