Richmond During the Civil War

Secession

Title: Richmond Grays
Source: the Virginia Historical
Society
More informationLike most Southern cities, Richmond opposed secession on economic grounds. After all, Richmond's merchants supplied Northern markets with tobacco; its flour-milling firms dominated trade with South America; and Tredegar ironworks produced railroad iron and ordnance for the federal government as well as state governments in the North. Such interests encouraged moderation in politics. While many states in the Deep South were dominated by the Democratic Party and its radical, "fire-eater" wing, Richmond and the state of Virginia had a tradition of healthy political competition between Democrats and former members of the Whig Party. (The Whig Party had collapsed by 1856, but its former members in Virginia were inclined to oppose secession.) People debated secession at length and, like many across the Upper South, tended to adopt a cooperationist stance. The term was not meant to imply actual cooperation with the North; rather, cooperationists resolved to wait for the North to act aggressively first.

The election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president in November 1860 was not provocation enough, especially since Republicans failed to gain either house of the U.S. Congress. In the end, what proved too much for Virginians was Lincoln's insistence on resupplying Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and his subsequent call, on April 15, 1861, for 75,000 ninety-day volunteers. The Virginia Convention, which had been convened in Richmond since February, finally voted to secede on April 17, 1861. The decision was ratified by a statewide referendum on May 23.

The Confederate Capital

Title: Richmond Capitol
Building
Source: Library of Congress Prints &
Photographs Division
More informationWord of Virginia's secession produced jubilation in Richmond. There were torchlight parades, fulsome speeches, and the mobilization of local guard units. There was also talk of moving the Confederate capital, then in Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond. Even before secession, the idea had been suggested by Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens of Georgia as a way of luring hesitating Virginians into the Confederacy. Now that they had joined, the government of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, in consultation with officials in Richmond, moved quickly to relocate the capital.

The move made sense for symbolic, economic, and military reasons. From its inception, Richmond bore the imprimatur of revolution: Patrick Henry thundered "Give me liberty or give me death!" at St. John's Church, and Thomas Jefferson designed the Capitol building. On a more practical level, Richmond was the South's leading industrial city, an important transportation hub, and source of agricultural resources. Virginia, meanwhile, was the richest in natural resources and most populous state in the South and boasted the region's largest rail network, as well as a mixed
Title: Richmond as Confederate
Capital
Source: the Library of Congress,
Geography and Map Division
More informationagricultural economy. Although Richmond's proximity to Washington, D.C., was hazardous strategically, Virginia's topography—the Appalachian Mountains and rivers, such as the James and Rappahannock, that flowed east to west—served as a natural defense against invasion.

As it happened, those defenses would be sorely tested. Relocating the Confederate capital to a city just a hundred miles from the United States capital caused much consternation in Washington. "On to Richmond" became the rallying cry for the first three years of the war, as the Army of the Potomac attacked the capital from the north, the east, and the south. After being routed at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, Union troops marched up the York Peninsula to within four miles of Richmond before being turned away by General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia at the Seven Days' Battles in June 1862. Indeed, Lee drove Major General George B. McClellan's army all the way to the outskirts of Washington, allowing Richmond's industry the room to thrive.

Industry

Title: Tredegar Ironworks
Source: Library of Congress Prints &
Photographs Division [cwpb
04035]
More informationTobacco manufacturing and flour milling had dominated Richmond's antebellum economy, but Confederate authorities were most interested in Tredegar ironworks. Established in 1837, Tredegar assumed regional and national prominence under the aegis of West Point–trained Joseph R. Anderson. Anderson expanded the works and obtained lucrative contracts in both the North and the South, with the firm manufacturing everything from armor plates to artillery pieces. By 1860, Joseph R. Anderson and Company, as Tredegar was officially called during the war, was the largest enterprise of its kind in the region and stood ready to arm and equip the Confederate military for four years.

The Confederate government relied on Tredegar and a number of smaller local firms to manufacture everything from heavy ordnance and iron cladding for naval vessels to buttons and bullets. In 1864, Ordnance Bureau chief Josiah Gorgas noted that the Confederacy had become self-sufficient in the production of war matériel. This was remarkable considering that in 1860, the future states of the Confederacy had accounted for only 16 percent of the nation's capital invested in manufacturing. Such an economic turnaround was largely due to the output of Richmond's manufactories and especially the Tredegar ironworks.

