Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War by Mary A. DeCredico (review)

In Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War, Mary A. DeCredico makes an important contribution to the underexplored topic of Confederate urban history. Richmond is an ideal subject for this study because of its centrality as the treasonous rebellion’s capital and its prominence as a leading regional industrial center. Readers in search of a powerful narrative of white Richmond Confederates’ daily lives will be pleased by DeCredico’s employment of a classic rise-and-fall narrative that at times risks obscuring the fact that the continued enslavement of millions of Black people hung in the balance of the Civil War’s outcome. Nevertheless, DeCredico excels at emphasizing Richmond’s importance to the Confederate rebellion. She provides a much-needed case study of a Confederate city’s wartime experiences.

Confederate Citadel follows a chronological tale of Richmond during the Civil War. DeCredico presents a case for how Richmond complicates larger narratives of American antebellum urban history. As a representative example of the complex factors that shaped American cities’ culture and economy, Richmond, despite its large Black enslaved labor population, challenges notions of southern urban distinctiveness. Likewise, Richmond’s wartime experiences mirrored those of other southern cities and communities. In secession’s wake, supply problems, disease, civil protests, and inflation threatened to destabilize Richmond’s ability to provide maximum support for the Confederate rebellion. The 1863 Bread Riots provide ample examples of the city’s precarious situation. However, Richmond’s wartime experiences shared much in common with those of the rest of the Confederacy. The fact that the city was situated in the war’s most crucial military theater from start to finish may have worsened conditions at times, but generally, the level of “hardship and despair” experienced in Richmond reflected the Confederacy’s more extensive problems (chap. 3).

DeCredico may have missed some opportunities to use Richmond to further develop the historical understanding of southern urban landscapes within an American context. Although, as DeCredico argues, “the vast majority of American cities in the mid-nineteenth century revolved around agricultural growing seasons,” her story of Richmond’s rise and fall never fully explores slavery’s role in retarding the growth of southern cities or in shaping a uniquely American urban landscape (p. 15). As DeCredico delves into the particulars of Richmond’s “tortured” history, readers are left wondering how the Confederate capital compared with similarly sized American cities such as Troy, New York, and Cleveland, Ohio (p. 4). To be sure, DeCredico has made a significant contribution to the understudied field of nineteenth-century southern urban history. However, the question “compared with what?” could have been more fully explored. Also, Richmond’s urban landscape appears flat without any detailed description of neighborhoods and geography. Plus, as in most community histories, the local government seemed to lack agency compared with state and national entities. Without such analysis, Confederate Citadel might have limited value to urban historians.

DeCredico’s efforts to create a stirring narrative that confirms a rise-and-fall epoch produces an imprecise language that far too many Civil War historians employ. Throughout the book, DeCredico has statements such as “The people of Richmond received more depressing news . . . when they learned the Confederate invasion of Kentucky had been turned back at a place called Perryville” (pp. 62–63). Such sweeping generalizations obscure the potential of Black voices of dissent within the city’s racially diverse populace. The visible welcome that Black people gave U.S. president Abraham Lincoln when he triumphantly toured the city on April 5, 1865, suggests a pent-up hostility toward the Confederacy’s enslaver regime. DeCredico never fully explores the types of resistance that Black Richmonders employed to undermine the Confederacy and to advance their pursuit of freedom. A deeper examination of postwar records might have revealed much about the city’s wartime Black dissidents.

Despite these shortcomings...