Review: Lankford, Richmond Burning (2002)

[truepenny]

Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital by Nelson D. Lankford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book about the fall of Richmond. It's frankly better than I thought it was going to be after the first few pages. Lankford writes about the fire (the Burning in Richmond Burning) both clearly and vividly, so that I understand both WHAT happened and as much as I can of what it meant to the people it happened to.

Lankford has combed exhaustively through the primary sources, and he's interested in EVERYONE's point of view: women, men, white, Black, North, South, officers, enlisted---and he's alert to the differences between the Unionist residents of Richmond and the Confederates. Not everybody saw the entry of the Union troops into the city as a good thing, and "good" was itself very much up for grabs. The Yankees restored order and fought the fire (set by Confederate soldiers) that was destroying Richmond's business district, and some Confederates recognized that as "good" and some couldn't recognize ANYTHING the Yankees did as "good." And Lankford is keenly aware of the ways in which the Civil War didn't end with the fall of Richmond, or with Appomattox, and the ways in which the (incredibly toxic) relationship between white Southerners and Black Southerners was destroyed by the Emancipation Proclamation without having anything to put in its place. (This is not saying slavery was a good relationship to have, only that it was familiar, and that its destruction, while morally and ethically necessary, merely tore things apart without reconfiguring them into a new pattern. This, of course, is one of the places where Reconstruction should have happened and didn't.) It is very frustrating to watch white Richmonders fail to have any theory of mind or any ability to see the conflict in anything but starkest Manichean dichotomies (with themselves, of course, always as the "good" people). It's almost equally frustrating (though of course, not quite, because I don't think they're as manifestly wrong as the white people who can't understand why the enslaved people of Richmond are so happy not to be enslaved anymore) to watch the Northerners do the same thing, to fail to live up to Lincoln's Second Inaugural. (One of the amazing things that occurs in Richmond Burning is the visit of President Lincoln to Richmond, which is so surreal it's hard to believe it happened.)

Lankford is also very much aware of the potential unreliability of his sources, of how much, for example, Northerners wanted to see the white people of Richmond as either resigned to their defeat or actually relieved, when in fact, while that was true in some cases, it was not true in all or even most. White Richmonders, like white Southerners across the South, were not resigned to their defeat at all. So Lankford, while writing only five years after Klein (Days of Defiance), is much more alive to the schisms that the Civil War manifested---or caused---but could not mend.



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