The Fall of Richmond

Sallie Brock (1831–1911)
From The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
“Did My Great-Grandfather Beat Robert E. Lee?” (Paul Donnelly, The New York Times)

“Lincoln’s Visit to Richmond” (National Park Service)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Union Looters” (December 1865), Mary S. Mallard
• “Our Visit to Richmond” (July 1864), James R. Gilmore

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“Ruins of Richmond, VA, 1865,” by photographer Mathew Brady (1822–1896). National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Wikimedia Commons.

By the spring of 1865 Robert E. Lee’s army of about 60,000 men held a line in Virginia that extended from outside the Confederate capital, Richmond, forty miles south to Petersburg. In an attempt to open an escape route to the west for his army, Lee attacked Fort Stedman, a Union strongpoint east of Petersburg, on March 25. The attack failed, and about 3,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, or captured.

The defeat marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. After heavy fighting on March 31, Union forces advanced on Five Forks, a crossroads about twelve miles southwest of Petersburg defended by a force of 10,000 under Major General George E. Pickett, who had been ordered by Lee to hold the position “at all hazards.” On the afternoon of April 1 the Union Army broke the Confederate lines at Five Forks. General Ulysses S. Grant then ordered an assault on the Petersburg defenses at dawn on Sunday, April 2. Within hours Lee telegraphed the Confederate War Department that both Petersburg and Richmond would have to be abandoned that night.

It is with Jefferson Davis’s receipt of that message that Sallie Brock begins the following account, which describes the fall of Richmond—and the devastation caused entirely by the actions of the fleeing Confederate military. After a triumphant entry, Union soldiers struggled to put out the fires, but it is clear from accounts that the conflagration was far too widespread—and the damage was already far too extensive—for any effort to save much of the city. On Tuesday, April 4, President Lincoln ignored the concerns for his safety and entered Richmond with his son Tad to meet with Union leaders, speak with the residents, and survey the damage.

In a later chapter of her account Brock describes the effects of the city’s destruction on the population:

The miseries of our situation which would have been incalculable at best were inconceivably enhanced by the disastrous burning of the business portion of the city. Nearly all the supplies of food were kept in the stores which were consumed by the fire and our poor people were almost totally dependent upon the mercy of the captors. For several months no remunerative employment could be obtained by the masses and they were compelled to live by charity.

Born in Madison County, Virginia, Brock had moved with her family to Richmond in 1858. In early 1861 she was working as a tutor about fifty miles away, in King and Queen County, but returned to Richmond when the war began and remained there for its duration. After the fall of Richmond she moved to New York City and two years later anonymously published her account of the war, which has remained in print for most of the past century and a half. In 1873 she published a poorly received (and soon forgotten) novel, Kenneth, My King, described by one recent scholar as “four hundred pages of courtship.” In 1882 Brock briefly returned to Virginia to marry Richard Putnam, an Episcopal minister from Boston. The couple lived in Brooklyn for the rest of their lives, but both were buried in Richmond.

Notes: The footnote on page 643 refers to the marriage of Lieutenant Colonel Walter H. Taylor, an assistant adjutant general on General Lee’s staff, to Ellen Selden Saunders. A receiving ship (p. 644) is a vessel where new recruits were sent to await service assignments. The “long lines of negro cavalry” (p. 646) were members of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, commanded by Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr. The “morbidly sensitive clause” mocked on the last page was included in General George Shepley’s order of April 3: “No treasonable or offensive expressions insulting the flag, the cause or the armies of the Union will hereafter be allowed.”