Title: Confederate Cartridge
Packages
Source: The Museum of the Confederacy
Richmond, Virginia.
Photography by Alan Thompson
More informationStill, problems plagued Tredegar. On March 13, 1863—it happened to have been Friday the 13th—an explosion at the Confederate States ordnance laboratory on Brown's Island killed more than sixty young women and children and briefly halted production. Two months later, a fire at the neighboring Crenshaw mills spread to some of the Tredegar's machine shops, destroying them. Labor shortages also proved to be an issue. Anderson had always augmented his labor force with slaves, but as demand increased and the needs for manpower stripped factories of work details, he was forced to rely even more heavily on slave labor to keep the works in operation. Coal and iron from forges in the Shenandoah Valley were critical to the Tredegar's operations, but Union cavalry raids in 1863 and 1864 proved disastrous to those operations and further crippled the works' ability to supply Confederate armies.

Overcrowding and Inflation

Title: Map of Richmond,
Virginia 1863
Source: Virginia Historical Society,
Robert Knox Sneden Diary
(Mss5:1 Sn237:1)
More informationAs soon as the war started, the population of Richmond began to swell. In addition to laborers and bureaucrats, refugees, spies, Confederate soldiers, journeymen, and less savory sorts, including prostitutes, gamblers, and speculators, all poured into the capital. By the summer of 1861, locals believed the city had become one vast armed camp; others argued the city was little different from the wicked biblical city of Sodom. In 1860, Richmond had almost 38,000 residents, including 11,739 slaves. Although no census was taken during the war, city officials estimated the population grew to more than 100,000 by 1863; some believed between 130,000 and 150,000 people crammed the capital by 1865.

This huge increase in population had severe consequences. The local police force was small and could not contain the crime wave that plagued the city until the war's end. Even after Confederate general John H. Winder took day-to-day control of the city beginning in February 1862, gambling dens and houses of prostitution flourished, while rival juvenile gangs threatened locals with petty larceny and assault. Accommodations were limited and according to some, abysmal. Nonetheless, they commanded high rents; it was not unusual to see several families living in cramped, unheated spaces. Epidemics of smallpox and other diseases threatened the city late in 1862 and in 1863. Food and fuel became scarce, especially as the armies battled on prime farmland in the Virginia Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley. Shortages of consumer goods and a worthless paper currency created unheard-of levels of inflation. Indeed, by 1863, prices in Richmond were 700 percent higher than they had been in 1861.

Title: Richmond Bread Riot
Source: The Museum of the Confederacy,
Richmond, Virginia
More information Overcrowding and inflation hit the laboring classes especially hard. Although wages rose throughout the period, they could not keep pace with the rising cost of consumer goods. This situation created a social powder keg that finally exploded on April 2, 1863, with the Richmond Bread Riot. "Celebrating" their right to live, working women, many of whom were employed by the city's government bureaus and factories, marched to the Executive Mansion seeking a meeting with Virginia governor John L. Letcher. Angered by his rebuff, the crowd surged into the business district, attracting hundreds of others along the way. Plunder and mob violence roiled the city for two hours until the threat of artillery dispersed the mob. Nonetheless, the Bread Riot sobered local and Confederate officials and underscored how desperate some in the city had become.

Hospital Center

Title: Moore Hospital
Source: Valentine Richmond History
Center
More informationAdding to the city's burdens was the constant arrival of sick and wounded soldiers. Richmond reveled in military victories at Manassas in 1861 and during the Seven Days in 1862, but those successes produced massive casualties that threatened to overwhelm the capital. The situation only grew worse as the campaigns of 1863 and 1864 again centered on the Confederate capital. Initially, locals opened their private dwellings and individual Confederate states operated "wayside homes" to tend to the sick and wounded. The Confederate Congress implemented legislation in the autumn of 1861 that standardized the hospital system and put it under the control of the Confederate Medical Department. The city's Chimborazo Hospital, located on a hill east of the business district, became the largest in the Confederacy while also boasting one of the lowest mortality rates among hospitals in the Union and the
Title: Sally Louisa Tompkins
Source: Virginia Historical Society
[2002.686.5]
More informationConfederacy. At Chimborazo alone, nearly 78,000 patients were treated during the course of the war.

