The Capital of the Confederacy

Virginia did not secede quickly or eagerly. When the Deep South states left the Union in the winter of eighteen sixty to sixty-one, Virginia held back. The convention that had convened in February voted down secession on the fourth of April. What changed everything was the fall of Fort Sumter and Abraham Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand militia volunteers to suppress the rebellion. Forced to choose between the Union and their sister slave states, Virginia's convention reversed course on the seventeenth of April, eighteen sixty-one. The vote was eighty-eight to fifty-five. Three days later, Robert E. Lee resigned his commission in the United States Army.

The choice made Virginia the war's central stage. Confederate President Jefferson Davis moved the capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond in May of eighteen sixty-one, a decision that shaped four years of strategy on both sides. Washington and Richmond stood barely one hundred miles apart. Protecting one and capturing the other became the twin obsessions of the Eastern theater.

The result was four years of war fought almost entirely on Virginia soil. The battles have become a drumbeat of American memory: First Manassas, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor. The Shenandoah Valley was burned twice, once by each side. An estimated one hundred thousand soldiers died in Virginia alone. A third of all major Civil War engagements took place on Virginia ground.

On the ninth of April, eighteen sixty-five, Lee met Ulysses Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house at Appomattox Court House and signed the terms of surrender. The war in the East was over. The house where Virginia had hosted its most violent years now hosted its close.