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This year the nation commemorated the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. The war was a period of great transformation in America, in Washington, D.C., and in the lives of African Americans. Those changes continued into the second half of the 19th century. Jason Steinhauer sat down with historian Kate Masur, a former Kluge Fellow at the Kluge Center and a recent returnee to the Center for this past year’s.
There were two lasting transformations: the city’s growth and the abolition of slavery. Abolitionists had been trying for decades to persuade Congress to abolish slavery in D.C., but Congress – dominated by slaveholding interests – would not move. Thus when Congress finally passed an abolition act for the capital in April 1862, it was clear that changes of vast magnitude, for the city, the region, and the nation as a whole, were at hand. At the same time, the war brought thousands of new people into what had been a relatively small city. Many of them were transient and left when the war machine disbanded; overall, however, population growth continued, a real estate boom ensued, and Washington began to become the modern city we know today.