Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital

Rebel Richmond

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

Rebel

RICHMOND

LIFE and DEATH in the CONFEDERATE CAPITAL

Stephen V. Ash

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the William R. Kenan Jr. Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2019 Stephen V. Ash

All rights reserved

Designed by Jamison Cockerham

Set in Arno, Cutright, Fell DW Pica, Fell English, Scala Sans, and Brothers by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Jacket illustrations: passenger and cargo boats on the James River and Kanawha Canal, Richmond, Va., sketched by J. R. Hamilton (1865), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; (sky background) Sowing and Reaping, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (23 May 1863), courtesy of the University of Virginia Library Online Exhibits.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Ash, Stephen V., author.

Title: Rebel Richmond : life and death in the Confederate capital / Stephen V. Ash.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2019] | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019004289| ISBN 9781469650982 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469650999 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Richmond (Va.)—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. | Richmond (Va.)—Social conditions—19th century. | Richmond (Va.)—Economic conditions—19th century.

Classification: LCC F234.R557 A84 2019 | DDC 975.5/45103—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004289

for Jeanie, again

Contents

Prologue  Richmond, Virginia: Thursday, 11 April 1861

  1  Rebel Patriots

  2  City of Strangers

  3  Housing the Multitudes

  4  Feeding the Multitudes

  5  Working

  6  Dissent and Despair

  7  Disorder, Crime, and Sin

  8  White Supremacy and Black Resistance

  9  White Society and Its Discontents

10  Longing, Suffering, and Death

Epilogue  1–10 April 1865

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A gallery of illustrations begins on page 107.

Rebel Richmond

Prologue

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA: THURSDAY, 11 APRIL 1861

The morning papers were crammed with urgent political news. It came from Washington, Montgomery, Charleston, and Richmond itself, where a convention of delegates from across the state was arguing over whether Virginia should join the seceded states. But most Richmonders had in mind more immediate concerns as they opened sleepy eyes and rose from bed.

The weather, especially. A four-day siege of thunder, lightning, and torrential rain had ended only the evening before. This act of God threatened Richmond far more than any political or military storm. The James River was flowing six to eight feet above normal. Some residents of the lower part of the city woke to find their cellars flooded. The water-powered flour mill of Haxall, Crenshaw, and Company, which sat at the river’s edge, was inoperable. A part of George Sadler’s tavern was six feet under water. The wharves at the downriver end of the city were submerged; the boats that steamed up regularly from Chesapeake Bay to deliver goods to Richmond and to carry away many of its manufactures would remain idle. The pumps that sent river water up to the municipal reservoir were disabled; although the reservoir was large and could slake the city’s thirst for a week or so without replenishment, any longer hiatus could provoke a crisis.¹

Beyond the city, the country roads had become channels of mud. Until they dried, the farmers and herdsmen of Henrico and neighboring counties whom Richmonders depended on for most of their fresh produce and meat would struggle to get their goods to the city’s markets. The rain had also halted corn planting, threatening to curtail or at least delay this year’s crop. And some of the wooden trestles of the Virginia Central and the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroads had been washed out, interdicting all rail traffic between Richmond and points north.²

But the storm had been a blessing to the city in one respect: it had noticeably suppressed street crime and rowdiness. The police had made only two arrests the previous day, both for public drunkenness. The culprits were George Frost and Betsey Williams, both well known to the authorities for their habitual alcoholic sprees. They sobered up overnight in holding cells and then were marched to city hall to appear before Mayor Joseph Mayo at his regular morning court session. He was willing to let them go home if they could post a modest bond to ensure their future good behavior or find someone to post it for them. But both were poor and friendless, and so they went to jail.³

Also imprisoned in Richmond as dawn broke on 11 April were 175 men, women, and children who within a few hours would step onto an auction block and be sold to the highest bidder. No fewer than five of the city’s numerous slave-dealing firms had scheduled sales for this day, in lots ranging from twenty to fifty human beings. Davis, Deupree, and Company advertised in this morning’s Enquirer that it would offer thirty likely slaves, who would of course be made available for inspection and interrogation by potential buyers before bidding began. The Odd Fellows’ Hall on Franklin Street, where this auction would be held, was a popular venue: Pulliam and Company had reserved a room there to sell twenty-five people later in the day. How many of these transactions would forever separate husbands from wives and children from parents was anyone’s guess; it was of no concern to the slave dealers or their customers.⁴

