Richmond Falls: Union Forces Seize Confederate Capital

Fire consumed the Confederate capital before Union soldiers could reach it. Retreating Confederate troops set ablaze tobacco warehouses and government buildings to deny them to the enemy, and the flames spread across Richmond's commercial district, destroying over 900 buildings in a city that had been the symbolic heart of the rebellion for four years. Union forces entered on the morning of April 3, 1865, just hours after Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government had fled by train toward Danville. Black soldiers from the 25th Army Corps were among the first to enter the city, a fact that carried enormous symbolic weight. Many of these troops were formerly enslaved men who had joined the Union Army after the Emancipation Proclamation. They marched through streets where enslaved people had been bought and sold, where the Confederate government had debated whether to arm enslaved men in its own defense, and where the intellectual architecture of white supremacy had been constructed into constitutional doctrine. Abraham Lincoln visited Richmond on April 4, walking through the burned streets accompanied only by a small guard detail and his son Tad. Formerly enslaved residents knelt before him. Lincoln reportedly told them, "Don't kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter." He toured the Confederate White House, sitting briefly in Jefferson Davis's chair, and met with Confederate Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell to discuss surrender terms. The fall of Richmond was more psychological than military. The city's defenses had held for nine months during the Siege of Petersburg, and its capture did not destroy the Confederate army. But the loss of the capital, combined with the evacuation of the government, shattered whatever remained of Confederate morale. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, already starving and depleted, retreated west toward Lynchburg in a desperate attempt to link up with Joseph Johnston's forces in North Carolina. Six days later, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.