Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital by Stephen V. Ash (review)

On May 29, 1861, Richmond officially became the capital of the Confederacy. For the next four years, its residents adjusted to life, and death, in the maelstrom of war. A bourgeoning population, soaring inflation, housing shortages, and the incessant stream of refugees, wounded, and dead affected every aspect of daily life for the soldiers, civilians, and politicians who made the city their home. Shifting the focus from the battlefield and political arena, Stephen V. Ash's Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital "turns the spotlight on Richmonders as a whole—the humble and middling as well as the powerful, the weak and the wicked as well as the strong and the decent" (4). Taking us into the city's narrow alleyways, its church pews, its overcrowded rented rooms, and its stench-filled hospitals, Ash produces a moving, intimate portrait of a community and, by extension, a nation at war. The experience of this city, Ash contends, was "unique and multifaceted and … ought to be understood and appreciated for its own sake and in all its variety" (4).

Organized into ten thematic chapters, Ash's work addresses the myriad demands and hardships the city's population faced from April 1861 to April 1865. In the immediate aftermath of secession, young men left for war, leaving civilian jobs vacant while factories, eager for government contracts, expanded, opening work for white civilian men and women, and black people, both free and enslaved. Some skilled tradesmen, discharges or exemptions in hand, returned home to fill these vacancies in the early years of the war. But that changed as the war progressed. Conscription and incessant local defense force mobilizations, especially problematic as the war reached Richmond's gates in late 1864, pulled men from their desks. Given the work's thematic structure, change over time—a concept fundamental to Ash's argument—can be difficult to discern at points.

At the same time, Ash is highly sensitive to differences of class and gender. Indeed, as he notes, the poorest tended to struggle most; the in-demand skills of the working-class artisans and tradesmen produced a constant stream of employment opportunities and a steady supply of traded goods. Others, though, were desperate for money, food, and shelter. Women pawned jewelry, took in boarders, or turned to piecework. While enslaved and free black people do appear in Richmond's factories or in the rented rooms of their owners, this is not primarily their story; Ash principally focuses on the experience of white Richmonders. While the story is largely told through familiar voices, such as Confederate War Department clerk John B. Jones, to extrapolate the hardscrabble lives of women, clerks, factory workers, and poor whites, Ash also gives voice to the largely voiceless by relying on census data, the governor's executive papers, and the secretary of war's letters.

Whereas early chapters focus on housing, feeding, and employing the city's multitudes, the monograph's second half turns to the Confederacy's disorder, despair, and suffering. Emblematic of the Confederacy as a whole, the capital was not immune to the South's general breakdown in law and order. And Ash, as always, is at his strongest when considering depravity and discontentment. With the Confederacy crumbling from within and without, the enslaved resisted by forming churches and evading laws. Unionists and deserters took refuge among the swollen population. Drunks roamed the streets, committing petty acts and felonious crimes. Women rioted for food. White class resentment, along with the threat of mob violence, increased by the day. In response, the citizens formed pro-secessionist home guards, the state regulated the manufacture of liquor, and the city suppressed its black population. Nothing, however, worked completely. In the end, Ash argues, Richmond "was transformed into a gigantic theater of tragedy, the embodiment of the Rebel nation's sorrow and pain" (205).

"Stories of Richmond's...