The flooding and the slippery streets notwithstanding, as the day progressed most Richmonders managed to go about their business. Housewives and house servants headed to the two municipal markets with shopping baskets in hand, although the vendors’ stalls were rather sparsely stocked. Workmen white and black took up their tasks at the factories and artisan shops that had avoided the flooding. Clerks assumed their posts at the counters and desks of retail stores, business offices, banks, and hotels. By evening the river was subsiding rapidly and the damage was being repaired. Longtime residents of the city agreed that while this flood had been bad, it was much less destructive and disruptive than the big one of 1847 and even the lesser one of 1856.⁵

The storm had passed, and no other seemed to be in the offing. Richmonders retired for the night anticipating that the next day things would get pretty much back to normal.

The twelfth of April did not, of course, see normality restored. On that day a storm of a different sort broke. It would rage not four days but four years and would engulf not just Richmonders but all Americans.

This book is about the people of Richmond during those years of civil war, about how they lived and also about how they died. A remarkable drama unfolded in the city during that time, as its inhabitants were caught up in momentous events and profoundly unsettling changes. How Richmonders endured those tumultuous years is an intriguing and important story.

Rich in history but of modest size and modest political and economic significance on the eve of the war, Richmond abruptly became the capital of the new government of the Confederate States of America, its military headquarters, and its primary munitions producer, essential to the nation’s survival. As the war got under way the population mushroomed, the economy was deranged by sea and land blockades, government and citizenry clashed desperately over the allocation of vital resources, and the city was targeted by a mighty enemy army.

This experience, it is fair to say, is unparalleled in American history. Richmond’s wartime counterpart, Washington, D.C., certainly saw enormous governmental and population expansion and a vastly enlarged military presence, but it was not the primary manufacturing center of its nation’s war effort, never endured blockades or scarcities that threatened the survival of government or citizens, and was never seriously endangered by an enemy army at its gates. Nor did any other Northern or Southern city in that era—or any era before or since—have to grapple with a comparable host of transformations and calamities. Civil War Richmond stands alone in the American experience in the nature and severity of the challenges it faced.

Earlier general histories of wartime Richmond emphasize the high politics of the Confederate government, the battlefield clashes of the armies defending and attacking the city, and the lifestyles and attitudes of the city’s elites. Those histories leave much unsaid about how ordinary Richmonders fared in the maelstrom of war.

This book places national politics and military maneuvers in the background and turns the spotlight on Richmonders as a whole—the humble and the middling as well as the prominent and the powerful, the weak and the wicked as well as the strong and the decent. Drawing on rich sources untapped by previous tellers of the tale, it explores matters ranging from how the people responded to patriotic appeals and governmental dictates to how they fed and housed themselves amid grueling shortages and claustrophobic crowding, made a living in a turbulent economy and distorted labor market, wrestled with the problems of political dissent and war-weariness, confronted a deluge of crime and disorder, dealt with one another across the lines of race and class and gender, coped with the omnipresent specters of suffering and death, and sought the help of God in making sense of it all.

What happened in Richmond during the Civil War mattered. It mattered not just because eminent men decided lofty issues of war and state there, nor because enormous armies fought bloody battles over it, nor because polished ladies and gentlemen wrote memorable accounts of glittering balls and dinner parties there. Events and conditions in the city were reported in great detail by contemporary journalists and others and were followed closely all across America, by the Confederacy’s foes as well as its friends, for the city was seen in many ways as the heart and soul of the Rebel nation and a key signifier of its destiny. Stories of Richmond’s ordeal colored Americans’ understanding of the war as a whole—not only while it was being waged but also after it ended.

