cover image RICHMOND BURNING: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital

RICHMOND BURNING: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital

Nelson D. Lankford, . . Viking, $27.95 (312pp) ISBN 978-0-670-03117-7

Lankford continues his investigation of the Civil War's human dimensions with this narrative of Richmond's fall in 1865. As the war progressed it was increasingly clear that the fall of its capital meant the end of the Confederacy—and by spring 1865 it was equally clear that fall was inevitable. Lankford uses a judicious combination of published and archival primary sources to demonstrate the increasing confusion that gripped the city as the government fled and the Union troops approached. He is equally successful presenting the tentative triumphalism with which the Northerners, many of them serving in segregated black regiments, entered the city. The fire that began with Confederate efforts to destroy military stores laid a large part of the city in ashes by the time of Abraham Lincoln's visit on April 4, an event that brought home to Richmond's citizens their new reality as an occupied city. The particular strength of Lankford's book is its demonstration of the rage with which most of the white population accepted that situation. Lankford is at pains to challenge myths of reconciliation between North and South, such as Lincoln's alleged visit to Confederate General George Pickett. Instead he offers comprehensive evidence that Richmond's citizens clung unrepentantly to their bitterness and sense of victimization, and denied the role of slavery in precipitating the war. The result for decades was their own enslavement to a past whose realities, as shown here, were a long way from the popular mythology of "gunpowder and magnolias." (Aug. 5)

Forecast:Lankford has a track record: his two edited volumes, Eye of the Storm and Images from the Storm, were History Book Club main selections, and BOMC alternates. But he'll have competition in reaching a wide audience with this: James McPherson's new Civil War book Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam 1962, comes out in September.