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Richmond 1865

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Originally aired on April 05, 1996 - In part 84 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson discusses the destruction and chaos that occurred in Richmond, Virginia on April 2, 1865.

#84 – Richmond 1865 (Death of a City)

Nothing at any time in the Civil War quite matched what happened that April evening. It was as if Dante’s Inferno had come to life. Pandemonium, lawlessness, feelings of abandonment, a sense of helplessness, all overwhelmed what were perhaps the proudest people in the Confederacy: the citizens of Richmond, Virginia.

The date was April, 2, 1865. Late that Sunday morning, General Robert E. Lee informed President Jefferson Davis that the Petersburg defenses, impenetrable for nine months, had snapped under heavy Union attacks. Richmond was doomed. The city had been the capital of a state and a nation. It was the industrial railroads, harbor facilities, manufacturing plants that together were unmatched anywhere in the South.

Back in 1861, a Confederate official on arrival in Richmond had exclaimed: “A Virginia gentleman of the old school may not have been produced alone in Richmond. Far be it from me to locate the virtues of the old Commonwealth exclusively at this place, but I do say that there (are) to be found in this glorious old city the fullest expressions of the highest type of civilization America has ever seen.”

Richmond stood valiant and unconquered through four years of Union effort to seize it. Now, on April 2, 1865, it was defenseless. What was left of the Confederate government departed for safety in Danville. While it did so, the defilement of a once-beautiful city took place.

Mobs spilled into the streets. Looters broke into stores and helped themselves to everything. Government commissioners had poured barrels of whiskey into the streets. It flowed for blocked into the gutters, to the delight of rampagers who scooped it up with both hands or any form of dipper. Criminal elements feasted on Richmond, one observer noted, “like fierce, ferocious beasts”. However, the worst was yet to come.

Confederate officials had ordered that all the large warehouses filled with tobacco and other valuable commodities be burned to prevent their capture. The fires began in mid-afternoon. So did strong winds. Soon all of downtown Richmond was engulfed in flames.

Young Sallie Putnam lived with her parents in the capital. Traumatized, she wrote that the fires spread “with fearful rapidity. The roaring, the hissing, and the crackling of the flames were heard above the shouting and confusion of the immense crowd of plunderers who were moving amid the dense smoke like demons…From the lower portion of the city, near the river, dense black clouds of smoke arose as a pall…to hide the ravages of the devouring flames, which lifted their red tongues and leaped from building to building as if possessed of demonic instinct, and intent upon wholesale destruction.”

No one in Richmond went to bed that night as flames converted a full twenty square blocks into a waste of smoking ruins, blackened walls, and lonely chimneys.

The devastation would have been even more extensive save for one of the most profound paradoxes of the war. On the morning of April 3, the first contingent of the Union army marched into the chaos of Richmond. Homeless women, children, and old men were huddled in Capital Square and along empty streets. They were too much in shock to react to the presence of Federal soldiers. Similarly, the men in blue were too stunned by gutted avenues and still-burning buildings to give heed to the needy.

Officers shouted quick commands; Northern soldiers became Southern fire-fighters. Their day-long efforts, under the most dangerous conditions, blocked Richmond from total destruction.

One final, implausible note must be added to this story. The Billy Yanks who saved Richmond in the city’s darkest hour were members of the XXIII Corps, a unit singularly remarkable because it was composed in the main of black soldiers.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.