Richmond’s wartime experience was shaped by people of every class, color, sex, and age. The city’s populace had always been diverse and became more so during the conflict. What Richmonders thought and said and did as the events of 1861–65 transpired spans the range of human nature, complicating any attempt to characterize them and categorize their behavior. Scholars seeking answers to the big questions about the Confederacy—for instance, whether it was sufficiently united to win the war or was doomed to defeat by internal divisions—may be frustrated by my reluctance (although not, I trust, complete failure) to address the debates or to situate the city in broader patterns. I hope the reader will understand that this reluctance reflects not indifference or ignorance on my part but rather my belief that Richmonders’ Civil War experience was unique and multifaceted and that it ought to be understood and appreciated for its own sake and in all its variety. I am happy to let others draw what historiographical conclusions they will from what I offer here; they may well find evidence to support both sides of every issue.

America’s Civil War was a people’s struggle waged off the battlefields as well as on them. Nowhere was this truth more dramatically demonstrated than in the beleaguered capital of the Confederacy. If this book succeeds in bringing wartime Richmond to life as a city of flesh-and-blood men, women, and children of many sorts who responded in very human ways to extraordinarily trying circumstances, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

1

REBEL PATRIOTS

James Wright cheered the creation of the Confederate States of America. He perceived in it, for one thing, a personal opportunity. A forty-eight-year-old Richmonder, he lived in a rented home with his wife, five children, and two boarders. He was making a living as a house painter, but he dreamed of grander things. On 19 March 1861 he wrote to the Confederate secretary of war in Montgomery, Alabama, offering his services as a drum major—in which capacity, he proudly explained, he had served the U.S. Army for seven years and the Virginia militia for fifteen. But it was not just the prospect of once again donning a splendid uniform and shako and flourishing a baton in martial parades that excited Wright. An earnest Southern-rights man, he rejoiced in the birth of the Confederate republic: "My sympathies are with the Southern States, and as a native Virginian I, among many thousands, would be glad to see our old mother go straight out."¹

James Wright’s wish for his motherland would soon be granted, and a large majority of Richmonders would take their stand alongside him. Fervent Rebel patriotism would infuse the city and guide its course in the years that followed. But with the boon of Southern independence would come the curse of war, which would sternly test the commitment of Confederates such as Wright to the cause they championed.

The city where Wright made his home was, by American standards, middle-aged. Founded in the 1730s, incorporated in 1742, and designated the state capital in 1779, Richmond thrived economically thanks to its location at the falls of the James River. The interdiction of river traffic by the falls made Richmond a natural entrepôt. Goods came down the river from Virginia’s piedmont and highland regions and down the canal that eventually supplemented the river, while seaborne goods came up the river from ports around the world. Wholesalers, retailers, and warehousemen did a brisk business in the city. Industries developed in Richmond, too, their products flowing up the river and canal to the state’s interior and down the river to the outside world.²

A wave of turnpike and railroad construction in the first half of the nineteenth century reinforced Richmond’s commercial and industrial importance; it became one of the South’s key road and rail hubs. Among the leading commercial enterprises in the city that benefited from the transportation boom was the slave trade. The primary industries were tobacco processing, flour milling, and iron manufacturing; they drew raw materials from Virginia’s farms and plantations, from the coal deposits near the city, and from the pig iron furnaces beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and were in many cases powered by the river rapids. Lesser industries emerged in great profusion as well. By 1860 Richmond ranked thirteenth among U.S. cities in industrial output—and first among those that would soon be part of the Confederacy.³

Newcomers were invariably struck by the topography. It was a city of hills. Each had a name: Union Hill, Church Hill, Oregon Hill, Navy Hill, and others. The highest, which offered a panoramic view of the city, was Council Chamber Hill, on the crest of which stood the impressive neoclassical state capitol designed by Thomas Jefferson. That building was at the center of Capitol Square, in or around which stood most of the other public buildings.⁴

The city stretched for two miles along the northern bank of the James (the left bank as one went downriver) and for a mile and a quarter inland at its greatest extent. It rose up dramatically from the river, which at that point, as described by one visitor, is more than [a] fourth of a mile wide, but is much broken up with a multitude of rocky islets and bowlders, against which the waters are ever beating in angry fury and noise. A tributary of the James called Shockoe Creek bisected the city.⁵