One hospital managed to avoid the Confederate government's centralization efforts. Sally Tompkins convinced wealthy Richmonder Judge John Robertson to allow her to operate a hospital out of his home while he moved to a safer area in the Shenandoah Valley. Robertson Hospital could care for only a hundred patients at a time but was also able to provide them with more personal attention than they might receive elsewhere. "Then men under Miss Sally's kind care look so clean and comfortable. Cheerful, one might say," the diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote. The hospital's success prompted Jefferson Davis to commission Tompkins a captain in the Confederate cavalry, which allowed her to escape the Medical Department's purview. She continued to operate her hospital until the end of the war.

Women at Work

Tompkins was not the only white woman who actively worked for the Confederate cause in Richmond. Other women filled key positions in the Treasury Department, the
Title: Women in the
Confederate Treasury
Source: The Museum of the Confederacy,
Richmond, Virginia
More informationOrdnance Department, the Quartermaster Department, and the Confederate commissary. Women sewed uniforms, made percussion caps, and signed currency, all for wages and in support of the Confederate cause. In most instances, white women were forced to labor in the capital's factories and bureaus because their husbands, fathers, and sons—the breadwinners—were off fighting for the Confederacy.

Not all of Richmond's women were as dedicated to the Confederacy. Elizabeth Van Lew and her mother were staunch Unionists. Indeed, Union generals Benjamin F. Butler and Ulysses S. Grant deemed the information the younger Van Lew provided them as critical to the 1864 campaigns. In recognition of that assistance, Grant, as U.S. president, appointed her postmaster of the city after the war.

Scholars debate the impact women's work exerted on gender roles; many assert the effect was short-lived and ended with the advent of peace. Nevertheless, locals, visitors, and news correspondents commented repeatedly on how many women had entered the work force. Given the high number of casualties and disabilities the war produced, one wonders if Confederate women could, indeed, return to solely the domestic sphere. With a quarter of the white male population dead, many women had no choice but to continue working to support their families.

Siege and Evacuation

Title: Call to Arms in
Richmond
Source: the Library of Virginia
More informationConfederate military fortunes waxed and then waned in 1863 and 1864. The ninth "On to Richmond" campaign culminated in the overwhelming Confederate victory at Chancellorsville in May 1863. But following on the heels of that battle came twin Confederate debacles at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. When Grant was appointed general-in-chief of Union armies after Gettysburg, he determined to follow Lincoln's directions to target Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia and not the Confederate capital. Yet Richmond necessarily loomed large because Lee determined to defend it: it was his logistical lifeline.

The Overland Campaign of 1864 was launched in the Wilderness and quickly became a slugfest in the woods. Lee inflicted horrific casualties, but Grant relentlessly continued his attack. By June, the campaign had settled into a siege at Richmond's backdoor—the city of Petersburg. As Lee and many Confederates knew, it was only matter of time before he must abandon the capital or be encircled by the Union juggernaut.

As the Confederate lines grew thinner and thinner during the nine-and-a-half-month siege, people in Richmond faced the real possibility of starvation. On March 25, 1865, Lee tried to break through Grant's lines, only to be repulsed. Just days later, Grant launched an all-out assault on Lee's army. Lee was forced to notify President Davis on April 2, 1865, that Richmond had to be evacuated.

Title: The Fall of Richmond
Source: the Virginia Historical
Society
More informationThe evacuation of Richmond remains a controversial topic because the officers in command disagreed over who gave the orders to torch stockpiles of supplies within the city. Throughout the war when the city was threatened, locals had vowed to destroy anything of value to keep it from the hands of Union forces. Confederate and city officials, however, worried that such destruction could not be contained and that it might spread to residential areas and endanger civilians.

