Civil War Richmond: The Last Citadel, Jack Trammel and Guy Terrell, Forward by Ed Ayers, 205 pp., 71 illustrations, 4 charts, 3 maps, bibliographic notes, bibliography, index, $21.99

The authors offer a clear and concise presentation of Richmond's various histories; such as Richmond before 1861. This discussion includes its founding, commerce, and population in the context of it's being as a state capital in which cotton was king and slave sales occurred. Not neglected is the African American community and citizens who opposed slavery, 

The authors' offer the city's 1861-1864 history regarding  Virginia's secession, the choice of the Confederacy's national capital, manufacturing and railroad center, as well as a discussion of its newspapers, Unionist sentiments and spies, along with the impact of the Seven Days Battles upon the city. 

                                                  Both of these sections are presented in about 145 pages. A third topic, Richmond in Decline, 1864-1865 is adequately presented in about 45 pages. Overall, the maps, charts and photographs/illustrations add significantly to the reader's enjoyment of this splendid offer from History Press.

From the Publisher:

 Few American cities have experienced the trauma of wartime destruction. As the capital of the new Confederate States of America, situated only ninety miles from the enemy capital at Washington, D.C., Richmond was under constant threat. The civilian population suffered not only shortage and hardship but also constant anxiety. During the war, the city more than doubled in population and became the industrial center of a prolonged and costly war effort. The city transformed with the creation of a massive hospital system, military training camps, new industries and shifting social roles for everyone, including women and African Americans. Local historians Jack Trammell and Guy Terrell detail the excitement, and eventually bitter disappointment, of Richmond at war.

New and Noteworthy: Life During Wartime--Living, Dying and Surviving in Richmond, Virginia

Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital,Stephen Ash, University of North Carolina Press, 296 ppages,  illustrations, bibliographic notes, bibliography, 2019.  $35.00.

Reviewed by Michael E. Woods (Marshall University) Published on H-CivWar (January, 2020)

A fresh-faced lieutenant screams from a hospital bed. Shopkeepers fence stolen goods, while an equally entrepreneurial embalmer smuggles deserters and draft dodgers out of town in coffins. Neighbors hear a confectioner lashing an enslaved girl with a leather strap; the next day, the four-year-old child is found dead. In a filthy shack near the wharves, a young prostitute dies alone from a laudanum overdose. These kinds of stories are rarely commemorated with monuments or dramatized in reenactments. But they are all Civil War stories, and they all find a place in Stephen V. Ash’s outstanding Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital. 

Richmond was a national capital and a target for attack, a commercial hub and a manufacturing powerhouse, a haven for refugees and a place of captivity. But although historians have thoroughly documented the city’s political and military histories, the experiences of its humbler residents, whose numbers swelled to more than 100,000 during the conflict, have received less attention. The purpose of Ash’s book is to explore “how ordinary Richmonders”—black and white, enslaved and free, male and female, rich and poor, civilian and soldier—“fared in the maelstrom of war” (p. 3).

Ash quite logically emphasizes Richmond’s uniqueness, but the city’s prominence in both history and historiography means that this book will fascinate not only local historians but also readers interested in everything from common soldiers and women’s history to class conflict and slave resistance.
Ash surveys life in wartime Richmond in a series of thematic chapters. The city’s diverse population was fractured along lines of wealth, status, and occupation, but most Richmonders faced an increasingly severe struggle to get by as neighbors multiplied and resources dwindled in what one local paper aptly called the “metropolis of the South” (p. 19).

Richmond’s population may have tripled during the war as bureaucrats, soldiers, refugees, impressed slaves, and drifters, driven by force or free will, crowded into the city. With housing scarce and rents soaring, civilians squeezed into rented rooms, hotels, and offices while soldiers and enslaved laborers lived in nearby barracks and encampments and a growing number of captives—including political prisoners and captured Union soldiers—languished in jails and camps. And although proximity to a rich agricultural hinterland had kept antebellum Richmond well fed, wartime disruption and overcrowding created a parallel crisis of sustenance. As with the housing shortage, public efforts to increase food supply met with mixed results: most Richmonders did not starve, but the poor and the wards of the Confederate government waged a desperate struggle for subsistence.
 
