Richmond as the Confederacy's Capital

When the Confederate States of America moved their capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond in May of eighteen sixty-one, the decision was driven by industrial logic as much as political calculation. Virginia had just voted to secede. Its industrial output was nearly equal to that of all the other Confederate states combined.

Richmond sat at the center of that economy, with the Tredegar Iron Works on the James River and five railroad lines converging on the city. Richmond was chosen as the Confederate capital on May eighth, eighteen sixty-one, and held that status for nearly four years. Jefferson Davis governed from an office near the Capitol.

The Confederate Congress met in the same building where the Virginia General Assembly had been meeting since the seventeen eighties. The city's population roughly tripled as the war came. Soldiers, government workers, refugees, and prisoners of war all arrived.

The Richmond-area prison camp at Belle Isle on the James River and the warehouse prison called Libby Prison in Shockoe Bottom held Union officers and enlisted men under conditions that deteriorated badly as the war lengthened. Richmond was the target of the Union war effort throughout. General George McClellan came within sight of the city's church steeples during the Peninsula Campaign of eighteen sixty-two before Robert E.

Lee drove him back in the Seven Days Battles. General Ulysses Grant laid siege to nearby Petersburg from June eighteen sixty-four until April eighteen sixty-five, slowly starving the Confederate lines until they broke. The Confederacy's time as a functioning government ended here.

The city that served as its capital has spent the century and a half since working through what that history means, pulling down monuments in twenty twenty, excavating the slave trade site in Shockoe Bottom, and building museums that attempt to tell all of it at once.