RICHMOND BURNING

An absorbing study of the Confederacy’s last hours and a city in ruins.

The Southern secession was no monolithic enterprise, to judge from this account by Virginia historian Lankford (The Last American Aristocrat, 1996). Richmond may have been the capital and nerve center of the Confederacy, but it was crawling with politicians and citizens who despised Jefferson Davis, feckless generals and disgruntled privates, and not a few members of the “Unionist underground,” including a southern belle who “placed one of her free black servants as an agent in Jefferson Davis’s household.” Southern apologists have long suggested that someone from this large group of well-motivated suspects set the ravaging fire that greeted conquering Federal forces in the spring of 1865. Lankford clears up the question definitively: the great fire was set after Davis had fled the city by Confederate soldiers seeking to deny the enemy the last of the rebel army’s supplies, and though it has passed into legend as a monumental catastrophe, it destroyed only some ten percent of the city—enough, however, to provide newspapers with the “pictures of devastation that people in the North craved.” Lankford’s smoke-filled pages are dense with well-chosen anecdotes, such as his portrait of an exasperated Robert E. Lee at Appomattox catching sight of the disgraced General George Pickett and spitting out, “Is that man still with this army?” The author examines and dismisses a few myths along the way, including the why-can’t-we-all-get-along saw that Lee later prayed with an African-American gentleman in a gesture of national healing, an episode evidently invented to hide “differences that cannot be masked by the warm sepia tone cast over our great national trauma by popular books and documentary films.”

An able balance of scholarly precision and readability.