I am always on the lookout for historians who can fashion well-worn stories from the past into sparkling new dramas filled with cliffhangers and near-catastrophes that keep me turning pages in taut expectation of an outcome decided centuries ago. Author Scott Ellsworth provides just that in Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America.
Ellsworth’s account commences in media res during the preparations for a renewed Union military campaign under Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the spring of 1864. Ellsworth portrays the excitement felt by the Washington, D.C., population, abuzz with hope for a swift end to a long conflict. Even the capital’s 5,000 prostitutes are caught up in troop movements, contemplating as a group “pulling up stakes and heading to City Point” for the offensive.
The bustling district and its residents are the central figures in Midnight on the Potomac. With a population of just 75,000 in 1860, war caused overcrowding in the city as “entire families squeezed into rented rooms, rustled up tents, or slept in the open air.”
A major reason for the crowding, as Ellsworth portrays it, was the influx of around 40,000 former slaves who found their way to the capital after Congress outlawed slavery in the district in 1862. Called “contrabands” by the federal government and “runaways” by slave owners, Ellsworth acknowledges, “They had stolen something that was, in fact, true. They had stolen themselves.”
The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America; By Scott Ellsworth Macmillan; 336 pp, $32.00
Ellsworth’s ability to maintain tension and suspense is masterly, particularly as he outlines Confederate actions that may have changed the path of the war. Among them is Gen. Jubal Early’s raid on the district, where the Rebel army “bedded down within sight of the U.S. Capitol” on July 11 before discovering that newly-arrived Union reinforcements meant that “the moment for an assault … had passed.”
In one of his short but impactful descriptions of the year’s bloody battles, Ellsworth describes how Union hopes deflated in May following the Battle of the Wilderness and the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, where “bodies of Union and Rebel dead were piled five deep in some places” and trenches ran with water that was “almost black with blood.”
Ellsworth brings readers to the hospitals stationed throughout the district, where a coterie of nurses must manage the “psychic cost” of caring for tens of thousands of casualties. One nurse, beloved author Louisa May Alcott, “was never the same again” after working in a Georgetown hospital.
Among the most affecting scenes in Midnight on the Potomac comes after Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union troops capture Atlanta in September, reinvigorating Abraham Lincoln’s hopes for reelection. As the troops marched quickly onward to their next destination, they were joined by “a river” of former slaves, one of whom looked on Sherman and “exclaim[ed] with the utmost solemnity, ‘I have seen the Great Messiah and the army of the Lord.’”
That Sherman “was an unlikely candidate for a modern-day Moses” was not relevant to the formerly enslaved following in his wake. “Told at first that they could not come along, they came anyway. If the army marched fifteen miles a day, so did they. They, too, had to forage for their own food along the way – and had to do so unarmed,” Ellsworth writes. “It was their soul-deep, long-held desire for freedom that had sent them … on this journey of dignity and hope.”
Ellsworth draws out the humanity in his subjects on both sides of the bloody American conflict, including John Wilkes Booth. Long before mentioning Booth’s largely hidden affinity for the Confederate cause, Ellsworth describes the actor’s popularity throughout the country and notes multiple journalistic accounts of his “genius.” Lincoln’s son Tad held Booth in such high esteem that he asked to meet the actor at a spring 1863 performance at Grover’s Theater. In Booth’s dressing room, Tad shook hands with his father’s would-be assassin.
In stark contrast with the dismal days of battle in mid-1864, Ellsworth paints a post-election period of vibrance as northerners’ hopes are restored. During Lincoln’s second inauguration, readers all but feel the squelch of the muddy streets underfoot as masses processed down Pennsylvania Avenue with “the whole city like a rainbow.” Residents’ joy is palpable during the Grand Illumination, which saw myriad government and private buildings, and even the local asylum, “bathed in light” to celebrate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Grant.
Lincoln’s death then follows like an anchor weight, dragging the country into dark mourning.
Ellsworth gives voice to Confederate praise for Booth’s actions but devotes far more space to the thousands who participated in the president’s funeral and the hundreds of thousands who paid their respects as Lincoln’s funeral train passed through 10 major American cities on its 1,600-mile journey to Springfield, Virginia.
When the train reached Ohio and Indiana, Ellsworth writes, “At every crossroads and every village and town along the way, crowds of farmers and small-town residents had gathered along the railroad tracks, lit by bonfires … All night long, the people sang, and cried, and waved goodbye while their bonfires sent swirls of sparks heavenward. Abraham Lincoln, once a boy so poor that he had to wear gunnysacks for clothing, but the man who had saved the Union and helped to destroy slavery, was being sent home in a blazing river of light.”
There’s more to Ellsworth’s adventure than poetic observations, suspenseful pacing, and intimate portrayals of historical figures. In an afterword that casts the entire work in a new light, Ellsworth relates that his account is a rejection of post-war revisionist history of the conflict that portrays slavery as “a benign institution,” casts Lincoln’s assassin as a crazed “second-rate actor,” and insists that the war, which saw 1 in 50 Americans die, was merely “a tragic, misguided squabble over states’ rights.”
LEPORE GRASP OF THE CONSTITUTION
For the doubting Thomases among us, Ellsworth’s detailed and sometimes humorous bibliographic notes point readers toward the vast array of original first-person accounts and later scholarship that support his observations. He also notes previous authors’ shortcomings. Even vaunted Civil War historian Shelby Foote warrants Ellsworth’s critique that “readers will practically need a microscope to find Black people in [Foote’s] three-volume masterwork, The Civil War: A Narrative.”
Midnight on the Potomac is told with heart but backed up with fact, making it approachable for any reader with a passing interest in American history and intriguing for Civil War history buffs.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.