Many thought Richmond beautiful, especially in the summer when the trees lining the streets were in full leaf. Winter bestowed a certain beauty, too, although it also brought vexation in the form of snow and ice that made the steep hills treacherous to pedestrians and vehicles. The city was laid out in a very regular pattern, with straight streets running (approximately) north–south that crossed east–west streets at strict right angles. The major thoroughfares were Broad Street and Main Street, which ran east–west flanking Capitol Square. The business houses and factories were mostly confined to the city’s core, an area stretching from the riverfront up to Broad Street and from Shockoe Creek westward for a half mile or so. Surrounding the core were residential neighborhoods, each with its own nickname—Shed Town, Butchertown, Jackson Ward, and others—some of which took the name of the hill they occupied.⁶

Certain neighborhoods had a distinctive ethnic or racial tinge. Native-born whites made up only about half of Richmond’s population on the eve of the war. Of the 37,910 inhabitants counted by the census takers in the summer of 1860, 11,699 (31 percent) were slaves, 2,576 (7 percent) were free blacks, and roughly 5,000 (13 percent) were foreign-born whites. Irish immigrants accounted for nearly half the foreign born, with Germans not far behind in numbers. Members of those two ethnic groups, along with the free blacks, tended to cluster with others of their kind in particular neighborhoods.⁷

But all the city’s residents were swept up in momentous political developments from November 1860 to May 1861 that catapulted Richmond to greater prominence. The election to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, horrified many Southern whites, for he and his party were avowedly antislavery. Dismissing the Republicans’ claim that they intended only to halt further westward expansion of the South’s peculiar institution, not abolish it, some white Southerners envisioned a nightmarish future in which the politically impotent South would have emancipation forced on it by the North. The result, they were certain, would be bloody havoc. Spurred by this fear, the seven states of the lower South seceded from the Union and sent representatives to Montgomery, where in February they formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America.

Many thousands of Virginians, James Wright among them, ardently desired to see their state join this exodus from the Union. But when Wright offered his services to the nascent Rebel army in March, he and his fellow secessionists were nowhere near a majority of whites in the Old Dominion. Yes, almost all white Virginians were disquieted by Lincoln’s election; one Richmonder called it the most deplorable [event] that has happened in the history of the country. But the fear of an imminent threat to slavery that seized the Lower South infected comparatively few inhabitants of the Upper South. White Virginians during that time, although as committed as any other Southern whites to protecting slavery, tended to see the incoming presidential administration as less of a threat to the peculiar institution than secession itself, which might trigger the chaos of a North-South war that would likely be fought out in the Upper South.⁸

But change came abruptly on 12 April. Early that morning Confederate artillery in Charleston, South Carolina, opened fire on Fort Sumter in the city’s harbor, still held by the U.S. Army. The news soon arrived in Richmond by telegraph, convulsing that city as it did every other part of the South and North. Many conservative Richmonders, assuming that the attack made war inevitable, instantly reassessed their loyalties. It is not doubtful which course the current of feeling is rapidly taking, wrote diarist John Jones, a Marylander who had arrived by train that day from Washington and had taken a room at the Exchange Hotel. Even in this hitherto Union city, secession demonstrations are prevalent. Those trying to stand against the tide, said Jones, are now stricken dumb amid the popular clamor for immediate action.⁹

Fort Sumter fell on 14 April. The next day President Lincoln proclaimed his intention to put down the Southern insurrection with troops to be summoned from the loyal states, thus dashing any remaining hope that war might be averted. White Richmonders, now forced to choose between waging war on the seceded states or joining with them to defend against invasion, overwhelmingly took their stand with the Confederacy. The most hopeful unionists in Virginia have now given up, wrote a Richmond woman on 21 April. Since coercion has become the policy of Lincoln’s administration, combined resistance is our common duty. Three days later another Richmonder wrote to a relative in the North about the quick reversal of sentiment in the city: "You have no idea how hateful the word Union has become here."¹⁰

Richmond resounded for days with public demonstrations and street-corner orations. John Jones, who had intended just to pass through the city on his way south to the Confederacy, was caught up in the excitement and stayed on to chronicle it. Business is generally suspended, he wrote on 15 April, and men run together in great crowds to listen to the news. That day he saw hundreds of secession flags … flying in all parts of the city; that night he watched a procession with banners and torch-lights. Politicians delivered rousing speeches, evoking hearty responses from the people.¹¹

