Richmond: Capital of the Confederacy, Then and Now
Near Richmond, Virginia
Richmond was the capital of the Confederate States of America from eighteen sixty-one to eighteen sixty-five. The choice was partly strategic, Richmond was an industrial center, home to the Tredegar Iron Works, the primary cannon foundry for the Confederate Army, and partly symbolic. Virginia was the most significant state in the Confederacy in both population and historic standing.
Having Virginia's largest city as the capital was a statement about what the Confederacy thought it was. The capital fell on April third, eighteen sixty-five, when Confederate forces evacuated and set fire to the warehouse and business district to deny Union forces its resources. The fires burned out of control through the night.
Union soldiers helped Richmond residents fight the fire the next morning. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, sixty miles west, six days later. Monument Avenue, the broad boulevard that runs through a residential neighborhood of Richmond, was lined from the eighteen nineties through the nineteen twenties with equestrian statues of Confederate generals, Lee, Stuart, Jackson, Davis, and others.
In twenty twenty, following the killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed nationally, the city took down the Confederate monuments it owned on Monument Avenue, and the state removed the Lee statue the following year. All of them are gone. The pedestals remain in some cases.
The statue of Arthur Ashe, the Richmond-born tennis champion, remains at the end of the boulevard. Ashe was added in nineteen ninety-six after a long controversy. His statue faces the same direction as the Confederate statues that flanked him.
The avenue now has a different, unsettled character that nobody has quite decided how to resolve.
