After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat

How the Confederate capital’s citizens, white and Black, faced their future in the wake of Union victory

In April 1865, the Civil War, which had consumed the lives of the residents of Richmond, Virginia, for four years, ended in a vast conflagration that nearly destroyed their city. As Confederate troops fled and Union forces streamed in, the world they had known literally went up in flames. None could predict what would replace it when the smoke cleared.

After the Fire tells what happened next, offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives to evoke a vanished world of privation, defeat, jubilation, false starts, engrained antagonism, and the lost causes of Confederate nostalgia and of racial reconciliation. Nelson Lankford deftly narrates the desperate struggle of Confederates and Unionists, men and women, and white and Black Americans to shape the postwar landscape. Unsettling any sense of inevitability about this pivotal moment in history, Lankford puts the reader in the shoes of those who lived through it.

Nelson D. Lankford is the former editor of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and the author of Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital.