Freedom Rising is a fresh, intensely human account of how the Civil War transformed the nation's capital from the debating forum for a loose union of states into the seat of a forceful central government. Before 1861, Washington was a dusty, muddy city of 60,000, joked about by urban sophisticates from New York and Boston. But at the onset of war, thousands of soldiers, job seekers, nurses, good-time girls, gamblers, newly freed slaves-all kinds of...