DC By the Book

Excerpt: Six weeks later, on a warm afternoon on June the fifth, 1861, a petite, dark-haired woman, often mistaken from afar for a child, strode three diagonal blocks down New York Avenue in Washington City. Crossing the cobbled street, Dorothea Dix dodged bands of drilling soldiers on Pennsylvania Avenue, then swept up an ill-tended slate walkway to the tall double entry doors of the president’s house, where roving sentries let her pass with a nod. Presenting a letter confirming her appointment with Mr. Lincoln, she took in the tattered rugs and dingy walls that adorned the entryway of the Mansion and decided that chief among the needs of the new president was a better housekeeper.

Excerpt: As Mary disembarked, she thought that no delivery she had ever attended had been as exhausting as sitting in that humid train car, en route to the rest of her life. Now moist heat billowed through the depot doors left open to the street; a horde of people, horses, and carriages crowded a wide, circling avenue. Mary gathered herself. Just one more hurdle, she thought, and then she would be there. She elbowed through the crowd and hailed a hack from the line of cabs and directed its driver to take her to the corner of New York Avenue and 14th Street.

Excerpt: The capital was unexpectedly seedy, a cross between a swamp and Versailles. Rare islands of marbled grace reared up between linked villages of squatting shanties, vacant lots, rollicking taverns, and slovenly grocers. Squalid creeks and deep gutters formed moats around the fine and unsightly both. Even the receding Capitol building itself, viewed as Mary twisted her head in search of something to admire, disappointed. Under a pale sky blunted by heat, it towered upon its hill, a skeletal dome awaiting marble blocks, looking like the Union itself, gutted and uncertain.

Excerpt: It was past three o’clock that same afternoon that Mary sank into the shade of a single oak tree standing outside the E Street Infirmary in Judiciary Square. Named in the hope that it would house a series of courts, the square instead featured City Hall, with its heavy towers, steep chimneys, and court system hidden deep within its Gothic confines. In Judiciary Square, there were no other courts, only the infirmary and medical school, housed in a large winged building that stood between a series of rising row houses that would forever usurp the concentration of courts Pierre Charles L’Enfant had envisioned for the capital. The square was also a thoroughfare for farmers taking their product to the nearby market, and the lively plaza seemed as familiar as State Street on Market Day, except that Mary had never felt more out of place or more tired.

Excerpt: The last hospital on Mary’s list was the Union Hotel. Her driver crossed the flat city and clattered over a bridge and climbed the hill to the village of Georgetown. A bustling place, it was full of people, even at this hot hour. Genteel homes lined the narrow street, but soon gave way to commerce. The driver stopped opposite a tobacco warehouse that occupied the whole of a block.

Excerpt: Now he surveyed the dilapidated building from which hung a sign declaring it to be the Union Hotel. Rows of windows were crookedly set or broken. It was unpainted, three stories, ill configured, added onto, subtracted from, ramshackle, severe, looking more like a prison than a hotel.

Excerpt: They traveled on, passing the slow mule teams hauling packet boats down the canal toward Georgetown and, as they neared the town, row houses and factories and warehouses sprouting from the treed hillside.

Excerpt: In the evenings, she walked more than a mile back through the city along a different route, across the City Canal and diagonally along the mall, toward the great undomed Capitol building under which her boarding house squatted. The absence of the bulk of the Army of the Potomac made the once bustling city seem like the township it had been before the country had gone to war. Fewer trundling caissons, rarely a parade. In the distance, Armory Square Hospital was rising. Already, Mary could see the shells of the pavilions, the outlines where, at President Lincoln’s suggestion, gardens would one day be planted between the long buildings.

Excerpt: They were all going to Washington, where the brand-new Armory Square Hospital was waiting for them. For many months she had seen it rise, the many pavilions, the modern conveniences, the open wards, bed after bed at the ready.

Excerpt: After leaving the Surgeon General’s office that morning with her list, Mary had hired a hack for the day, first visiting the Patent Office, which had become an overflow hospital to house the flood of sick soldiers. Invalids lay on pallets of straw on the floor between inventions and displays. There were small piston engines arrayed under glass, great winged contraptions hanging from the ceiling, drawings of apparatuses for sawing the skins off calves, smoke-consuming furnaces, and even more devices that crowded the large, echoing rooms.

Excerpt: F Street was an artery of quietude compared to Pennsylvania Avenue, but it nonetheless pulsed with dust and heat, and as they walked along they hugged closely to the buildings for shade.

Excerpt: Now he and Mary reached the square where the E Street Infirmary stood in silent, serious judgment. He had brought Mary here without thinking. They had walked ten blocks, past the post office where army wagons by the dozens lined up to procure food from the commissary in its basement, past the reporters hurrying from the Evening Star’s offices, past even Mrs. Surratt’s Boarding House, where James had stayed one night and found the company treacherous.

Excerpt: The towpath of the C&O was infinitely better maintained than the roads at this time of year, which was why Stipp had decided to return to Georgetown along its crowded path, rather than over the potholed turnpike, the way they had come earlier that morning. Mary was seated on the carriage bench beside him, staring off over the roof of a packet boat into the steep wooded hills rising sharply from either side of the canal.

Excerpt: The hotel had been bedecked with flags and sentinels, its new, official status recently proclaimed by the Surgeon General’s office. Outside its doors, a good many of the convalescents were standing about, brightened by even a brief stint in the drizzly February cold.

Excerpt: When the cab sailed past the president’s house, the flags had been dropped to half-mast. Swaths of black crepe now draped the double front doors. A line of mourners was forming.