Jones depicted a city celebrating jubilantly, but at least one other witness sensed a different tone. Observing the scene on the night of 19 April, Emma Mordecai perceived no noisy exultation nor joyful spirit in the perfectly decorous throng that filled the streets. A deep earnest enthusiasm greatly tempered with sadness was the prevailing feature.¹²

For two months a convention of delegates from across the state had been in session in Richmond, debating and repeatedly rejecting an ordinance of secession. But on 17 April, two days after Lincoln’s call to arms, the ordinance passed (subject to popular ratification), dissolving Virginia’s ties to the Union. Eight days later the convention approved an alliance between Virginia and the Confederacy and ratified the Confederate Constitution. On 7 May, the Confederate Congress admitted Virginia to statehood. Virginia’s electorate approved the secession ordinance by majority vote on 23 May. Three other states of the Upper South likewise hoisted the banner of the Confederacy.¹³

Meanwhile, the founding fathers in Montgomery, led by President Jefferson Davis, prepared for war. Selecting a permanent capital for their new nation was a matter of high priority, little Montgomery being deemed unsuitable by most. A number of cities vied for the honor, including Richmond. The Virginia convention formally invited the Confederate government to make Richmond its home, and the Virginia representatives to the Confederate Congress lobbied hard for acceptance. Two considerations were particularly influential in the eventual selection of Richmond. First, it would bring the government seat and army headquarters close to what would clearly be a primary theater of war, northern Virginia, rendering more efficient the military defense of the region. Second, Richmond would have to be strongly defended by Confederate forces in any event because of its strategic importance as a rail hub and industrial center. Congress approved the decision on 20 May. Government officials immediately began packing up and moving out of Montgomery by train. Jefferson Davis arrived in Richmond, amid great celebration, on 29 May.¹⁴

For some Richmonders, however, the conversion from Union to Confederate patriotism was no snap decision but a long, agonizing struggle. Jacob Bechtel was one. A thirty-six-year-old bookstore clerk, he had been born and raised in Pennsylvania but had lived in the South since he was twenty. His correspondence with his brother in the North during the spring of 1861 recorded the anguish of a man torn between two loyalties. On 1 April he condemned both the Lincoln administration and the vaporing demagogues working to get Virginia out of the Union, and he lauded the brave and gallant spirits in the Virginia convention who so far had stymied the secessionists. Twenty-three days later, with the state effectively out of the Union and the city ablaze with the spirit of resistance, Bechtel denounced the War Proclamation of that stupid ass at Washington but confessed that I cannot bear to turn against the Old Flag. In early May he still deplored secession but deplored equally the North’s determination to undo it by force: The Union is gone, utterly, irrevocably gone. … Why then insist upon restoring the dead[?] Would a Union of bodies without a Union of hearts be desirable? He prayed for a peaceful separation of North and South; it sickened him to think of the two sections cutting each other[’]s throats. Urged by his brother to return to the land of his birth and join the crusade to crush the traitorous Rebels, and warned that by remaining in the Confederacy he risked forever alienating his Northern kin, Bechtel replied, I cannot forget that I have eaten and drank at the hospitable boards, and sat by the peaceful firesides of the South for sixteen years. … Here three of my children were born, and here the ashes of one repose. I cannot raise my hand against [Southerners]; even at the expense, as you say, of the sympathy of you all. By mid-May he had resolved to stay in Richmond and quietly accept things as they were. He vowed, however, that he would never voluntarily take up arms against the Union.¹⁵

Richmonders who rallied wholeheartedly to the Confederate banner had no doubt that their cause was just. They were taking up arms to resist tyranny, just as the Revolutionary patriots had done. We are menaced with subjugation for daring to assert the right of self-government, wrote prominent Presbyterian minister Moses D. Hoge in June 1861. The Lincoln administration was a military despotism whose malevolent designs Hoge opposed with my whole mind and heart. Another leading Richmonder, state attorney general John Randolph Tucker, affirmed that the Confederacy was waging "a war of defence—not of aggression. … We vindicate its rightfulness. We neither sought, nor provoked it. … We had no alternative, but to surrender our heritage [of liberty] to the wrong-doer, or to defend it to the death."¹⁶

