Book Review: After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat
After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat. By Nelson D. Lankford. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025. Hardcover, 368 pp., $32.95.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
Most Civil War enthusiasts are well aware that as the Confederate defensive lines at Petersburg broke on the morning of Sunday, April 2, 1865, its government and elements of its army began evacuating Richmond that same day. In an attempt to slow their enemies and to ensure that war materiel did not fall into the hands of the soon to arrive Federal forces, the departing troops set fires to bridges, warehouses, and other buildings that burned out of control, scorching a large portion of the city’s business district between the capitol building and the James River.
The Richmond conflagration story is one told well through the dozens of photographs made soon after the city’s fall and through books like Nelson D. Lankford’s Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital (Viking, 2002). Fewer people, however, know the rest of the story. Thankfully, Lankford follows up his previous book with After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat.
In addition to a scene-setting prologue and an insightful epilogue, Lankford uses 22 chapters to tell the fascinating, twisting, and at times frustrating story of the former Confederate capital’s attempt to pick up the burned pieces and move forward into an uncertain next four years.
Where After the Fire excels is in Lankford’s amazing ability to provide readers with almost every perspective possible. Whether he is describing the new world of freedom that many of the city’s Black residents and those arriving from the countryside experienced, the cacophony of disputes that the Federal occupation forces faced, the legal and political limbo zone that white Confederate-sympathizing citizens found themselves in, or the white Unionist government that attempted to establish itself, all views get a healthy amount of context, page space, and consideration.
Of course, in order to accomplish this challenging feat, Lankford’s research necessarily runs deep and wide. Utilizing a wide range of archival primary sources like newspapers, letters, diaries, printed speeches, Freedmen’s Bureau records, military records, maps, and city records, as well as host of published primary sources and secondary sources, Lankford’s almost 50 pages of notes and bibliography bear witness to his search’s scope.
The historical personalities that Lankford chooses to examine drive the story of After the Fire. Some are well-known figures, others are not, but they all add to Richmond’s intriguing Reconstruction story. Lankford shares the experiences of men and women like Francis Harrison Pierpont, the Unionist governor; Thomas Morris Chester, the Black newspaper correspondent, who covered Richmond’s immediate post-war days; generals Marsena Patrick, Alfred Terry, and John Schofield, who all took turns at occupation duty; Edward Pollard, newspaper editor and author of The Lost Cause; Elizabeth Van Lew, war-time Union spy and post-war post mistress and pariah; Susan Hodge, wife of the chaplain to the Confederate congress and stalwart southerner; Albert Brooks, African American entrepreneur, and James Hunnicutt, white minister who advocated for equal rights for all, and numerous others from all walks of life, who, as Lankford explains, contributed toward shaping Richmond during the four years following the war.
Despite the significant amount of scholarship that has rather recently appeared about war-time Richmond, this needed book carries those stories forward continuing to show the city’s change—and in some cases lack of change—over time. Impressively researched and impeccably written, After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat is an important and timely read.
