After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat

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

In April 1865, the Civil War, which 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 tells what happened n...