*   *   *

The morning of the 2d of April, 1865, dawned brightly over the capital of the Southern Confederacy. A soft haze rested over the city, but above that, the sun shone with the warm pleasant radiance of early spring. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Our Visit to Richmond

James R. Gilmore [Edmund Kirke] (1822–1903)
From The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
Horace Greeley (Mr. Lincoln and New York)

“The South’s Capital Dilemma” (Ford Risley, The New York Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Armies of the Wilderness” (May 1864), Herman Melville
• “Meeting ‘Father Abraham’” (February 1864), Lois Bryan Adams
• “The Nameless Dead” (October 1863), Kate Cumming
• “Battle of Gettysburg” (July 1863), Arthur James Lyon Fremantle

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Confederate currency, depicting Jefferson Davis, with the inscription “Two years after the ratification of a treaty of peace between the Confederate States and the United States, The Confederate States of America will pay to the bearer on demand Fifty Dollars / Richmond, Feb. 17th, 1864.” Image courtesy of the Don C. Kelly website.

For nearly two years New-York Daily Tribune editor Horace Greeley had been intermittently seeking ways to bring about a peaceful settlement of the Civil War when Colorado mining promoter William Cornell Jewett wrote to him on July 5, 1864, that “two Ambassaders—of Davis & Co. are now in Canada—with full & complete powers for a peace” and that the Confederate envoys wished to meet with Greeley and President Lincoln. Greeley forwarded Jewett’s correspondence to Lincoln, who replied: “If you can find, any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, what ever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you.”

On July 20 Lincoln’s assistant secretary John Hay crossed into Canada with Greeley and offered safe conduct to Washington for James P. Holcombe and Clement C. Clay. Instead of responding to Hay, the two Confederates addressed a letter to Greeley, in which they accused Lincoln of refusing to negotiate in good faith, and released it, along with earlier correspondence, to the Associated Press. The agents had, in fact, never been authorized by the government at Richmond to negotiate a peace settlement; as historian Reinhard H. Luthin writes, they were actually “intent, not on peace, but determined to cause confusion in Federal councils and doubts in mass Northern minds.”

Greeley returned to New York, where James Gordon Bennett, editor of the rival New York Herald, attacked “poor Greeley that nincompoop without genius” for “cuddling with traitors.” Clay, Holcombe, and their fellow Confederates continued to meet with Democrats and pursue what had all along been their primary aim: to influence the upcoming presidential nomination and the 1864 election.

Meanwhile, in early July President Lincoln gave Colonel James F. Jaquess, a Methodist minister on leave from the 73rd Illinois Infantry, and James R. Gilmore, an author of books and sketches under the pen name Edmund Kirke, permission to travel to Richmond and hold unofficial talks on peace terms with Confederate leaders. The two emissaries crossed into Confederate-held territory on July 16 and met with Davis and his secretary of state Judah P. Benjamin the next day. They returned, as Lincoln hoped and expected, with an unyielding statement from Davis regarding the Confederacy’s war aims. Gilmore published a letter about his trip in the Boston Evening Transcript on July 22:

I have not, however, exchanged a word with Mr. Greeley, or even seen him, for fully three months, and I have no connection with, in fact I know nothing of, his “negotiations.” This much, however, in reference to that much-talked-of matter, being a Yankee, I can guess. It will result in nothing.

Gilmore concluded that, while the Confederate agents in Canada may have “‘pulled the wool’ over the eyes of Mr. Greeley, they have not pulled it over the eyes of Mr. Lincoln.” His wryly humorous yet pointed account of this mission appeared in the next issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Notes: On page 341, the glorious Massachusetts General refers to Union Army major general Benjamin F. Butler, who commanded the Army of the James along the James River in Virginia. Brigadier General Robert S. Foster (p. 342) led the Third Brigade of the First Division, Tenth Corps, Army of the James. On page 348, Gilmore mistakenly refers to Jefferson Davis as “President” under Franklin Pierce; he was actually secretary of war in the Pierce administration. Mr. Ashley’s Reconstruction Bill (p. 352) refers to legislation introduced in December 1863 by Ohio Republican James M. Ashley, authorizing the president to appoint provisional military governors in the rebelling states. The governors would organize elections for state constitutional conventions in which suffrage would be extended to black men but denied to those who had fought against the Union or held office in a secessionist government. The bill was tabled in February 1864. Castle Thunder (p. 356) was the Confederate prison in Richmond used to house political prisoners and suspected spies.

