The Civil War transformed Washington from a sleepy, Southern shantytown riddled with malaria to a boomtown of bureaucracy as the government expanded to handle all the tasks necessitated by a conflict which sprawled from Manassas, Va., to Brownsville, Texas. And along the way, it provided the city with one of its enduring symbols — red tape.
The war produced 2 million veterans, and the newly created Bureau of Pensions used actual red tape to seal their documents — unwittingly helping to define the relationship between bureaucrat and citizen.
The burgeoning bureaucracy created by the war tied the country’s people to their government — to Washington — like never before.
“Before the Civil War, the only direct contact the average person with the federal government was through the post office,” said Chandra Manning, associate professor of history at Georgetown University.
But that swiftly changed after Fort Sumter was fired upon by South Carolina secessionists 150 years ago this week.
“When Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 troops initially, there was nowhere to put them — they started camping out on the Mall,” said Alan Kraut, professor of history at American University.
The government began doling out contracts, pushing production for guns and uniforms, and dealing with questions like: How long does a pair of boots last when you’re in the field?
“This was our first big bureaucratic task as a country, and that’s arming a big army to fight over a number of years,” Kraut said.
To fill that demand, whole populations outside the war effort swarmed to D.C. In 1860, the population was just over 75,000; by 1870, the District had swollen to nearly 132,000 residents.
And the character of the city changed dramatically. “The Southern dominance of the city in terms of society and politics was replaced by Northern dominance, and especially Republican dominance,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson. Southerners exited into Virginia while Northerners looking to get in on the action streamed into the city.
Washington became a “magnet” to more than just soldiers, but “hustlers of all kinds,” said Ernest Furgurson, author of “Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War.”
“People came here to make a buck off the war, as there were huge opportunities to sell things to the War Department,” he said. “They might be good blankets, and they might be old, moldy blankets taken out of an attic.”
Not long after the arrival of the soldiers, prostitutes worked an exploding red light district near what is today Federal Triangle. Historians disagree as to whether they gained a new nickname from association with the troops of Union Gen. Joseph Hooker, but the working girls were known as “Hooker’s division” in local circles.
The District was also very attractive to escaping and former slaves, building the District’s black stronghold. “You see much of the beginning of black activism taking place in Washington, D.C.,” said Kate Masur, author of “An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C.” She added, “Early in the war, black people started attending sessions of Congress. … By the spring of 1864, crowds and crowds of them observed the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.”
The federal government would balloon in the 1930s, under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. But the Civil War saw the city take its first giant steps toward unifying and centralizing the nation’s governance.
“The Civil War significantly increased not only the size, but the importance of the federal government,” said James Madison University historian David Dillard. “What we had by 1865 was the real beginning of the type of government we know today.”
Red tape and all.