Unlike food and shelter, jobs were plentiful in a city where fierce competition for workers pitted private manufacturers against public-sector employers and the military. Even though Confederate officers detailed soldiers to work in factories and other productive enterprises, the labor shortage remained acute, so considerable numbers of enslaved people, free blacks, and white women and children filled the void. Of course, with so many strangers coming and going, old fears of insurrection and new apprehensions of disloyalty fostered an atmosphere of suspicion.

Deserters and Unionist agents did not topple the city’s Confederate power structure, but the prevalence of crime and immorality, coupled with resistance by enslaved people, made many affluent white Richmonders fear the worst. The outbreak of Richmond’s infamous bread riots in April 1863 seemed to portend a more general uprising of the city’s motley underclass, and for the last two years of the war, local officials mixed poor relief with paramilitary repression in an effort to keep order. The proximity of military force reassured Richmond’s elite, but the proliferation of military hospitals, complete with the sights, sounds, and smells of suffering and death, provided a constant reminder of the war’s costs.

Ash has indeed brought “wartime Richmond to life as a city of flesh-and-blood men, women, and children of many sorts who responded in very human ways to extraordinarily trying circumstances” (p. 5). The success of this rich social history stems from diligent archival research. Ash delved into a variety of manuscript materials, including personal correspondence, the records of the Southern Claims Commission, church and hospital records, and letters received by the Confederate Provost Marshal’s Office and the Confederate Secretary of War.

These dusty files yielded a trove of poignant stories that demonstrate how Richmond’s diverse residents navigated a city shaken to its core by an increasingly revolutionary conflict. From the arrest of an African American bartender who allegedly spoke to a white man with “insolent and provoking language” (p. 175) to hospital matrons’ attempts to brighten their dreary living quarters, Rebel Richmond compellingly illuminates how Richmonders lived, labored, and died in a city where the war sometimes reached the suburbs and was never far away.

This book complements previous accounts of wartime Richmond by Emory M. Thomas and Ernest B. Furgurson, which relied (particularly in Thomas’s case) more heavily on published materials.[1] It also will provide opportunities for comparative analysis if read alongside other urban histories, such as Wendy Hamand Venet’s study of Civil War-era Atlanta and William Warren Rogers Jr.’s work on Montgomery.[2] Indeed, what Richmond shared with other Confederate cities may be as important as what set it apart. Richmond’s status as a political, industrial, and military center certainly made it a distinctly attractive target for Union strategists and a singularly powerful symbol of Confederate nationalism, and Ash quite reasonably underscores its uniqueness.

But many aspects of Richmond’s story had parallels in other Confederate cities. Union war planners coveted New Orleans and Atlanta; manufacturing boomed in Selma and Augusta; refugees streamed into Raleigh and Columbia. Rebel Richmond therefore underscores the centrality of cities to the story of the Confederacy. As Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers have pointed out, for all the obvious importance of Southern plantation agriculture, and for all the Lost Cause paeans to an agrarian way of life, cities were at the heart of the Confederate project, from the meeting of secession conventions to the manufacturing of war materiel and the marshaling of armies.[3] Rebel Richmond demonstrates this point brilliantly and poignantly. Regardless of where they came from or why they were there, Richmonders—all 100,000 or more of them—experienced an emphatically urban Civil War.

Bibliographic Notes:
[1]. Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971); Ernest B. Furgurson, Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).
[2]. Wendy Hamand Venet, A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); William Warren Rogers Jr., Confederate Home Front: Montgomery during the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
[3]. Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers, “Introduction: Historians and the Urban South’s Civil War,” in Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War Era, ed. Andrew L. Slap and Frank Towers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015): 1-23.
 
Full Text Source: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54431

Richmond's Worst Wartime Diaster: Brown's Island Munitions Factory Explosiion

Brown's Island Munitions Explosion Was Worst Wartime Disaster In Richmond, Katherine Calos, Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 4, 2017

The first blast lifted Mary Ryan off the floor. The second blew her to the ceiling. The Confederate munitions factory on Brown's Island exploded with a fury that killed more than 40 of its female workers, an event that shocked the city on March 13, 1863, and inspired an outpouring of sympathy.
The homefront disaster was Richmond's worst during the Civil War. Its 150th anniversary was commemorated with living history programs at The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar and with the dedication of a historical marker beside the island.