*   *   *

Why my companion, the Rev. Dr. Jaquess, Colonel of the Seventy-Third Regiment of Illinois Volunteers, recently went to Richmond, and the circumstances attending his previous visit within the Rebel lines,—when he wore his uniform, and mixed openly with scores of leading Confederates,—I shall shortly make known to the public. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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“Our Beleaguered City”

Judith W. McGuire (1813–1897)
From The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
The “Seven Days,” June 25–July 1, 1862, and Emancipation (Brooks D. Simpson, Reader’s Almanac)

American Civil War Peninsula Campaign and Seven Days Battles: maps, photographs, and a calendar of events (Matthew D. Parker, Thomas’ Legion)

Previous Story of the Week selections on the Civil War:
““Celebration in Charleston,” William Howard Russell
“The Union Army Retreats,” William Howard Russell
““Attack on Fort Donelson,”
Lew Wallace

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Previously published:
The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It
Over 120 pieces • more than sixty participants • 816 pages
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Both volumes are also available as e-books for Kindle, Nook, iPad, and Kobo.

This week (through July 1) marks the 150th anniversary of the “Seven Days,” which Brooks D. Simpson succinctly described in a recent post on the Library of America’s blog:

On June 25, 1862, the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac clashed outside Richmond, Virginia, and continued to do so for a week. The series of engagements that followed has become known as the Seven Days, and at their conclusion, Robert E. Lee had succeeded in driving George B. McClellan’s bluecoats from the outskirts of the Confederate capital.

Judith and John McGuire were in Richmond when the Seven Days battles began. The previous year, in May 1861, the McGuire family had been forced to split up when their home in Alexandria came under attack; their three daughters were sent to stay with a relative, while both sons enlisted nearby with Confederate forces. (All the McGuire children were from their father’s previous marriage.) They were refugees for the duration of the war and, they soon learned, they lost all their possessions when their home in Alexandria was requisitioned as a military hospital by Union forces. By February 1862, rejoined by the two youngest daughters (the oldest had married), they had made their way to Richmond, Judith’s childhood home, where she served as a volunteer nurse.

Mrs. McGuire kept a diary for the benefit of “the members of her family too young to remember these days” and initially had no intention of publishing it. A 1974 biographical profile by Willie T. Weathers in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography summarizes the book’s subsequent history:

Having been persuaded to share her private record of the war years with the public, she published it anonymously and with the names of living friends and relatives concealed under their initials. The first edition was published in New York in 1867, and a second followed in 1868. A Richmond publisher brought out a third in 1889, with the author's name in parentheses below "A Lady of Virginia" [and] a partial key to the initials.

Weathers notes that the book became “a best seller throughout the postwar South and [is] a classic still read with pleasure.” The text of Judith’s riveting eyewitness account of the Seven Days presented to Story of the Week readers is taken from the third and final edition.

Notes: Major General A. P. [Ambrose Powell] Hill was a division commander in the Army of Northern Virginia. Pegram’s Battery refers to the Purcell Artillery, a company established a year earlier in Richmond and led by twenty-year-old William R. J. Pegram, the younger brother of Confederate General John Pegram. His unit sustained the heaviest losses of any Confederate artillery company during the Seven Days, and Pegram became a local hero after the engagement. Ballard House was a five-story hotel in Richmond. General C. is Thomas Jefferson Chambers, commissioned as a major general during the Texas Revolution. Of the casualties mentioned in the closing paragraphs, First Lieutenant Edward Brockenbrough, Major [Francis Buckner] Jones, and Lieutenant Colonel [Bradfute] Warwick would die of their wounds within two weeks.

June 27th.—Yesterday was a day of intense excitement in the city and its surroundings. Early in the morning it was whispered about that some great movement was on foot. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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