Patriotic zeal, martial enthusiasm, and a spirit of sacrifice inspired many Richmonders to volunteer for military service. By November 1861 at least 2,500 were in uniform. Twenty-three-year-old Henry H. Fauntleroy spoke for many in a letter he wrote to Virginia’s governor in June: I am anxious to serve my country, he announced. A resident of the state’s Eastern Shore when the war broke out, Fauntleroy had hastily moved to Richmond, thinking that I could be of more service on this side of the bay in active duty. This had entailed a rather risky voyage across the bay in an open boat, shunning the blockading ships. Fauntleroy had more to offer than the typical volunteer, for he was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, trained not only as a soldier but as a civil engineer. Suggesting modestly to the governor that he might make a good officer, he added that if no commission could be granted, I intend to shoulder my musket & go as a private.¹⁷

Volunteers under eighteen years old, and there were many, were supposed to have parental permission to enlist. Some dodged that requirement by running away from home and lying about their age. In June 1861, sixteen-year-old James Oliver slipped away from his mother and made his way to Petersburg, where he joined an infantry company. This left his mother in dire straits. Recently widowed, desperately poor, and wholly illiterate, Ann Oliver had two other children to care for, both under ten years old; she would never have given James to the army willingly, for he was her sole support. But many other parents capitulated to the pleas of their underage sons, signed a consent form, and kissed them goodbye as they went off to war. Seventeen-year-old Levert Powell, son of a wealthy physician whose estate (Melrose) stood on the city’s outskirts, quit school and joined the Richmond Howitzers just nine days after the news of Fort Sumter arrived. Less than two weeks later, eighty young Richmonders formed themselves into a military company and offered their services to Jefferson Davis; some were only sixteen or seventeen, none older than nineteen, but all had their parents’ blessing. These youthful patriots were ready to march at any moment, they informed the president, and were prepared to bleed & die [for] the Southern cause.¹⁸

Some citizens volunteered with the understanding that they would serve only in and around the city. In the summer of 1861, 240 men joined together in a unit they dubbed the Home Artillery and offered themselves to the Confederacy with the proviso that they were not to be called from Richmond or its immediate vicinity, unless on some special occasion of attack or defence, and then only to a convenient distance, and for a short time. This condition being accepted, they were equipped with cannons and horses. But a few weeks later, the Confederate high command, having reassessed its needs, proposed that the Home Artillery be assigned to the army posted at Manassas Junction, some ninety miles north. Its members refused consent, whereupon their cannons and horses were confiscated and the unit disbanded.¹⁹

A good many Richmond men of Confederate sympathies, military age, and sound health declined to volunteer. Although they were not required to serve before national conscription was enacted (except for limited periods in the state militia), social pressure to enlist was strong and some felt obliged to justify themselves. Their reasons varied. Powhatan Weisiger, a twenty-seven-year-old hatter, remained behind in 1861 when his five brothers and two brothers-in-law living in or near the city all went off to war; I deemed my duty under the circumstances to stay at home, Weisiger explained, to care for the seven families of those who left as well as his own, which included his wife, two little daughters, and mother-in-law. A baker named John H. Pleasants likewise invoked family responsibilities along with financial necessity: a man of moderate means by his own estimate, he had a wife, three children, and a mother-in-law dependent on him. Only the vaguest of justifications was offered by George Dalney, who early in the war took a job with the Confederate Treasury Department because he did not feel qualified to take the field. A city official named Charles Stuart, by contrast, deemed himself eminently qualified to take the field, writing Jefferson Davis several times during the war’s first year to boast of his military education and experience, offer his services to the army, and trumpet his patriotism. ("I am heartily committed to the great struggle you are nobly conducting against fearfull [sic] odds," he proclaimed in one letter.) Stuart could have enlisted as a private at any time, but he chose to remain out of uniform as long as the commission he coveted was not forthcoming.²⁰

In the months following the outbreak of war, Richmond became an armed camp. Although most of the troops who enlisted there or arrived from other parts of the Confederacy were soon forwarded to the front, many thousands of others remained, crowding into buildings taken over as barracks or into tents pitched wherever space could be found. Meanwhile the Confederate bureaucracy expanded, Richmond’s existing industries grew busy with government contracts, new factories sprouted throughout the city, and the civilian population swelled. Army engineers took charge of constructing an elaborate network of fortifications to protect the capital from the Yankee invasion that was sure to come.

