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

In this meticulously researched social history of Confederate Richmond, Stephen Ash sheds light on a critical sector of the Confederate capital’s social fabric—the refugees, enslaved and free African Americans, impoverished women and children, foreign-born laborers, prisoners of war, and prostitutes that made up Richmond’s “common” population—and their interactions with the city’s merchant and ruling classes over the course of the Civil War. In focusing on how Richmonders sought to feed, clothe, and house themselves, cope with influxes in crime and the omnipresence of death, and navigate shifting boundaries of morality and of social and geographic delineation, Ash shows how the war transformed Richmond into a “gigantic theater of tragedy, the embodiment of the Rebel nation’s sorrow and pain” (205). Central to Ash’s story is the continuous struggle between the needs and resources of the citizenry and those of the Confederate government and its military, a struggle that inflamed class tensions, placed unfamiliar and onerous burdens on the city’s female population, and threatened to upend the city’s long-cherished racial and social order. Initially a boon to Richmond’s economic interests, Ash argues that the war pushed the city to the near brink of destruction in this coming-of-age chronicle of a city where mere survival became the ultimate focus of the majority of the population, and where suffering was a daily reality.

Building on Emory M. Thomas’s foundational The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital (1971) and Ernest B. Furgurson’s Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (1996), Ash’s scholarship delves deep into a variety of sources, including court records, period newspapers, census records, business files, letters, diaries and memoirs, church records, and an array of official documents and correspondence from government offices, hospitals, relief associations, and citizens and business firms. This breadth and depth of source material paints a fresh, vivid picture of the social dynamics, cultural mores, economic workings, and political structure of Civil War Richmond. Ash also draws heavily on key secondary works on Confederate politics, refugees, southern women, slavery and African American history, Civil War medicine, industry, agriculture, religion, mourning culture, and prisons to provide important context for his research. In doing so, Ash successfully rescues “obscure and mostly forgotten Richmonders from the wings” and places them “at center stage,” highlighting the kaleidoscope of individuals and experiences that made up life in the Confederate capital and constituted the pulse of the fledgling southern nation (230). Indeed, rather than labeling Richmonders’ experiences of war as wholly monolithic or stagnant, Ash shows how different sectors of the population, such as speculators, prostitutes, free blacks, and slaves, could alternately (or even simultaneously) benefit from many of the economic opportunities created by the conflict and suffer myriad physical and social privations incurred by war. He also nicely spotlights the critical subdivisions that existed within certain pockets of society, such as four separate classes of Richmonders that heretofore have frequently been lumped into merely two (or at most three) generic categories of the elitist “haves” and the impoverished “have nots” (184).

Despite intentionally veering away from historiographical debates concerning the success or failure of Confederate nationalism and the reasons for southern defeat in which many scholars have engaged, Ash’s work affirms the assertions of Stephanie McCurry, George Rable, Drew Gilpin Faust, Thavolia Glymph, Midori Takagi, and others that internal divisions, class and racial tensions, crime, and anxieties over the breakdown of traditional gender roles shook the foundations of Civil War Richmond in cataclysmic ways. Yet, like Gary Gallagher and William Blair, Ash also notes the key ways in which both the Confederate government and the state of Virginia were able to adapt throughout the war to meet their citizens’ evolving, most basic needs for survival. Perhaps some of Ash’s strongest historiographical arguments emerge from his engagement with Karen Halttunen’s masterful Confidence...