Their fears became reality when Confederate army officials did, in fact, set fire to the tobacco warehouses. A fierce wind fanned the flames and allowed them to spread quickly. Local officials added to the chaos when they broke open stockpiled barrels of whiskey. As the army and Confederate leadership withdrew, mobs seized control. Rioting and plunder became the rule of the day as local citizens attacked government warehouses, seized food and other articles, and scooped up liquor as it coursed through the streets. The fires succeeded in burning down portions of the business district, but the residential neighborhoods were spared. One historian estimates that only 10 percent of the city was actually consumed by the fires. The
Title: Burned District in
Richmond
Source: the Library of Virginia
More informationTredegar ironworks survived the evacuation fires only because Anderson deployed the Tredegar Battalion to protect it from the angry hordes.

The Union army that occupied Richmond and extinguished the fire found burned-out buildings and homeless women and children. Photographers captured the destruction and provided Northern audiences with picture after picture of the ruins in the Confederate capital. Many soldiers and other visitors remarked on the numbers of people dressed in mourning attire. Hunger forced many Richmonders to queue up on Capitol Square to receive provisions from their occupiers. A week after the city fell, on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered his gaunt army to Grant at Appomattox Court House.

Legacy

In many respects, Richmond's success in mobilizing and outfitting the Confederacy's armies predestined its demise, because the city remained a powerful symbolic target until the very end. Its ability to supply the Confederate military for four years transformed a symbol of rebellion into a bona fide military target. In a conflict marked by irony, perhaps none is as profound as an agrarian region becoming capable of fighting a total war for four years.

Time Line

• April 17, 1861 - The Virginia Convention of 1861, meeting in Richmond, passes an ordinance of secession by a vote of 88 to 55.
• May 20, 1861 - The Confederate Congress, meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, votes to move the capital to Richmond, Virginia. The move had been offered as a way of luring hesitating Virginians into the Confederacy.
• May 23, 1861 - The Virginia electorate overwhelmingly endorses the vote for secession taken by the Virginia Convention on April 17.
• May 26–29, 1861 - The Confederate capital relocates from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond.
• July 21, 1861 - The First Battle of Manassas is fought near Manassas Junction in northern Virginia. Confederate troops under Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard decisively defeat Union forces commanded by Irvin McDowell.
• February 22, 1862 - Jefferson Davis is inaugurated on Capitol Square as the elected president of the Confederate States of America.
• June 25–July 1, 1862 - In the Seven Days' Battles, George B. McClellan's Union Army of the Potomac, marching on Richmond from the southeast up the Peninsula, is defeated by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
• August 28–30, 1862 - At the Second Battle of Manassas, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia defeats Union forces under John Pope.
• March 13, 1863 - On Friday the 13th, an explosion at the Confederate States ordnance laboratory on Brown's Island kills more than sixty young women and children and briefly halts production.
• April 1, 1863 - A group of women—workers in Confederate ordnance establishments and the wives of the Tredegar ironworks laborers—meet at the Belvidere Hill Baptist Church in the Oregon Hill neighborhood of Richmond to discuss food and fuel shortages. They resolve to seek a meeting with Governor John L. Letcher.
• April 2, 1863 - A group of Richmond women concerned about food shortages march on the governor's mansion but are denied a meeting. A riot ensues, with the mob attacking government warehouses and grocery stores. The City Battalion is called and threatens violence in order to stop the looting.
• April 3, 1863 - For the second straight day, a group of Richmonders gathers to protest food shortages, but is discouraged from rioting. The previous day, the City Battalion had threatened violence against protesters.
• May 15, 1863 - Crenshaw Mills burn, causing destruction to portions of the Tredegar ironworks.
• May 5–June 3, 1864 - Ulysses S. Grant, the Union's new general-in-chief, directs the Army of the Potomac south toward Richmond. Bloody and largely inconclusive fights at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, along the North Anna River, and at Cold Harbor result in Grant's army's taking up siege positions before Petersburg.
• June 16, 1864–March 25, 1865 - The Union Army of the Potomac lays siege to Petersburg. The siege is characterized by 30 miles of trenches stretching Confederate defenses thin, and occasional pitched battles, including the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, and the more-decisive Battle of Five Forks on April 1, 1865.
• April 2, 1865 - After Union forces break through Confederate lines around Petersburg at the Battle of Five Forks a day earlier, Richmond is evacuated.

Further Reading