Ryan, an Irish teenager like many of the other workers at the Confederate States Laboratory, accepted blame for the explosion during the several days she lingered in pain. She confessed to Col. Josiah Gorgas, chief of ordinance, that she had banged a perforated wooden board containing friction primers against a table to knock them loose. The jostling was strong enough to ignite at least one of the primers, which set off an explosion that demolished most of the 70-foot building. 

Between 80 and 100 workers, mostly women, were in the room either at their jobs or warming themselves at a coal stove. An official report counted 69 casualties, of whom at least 44 died. "The most heart rending lamentations and cries issued from the ruins from the sufferers rendered delirious from suffering and terror," the Richmond Examiner wrote of the scene in its March 14 edition. "No sooner was one helpless, unrecognizable mass of humanity cared for and removed before the piteous appeals of another would invoke the energy of the rescuers."

Only a few of the victims died instantly. Others suffered "the most horrible agonies, blind from burns, with the hair burned from their heads, and the clothing hanging in burning shreds," the Examiner wrote. A few jumped in the river to extinguish the flames. For the rest of the month, deaths from the accident mounted. Mary Ryan, age 18, died March 16 at the home of her father, Michael Ryan, who also worked at the arsenal.

Elizabeth Young, 25, died in a rented room on Oregon Hill "after a severe pain of twelve hours, caused by the fearful accident on Brown's Island," the Daily Dispatch reported March 17. "This will be sad news to her relations and friends, whom she left not long since in Caroline county."

Only three of the dead were men. The Rev. John H. Woodcock, 63, was supervisor of the room where the blast occurred. James Curry, 13, died the night of the explosion from his injuries. Samuel Chappell, 16, somehow lived five days after being found wedged against a wall with his skull crushed from the collapse of the building's roof.

In an official inquiry by the War Department, Capt. Wesley N. Smith, superintendent, estimated that the room that exploded had contained 200,000 musket caps, 2,000 to 3,000 friction primers and about 10 or 11 pounds of gunpowder. It was more crowded than normal because materials weren't available to finish an expansion of another building. The mixture of jobs increased the risk of an accident. In addition to finishing friction primers, sewing cannon cartridge bags and boxing musket caps, workers were filling Williams cartridges and taking apart defective cartridges to separate the gunpowder and lead. As a result, gunpowder dust would've been in the air.

Friction primers were a detonation device for cannons. When the cannoneer pulled a lanyard attached to the friction primer pin, the effect was the same as striking a match. The spark ignited gunpowder inside the metal primer tube, and that small explosion ignited a larger charge inside the cannon.

As a last step in the manufacturing process, the primers were sealed with wax and varnished to protect against moisture, which possibly caused some of them to stick to the board that held them for manufacturing.

Many of the munitions workers were young women because their small, nimble fingers were considered more suited to the task of assembling up to 1,200 cartridges a day. Cathy Wright, curator at the Museum of the Confederacy, sees a parallel to Rosie the Riveter in World War II in the way women were sought for jobs that previously would have been off-limits. Before the Civil War, Wright said, "women had not been encouraged to find gainful employment. They were supposed to stay at home. Working for wages was a couple of steps above being a lady of the night."

The explosion made it harder to accept the idea of women in workplace, Wright said, but it didn't stop women from working. The community responded with contributions of $9,000 to $10,000 for the victims. The munitions lab on Brown's Island didn't exist until after the war began. Smaller explosions at its original location at the end of Seventh Street had raised safety concerns. So, the island was cleared and a group of one-story wooden buildings was constructed for the operation in 1863.

Explosions were an occupational hazard in munitions manufacturing, said Dean S. Thomas of Gettysburg, Pa., author of Round Ball to Rimfire: A History of Civil War Small Arms Ammunition.

