Now he confronted a sadder, busier Washington, reshaped by wartime exigencies. Churches and stables were enlisted as hospitals, while soldiers pitched their tents everywhere, even on the White House lawn. The city’s sanitary conditions were atrocious with the Potomac River degraded into a receptacle for sewage, spreading filth and disease whenever it overflowed. Soldiers trudged down muddy streets, past the newly completed Capitol dome and the unfinished Washington Monument—apt symbols of both the finished and remaining business of the war.
