Booknotes: After the Fire

New Arrival:

• After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat by Nelson D. Lankford (UVA Press, 2025).

Civil War Richmond books fairly abound, which is natural given the city's mega-role in shaping the conflict. Among them are major works, from classic to modern, by Emory Thomas, Ernest Furgurson, Stephen Ash, and Mary DeCredico. Like A.A. and Mary Hoehling's The Day Richmond Died (which I used to encounter inside nearly every used bookstore with a sizable Civil War section), Nelson Lankford's older contribution focuses on the end stage of the city's Civil War experience. His book Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital was first published in 2002 by Viking. Arriving more than two decades later is its sequel of sorts, After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat.

As explained in the prologue, After the Fire "is the story of Richmond and its people in the early months after the war, especially during the pivotal first year." Of course, every Civil War student is familiar with the fire and destruction that ensued as Confederate forces evacuated Richmond in April 1865 and triumphant federal forces moved in. Lankford's narrative "emphasizes the year of tentative rebuilding after the fire, culminating in dramatic events during April and May 1866" that revealed remembrance's stark racial divide (pg. 5).

From the description: After the war, it was left to the citizens to rebuild, and "After the Fire tells what happened next, offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives to evoke a vanished world of privation, defeat, jubilation, false starts, engrained antagonism, and the lost causes of Confederate nostalgia and of racial reconciliation. Nelson Lankford deftly narrates the desperate struggle of Confederates and Unionists, men and women, and white and Black Americans to shape the postwar landscape. Unsettling any sense of inevitability about this pivotal moment in history, Lankford puts the reader in the shoes of those who lived through it."