Richmond

On the night of 2 April 1865 the Confederate government left Richmond and ordered the tobacco warehouses burned so the supplies would not fall to the Union. The fire spread. By morning the commercial district was gone, and Union troops entering the city spent their first hours fighting the flames rather than anyone defending it.

Photographers arrived within days. What they made is among the most striking work of the entire war — not battlefields but a city as a shell, arches standing without buildings behind them, the Capitol intact above a district reduced to brick. Those images circulated widely in the North and shaped how the end of the war was understood.

Richmond had been the industrial center of the Confederacy, which is why it was the capital. The Tredegar Iron Works on the James River produced the majority of Confederate artillery and much of the armor for the ironclads. It survived the fire and kept working into the twentieth century, and photographs of it span both.

The Virginia State Capitol was designed by Thomas Jefferson, modeled on a Roman temple at Nîmes, and completed in 1788. It was the first public building in the country built in that style and it set a pattern that state capitols followed for a century.

Monument Avenue was laid out from 1890 as a grand residential boulevard and the statues were added over the following decades. Photographs from the period show it as an address rather than a controversy, which is the honest way to present them — the argument came later.

The James River runs through the city over falls, which is why the city is where it is: the last navigable point from the sea. The canal, the bridges and the tobacco warehouses all follow from that geography, and they are what most of the surviving photographs are actually of.

A City Laid Out Around Its Squares