The first invasion was soundly repulsed at the Battle of Manassas on 21 July. This Confederate victory gave the capital a long respite from worries about its safety. But Rebel patriots who expected the U.S. government now to acknowledge defeat and accept Confederate independence were disappointed. The enemy nation instead began marshaling its vast resources in earnest and redoubled its efforts to crush the Southern rebellion. One of its primary strategic goals was capturing the Rebel capital. In the spring of 1862, a huge Union army was transported by sea to the tip of the Peninsula (between the James and York Rivers) and from there advanced northwestward toward Richmond.

Resigned now to a long, hard war and recognizing that volunteers alone would not keep the military ranks adequately filled, the Confederate government enacted, in April, a conscription law. This forced into the army many Richmond men who theretofore had declined to don a uniform. Not all the new enrollees went to the front, however. In the summer of 1862, the War Department, having had another change of heart on the matter of restricted military service, accepted for duty the Twenty-Fifth Virginia Infantry Battalion (generally known as the City Battalion), composed of Richmond men and boys and permanently assigned to the capital’s garrison force. Here at last was a place for Richmonders who wanted (or were required) to serve in arms but wished to stay close to home.²¹

As the city assumed a war footing, many patriotic citizens ineligible to take up arms or excused from doing so did their part for the cause in other ways. Parlors, churches, and meeting halls hummed with the activities of civilian associations supporting the war effort. Women had a prominent role in this work. Sewing and knitting circles produced an endless stream of socks, scarves, pants, shirts, jackets, and even tents that went to the troops at the front. The Ladies’ Aid Society of Richmond, headed by Mary Randolph, cooperated with the YMCA to receive and distribute contributions of goods sent from all over the South for the benefit of soldiers, especially those hospitalized in the city. Women also volunteered individually for hospital work, visiting the wards to comfort patients by reading to them, praying with them, or writing letters for them. Some took patients into their own homes when the hospitals were inundated. Two women, Sally Tompkins and Juliet Hopkins, founded private hospitals in Richmond early in the war, providing welcome aid to an army struggling to care for its sick and wounded.²²

Men were active in voluntary work, too, and not only with the YMCA. The Richmond Ambulance Corps, established in 1861, rendered invaluable assistance to the Confederate army. Agents of the corps escorted sick and wounded soldiers from the front by train to Richmond and were on hand at the Richmond depots to ensure that each one was conveyed comfortably and speedily to a hospital. The Association for the Relief of Maimed Soldiers provided amputees with artificial arms and legs. Among that organization’s directors was the Reverend Moses Hoge, who devoted himself to many other patriotic endeavors as well, including preaching regularly (often three times a week) at army camps in the Richmond area and, on one occasion, traveling to England on a blockade-running steamship to secure Bibles for Confederate troops.²³

By late May 1862, the Union army advancing up the Peninsula was closing in on Richmond. The Confederate army that had triumphed at Manassas had since moved south to counter this new enemy threat and was manning the capital’s fortifications. Now essentially under siege, Rebel Richmonders prayed for deliverance while military and civil officials pondered abandoning the city. The patriots’ prayers were answered in late June and early July, when the Confederate army (under the command of Robert E. Lee) launched a counteroffensive that drove the enemy back down the Peninsula.

Lee’s army subsequently moved north and for nearly two years kept the Union army well away from the capital. Richmonders’ enjoyment of this lengthy reprieve was tempered, however, by the multiplying hardships of life in the city. An enormous influx of newcomers—many of them refugees from Southern regions invaded by Union forces—along with the Confederate War Department’s insatiable hunger for provisions and manpower, the Union sea and land blockades, and the disruption of Virginia’s transportation network, spawned critical shortages of food, housing, labor, and virtually every other essential commodity, not to mention a wave of crime and disorder that threatened to overwhelm the city authorities.

As the war continued, reports from the invaded sections of the country stiffened Confederates’ determination to fight. The Yankees