On the same day as the battle of Antietam in September 1862, an explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal in Pittsburgh had killed 78 workers. An arsenal explosion in Jackson, Miss., had killed about 40 people a few weeks later. "When they advertised for people to make cartridges," Thomas said, "they would advertise that it was as safe as anything else."

Text Source: Richmond Times Dispatch 
Slight modifications in the text related to current events' dates have been made in this post.

Image Source:  Richmond Arsenal

Forthcoming---A Guide To the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign

Guide To the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, edited by Charles R. Bowery, Jr. and Ethan S. Rafuse, maps by Steven Stanley, University of Kansas Press, 420 pages, 47 maps36 illustrations, $34.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Text From The Publisher:  Lasting from June 1864 through April 1865, the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign was the longest of the Civil War, dwarfing even the Atlanta and Vicksburg campaigns in its scope and complexity. This compact yet comprehensive guide allows armchair historian and battlefield visitor alike to follow the campaign’s course, with a clear view of its multi-faceted strategic, operation, tactical, and human dimensions.
A concise, single-volume collection of official reports and personal accounts, the guide is organized in one-day and multi-day itineraries that take the reader to all the battlefields of the campaign, some of which have never before been interpreted and described for the visitor so extensively. Comprehensive campaign and battle maps reflect troop movements, historical terrain features, and modern roads for ease of understanding and navigation. A uniquely useful resource for the military enthusiast and the battlefield traveler, this is the essential guide for anyone hoping to see the historic landscape and the human face of this most decisive campaign of the Civil War.
Charles R. Bowery, Jr. is an officer in the U.S. Army who has taught Civil War history at West Point, led tours of Civil War battlefield sites, and authored Lee and Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. Ethan S. Rafuse is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of nine books, including McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union and Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, 1863-1865.

Blurbs: “A stellar contribution to the long and excellent tradition of the U.S. Army War college guide that covers one of the most important campaigns of the Civil War. The authors’ organization and contextualization of their story are superbly done and the maps are outstanding, among the best I have ever seen depicting the action and topography of the Richmond Petersburg battle sites.”—Earl Hess, author of Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg

“A much needed edition on the final campaign to capture Richmond and Petersburg.  This book brings together the events on both sides of the James River enabling readers to understand this very complex and prolonged military event.”—Chris Bryce, Chief of Interpretation, Petersburg National Battlefield

“The most thorough, detailed, and accurate books of their kind. Indeed, they are unique. I have used them to lead guided tours of several battlefields, with great success.”—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom

CHARLES R. BOWERY, JR. is an officer in the U.S. Army who has taught Civil War history at West Point, led tours of Civil War battlefield sites, and authored Lee and Grant: Profiles in Leadership from the Battlefields of Virginia. ETHAN S. RAFUSE is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of nine books, including McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union and Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, 1863-1865.

New on the Personal Bookshelf--- Chimborazo: Confederacy's Largest Hospital

Chimborazo: The Confederacy's Largest Hospital, Carol C. Green, University of Tennessee Press, 200 pp., notes, bibliography, index, illustrations, paperback, $21.95.

A long time on the wishlist, Chimborazo was added to the personal bookshelf when I finally got to Chimborazo Hospital's site in Richmond. While staying at Williamsburg, VA my GPS spoke to me: "Richmond is onlyh 45 minutes away!" So the next day on to Richmond's American Civil War Center, The Tredegar Ironworks, Chimborazo Hospital, and the Edgar Allan Poe Museum! Blue skies and 45 degrees and cruise control!

The former headquarters building for the NPS's headquarters for the Richmond Battlefield Parks, the building marking the Chimborazo Hospital site did not exist during the Civil War. Though small, the building has a 2001 film and a very fine diorama of the hospital. Several of the items in the bookstore begged to be taken to my house but I limited myself to one but wrote down three titles to add to the wishlist. The Confederate States Medical Journal, published in 1864 and 1865 is once again in print and is priced at $95.

"Chimborazo covers the organization of the Confederate Medical Department of Chimborazo Hospital, staff leader Dr. James B. McCaw, the surgeons, staff and patients. Medical treatment and supplies is covered as is the closing of the hospital. The author offers an evaluation of the hospital.

