After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat

A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era

by Nelson D. Lankford

How the Confederate capital’s citizens, white and Black, faced their future in the wake of Union victory

In April 1865, the Civil War that had consumed the lives of the residents of Richmond, Virginia, for four years ended in a vast conflagration that nearly destroyed their city. As Confederate troops fled and Union forces streamed in, the world they had known literally went up in flames. None could predict what would replace it when the smoke cleared. After the Fire, the highly anticipated follow-up to Nelson Lankford’s Richmond The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, tells what happened next. Lankford deftly narrates the desperate struggle of Confederates and Unionists, men and women, and white and Black Americans to shape the postwar landscape, emphasizing above all the far-reaching contingency of that pivotal moment.

Offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives from individuals living at the epicenter of the great social and political cataclysm of the nineteenth century, After the Fire evokes a vanished world of privation, defeat, jubilation, false starts, engrained antagonism, and the lost causes of Confederate nostalgia and of racial reconciliation. Most important, Lankford unsettles the sense of inevitability that conditions so much contemporary thinking about this deeply transformative time and puts the reader in the shoes of those who lived through it.

368 pages, Hardcover

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American Civil War is the defining period in a rich history that belongs to all Americans. No city personifies the Civil War like the capital of the Confederacy. Richmond is both the image of dignity and manhood for the Confederacy and the very seat of rebellion and insurrection for the United States. Richmond would survive the war relatively unscathed only to become the epicenter for what Reconstruction would look like. Author Nelson Lankford, former editor of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, has written an excellent history of post-war Richmond titled After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025, 356 pgs., $32.95). After the Fire is a volume in the A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era series from the University of Virginia Press,
Richmond is the quintessential southern city. Its’ history goes back to Virginia’s colonial era. Presidents visited Richmond. Famous Virginians such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Robert E. Lee all knew Richmond as a place where they could feel that their work was important. However, Richmond also exhibited dehumanizing slave auctions, extreme racial segregation, and a desire to celebrate figures such as Lee, who many believed had committed treason. Richmond was cast aflame on April 3, 1865 in what many thought was a signal for the proverbial phoenix to rise from the ashes.
Lankford uses a wide variety of primary sources to describe life in Richmond immediately following the end of the war through the first years of Reconstruction. His prose is an excellent narrative that flows smoothly from that fateful day in April of 1865 through the end of the 1860s and the emergence of the white supremacy inspired government of the many ex-Confederates pardoned by President Andrew Johnson. After the Fire is an excellent social history. It serves a welcome need for a volume that explores the impacts of the Civil War on everyday citizens, former Confederates, and government officials striving to reshape modern America. After the Fire deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of any reader interested in the Civil War and American history.



Matt

After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat
Nelson D. Lankford
upress.virginia.edu
ISBN 9780813953366 356 pgs.,, $32.95 $26.69 Kindle

[Josh C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding walk through the immediate aftermath of the Confederacy's defeat in Richmond itself. In addition to familiarizing us with immediate day-to-day life in the burned-out, defeated capital, Lankford is unsparing about Northern politicians' refusal to enforce the defeat of the Confederacy on the city's political-economic upper class (over the objections of their own military occupation commanders), tracing it to the continued unwillingness they shared with their rebel counterparts to consider Black Americans as equals. He's also clear, though, that pro-equality political groups missed their own opportunities in infighting over the writing of Virginia's new constitution, a condition of readmission to the Union.

I do wish he'd gone a little deeper into the beginnings of the Robert E. Lee personality cult; he is careful to briefly highlight it but spends more time on the immediate formation of Confederate Memorial Day observations and Jefferson Davis's re-emergence into public life. Perhaps it was less Richmond-focused than the other facets of nascent Lost Cause ideology?

[Mshelton50 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent book by Nelson Lankford, for years the editor of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. His earlier book, Richmond Burning, covered the last days of the Confederate capital, culminating in the terrible fire that destroyed so much of the city. After the Fire deals with the tumultuous period from the fire’s immediate aftermath to July 6, 1869, when voters approved a new state constitution that paved the way for Virginia’s reentry into the Union. Highly informative, very well written, and beautifully produced by the University of Virginia Press.