any Confederates lost their property for non-payment of taxes, and only those who took the oath of allegiance could obtain a business licenses. Union troops pulled the rector of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church from his altar for failing to pray for President Lincoln.

New residents replaced the Confederates. Alexandria became the logistics center for the Union armies fighting in Virginia. Hospitals, enormous bakeries, and slaughterhouses served the army by river and rail from Alexandria. Thousands of escaped slaves arrived in the city, which became the "capital" of Unionist Virginia.

As George Washington's hometown, Alexandria became a tourist attraction for Union troops stationed in or passing through the city. One described it as "an old-fashioned city . . . with aristocratic and decided old English tendencies, the very streets resounding with such royal names as King, Prince, Princess." It also provided the whiskey and women that troops on leave sought to help forget the battlefields. By 1865 the hard used, worn out, abandoned city desperately awaited the return of the war's survivors. But prosperity would not return for half a century.