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The next day, Abraham Lincoln arrived unannounced in the city and walked up Main Street toward Capitol Square.
Some 1,000 buildings in 15 blocks of the industrial and commercial riverfront were burned to the ground. The Tredegar Iron Works was spared when its owner, Confederate general Joseph Reid Anderson, armed a group of employees, who stood guard against the arsonists.
Accompanied by his son and a small military escort, Lincoln was greeted by hundreds of black Richmonders, thus becoming part of Richmond's emancipation story. After visiting the Confederate White House, he made a brief tour of the city by carriage.
When Richmond fell, so did the Confederate cause. Exactly one week after Jefferson Davis fled the city, General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Five days later, President Lincoln was assassinated.
No other city had experienced so much concentrated fighting in its environs as Richmond during the war, or anything like the drama of its final days. In a city with such a diverse population, these events meant different things to different people. To some, they meant the end of a hope for a separate new nation; to others, they meant emancipation; and still others, they marked the beginning of a new, strengthened Union. One thing is certain -- few people ever forgot where they were and what they witnessed during those fateful days of April 1865. |