Opened in October of 1861, the hospital covered over forty acres and operated between 75 and 80 wards grouped into five separate divisions Each ward was a hut made of whitewashed pine boards that housed up to forty patients, giving the entire hospital a capacity of over 3,000. Every division had its own laundry, kitchen and bathhouse, and a central bakery and dairy serviced the entire facility, making Chimborazo one of the Confederacy's best-equipped hospitals as well as one of the largest. Directly outside the grounds were the J.D. Goodman brewery and the city's Oakwood Cemetery.

More than 76,000 Confederate sick and wounded were treated here. Chimborazo had a patient mortality rate of 20 percent; dismal by today's standards, but quite good in terms of nineteenth century medicine, before the days of antibiotics, antiseptic surgery and widespread understanding of germ theory. Indeed, it was viewed by Confederate leaders as one of the finest hospitals their new nation possessed.

Chimborazo hospital was innovative, pioneering several new techniques in medicine. Its use of separate wards allowed patients to be grouped together by state - a forerunner of the ward system in modern hospitals." (1)

(1) Richmond National Battlefield---Chimborazo

Forthcoming---The Great Escape, February 1864

Libby Prison Breakout:The Daring Escape from the Notorious Civil War Prison, Joseph Wheelan, Public Affairs Press, 352 pages, $26.95. February 2010

In warehouses along the Virginia waterfront, Union prisoners of war were held in desperate squalor—freezing, malnourished and subjected to hateful mistreatment. Among the worst of these makeshift prisons was Libby, a former tobacco warehouse where 1,200 Union officers slept without blankets on the bare floor and subsisted on scraps of cornbread and rancid meat. Many died, most endured; the most audacious plotted their escape. Joseph Wheelan, a prolific biographer and former AP editor, recounts the improbable tale of 109 courageous officers in Libby Prison Breakout—the first book to chronicle this amazing escape in depth. Charting the transformation of stately Richmond, Virginia, from antebellum gentility to wartime industrial center, Wheelan depicts the citizens’ attempts to cope with mounting privations as the Confederate Army commandeered Richmond’s food, clothing and goods. Martial law, protests, food riots and harsh countermeasures nurtured among Richmond’s populace a seething hatred of “the Yankee,” an enmity that would color the treatment of prisoners from the North. With prisoner exchanges at a standstill, Union POWs could scarcely hope for a timely release. And while the Union Army’s treatment of Confederate POWs was constrained by the Lieber Code (an antecedent to the Geneva Convention), no such code of conduct shielded Union prisoners from a prison system that “at times seemed expressly designed to induce suffering.” The often highly educated officers proved resourceful at coping with their captivity, but disease, lice, cruelty, overcrowding and sheer boredom made escape an increasingly urgent prospect. In November 1863, two recently captured Union officers, Colonel Thomas Ellwood Rose and Major A.G. Hamilton, began to dig a 55-foot tunnel under Libby Prison. Leading 107 of their fellow captives, they fled in the chill of winter through the heart of the Confederate homeland, with Rebel soldiers in hot pursuit. Their successful escape lifted Northern morale, and their subsequent Congressional testimony, detailing their cruel and degrading treatment, led to the imposition of harsh measures against Rebel POWs. Drawing from primary sources including letters, journals, prison records and even issues of the prisoners’ weekly “newspaper,” Wheelan makes this little-known historical event feel palpable and current. The author does not flinch from depicting the ghastly human cost of war, nor does he give short shrift to the tale’s colorful characters—such as Col. Abel Streight, a man of imposing physical presence, formidable intellect and larger-than-life personality; or the one-woman “spy ring” of Elizabeth Van Lew. Libby Prison Breakout is a valuable contribution to Civil War historiography, and a richly rewarding reading experience.

Joseph Wheelan, a former Associated Press reporter and editor, is the author of Mr. Adams's Last Crusade, Invading Mexico, Jefferson's War, and Jefferson's Vendetta. He lives in Cary, North Carolina.

Source: Public Affairs Press and History Book Club