Ashes of Glory
Furgurson, Ernest B.
Southern Discomfort Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War Ernest B. Furgurson Alfred A. Knopf /4/9 pages $30 REVIEWED BY Eddie Dean M ore than a half-century ago, on his pre-dawn stroll to the...
...He was twice wounded, first in an ill-fated trip to the front lines as a major in the Seven Days campaign of 1862, and later in a clumsy duel with Confederate Treasurer E.C...
...and first of all placed the horrible stars and stripes (which seemed to me so many bloody gashes) over our beloved capitol...
...as Furgurson A. Poe...
...by mid-war, the population had was howling for the ouster of Davis and more than tripled to around 140,000, the Rebel government...
...Today Freeman is remembered mostly for a local high school that bears his name...
...many states' attracting a motley assemblage of profi- righters claimed the Confederacy—which teers and hustlers of all sorts, not to men- had begun conscripting men, among tion prostitution, drunkenness, and other other newly authorized powers—had wanton vice that lent the Confederate cap- become more tyrannical than the Union ital all the sleaze of a frontier town...
...from which they had seceded...
...The most poignant detail of the wretch's last days comes from his will: "I do absolutely emancipate and forever set free from all manner of servitude my woman Corinna Omohundro, and her five children...
...remotely suspected of treason...
...In that high tradition," he wrote in 1932, "the humblest son of Richmond can spiritually keep the company of kings...
...At the sprawling Chimborazo Hospital, thought to be the world's largest, a young widow (and Chimborazo's first matron) witnessed the worst of the carnage...
...Few have tried," writes Ernest Furgurson in the preface to Ashes of Glory, "as this book does, to reach beyond the lives of the celebrated, to the preachers, slave dealers, refugees, spies, nurses, political prisoners, editors, prostitutes, and black and white underclass that kept the city going...
...its strategic proximity to Washington made it a natural choice to replace Montgomery as the Confederate capital...
...Southern Discomfort Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War Ernest B. Furgurson Alfred A. Knopf /4/9 pages $30 REVIEWED BY Eddie Dean M ore than a half-century ago, on his pre-dawn stroll to the offices of the Richmond News Leader, Douglas Southall Freeman would faithfully tip his hat to the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee that towers over tree-lined Monument Avenue...
...he also brings a special sympathy to the subject—his great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier in a Richmond hospital when the city fell in 1865...
...Old-line Richmonders, the blueblooded first 68 March 1997 • The American Spectator families of Virginia ensconced there since Elmore, whom Daniel had dubbed a gam-colonial days, raised their eyebrows at Con- bier unfit for public office...
...I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet," one Rebel rouser yelled at a downtown rally as war broke...
...their "eyes gleamed and teeth clenched as they showed me the locks of muskets to which the blood and hair still clung, when after firing, without waiting to reload, they had clenched the barrels and fought hand to hand...
...Along Monument Avenue, like many a Southern street, there are bumperstickers like "Lee Surrendered, But I Didn't" and "Hell No, I Ain't Fergettin...
...The editor and Pulitzer-winning historian believed the grand memorials to Lee and his fellow Southern heroes blessed and uplifted residents of the former capital of the Confederacy...
...Residents began a steady migration to the countryside and parts South, as the city filled with dying soldiers from both sides...
...One critic Some of the most anti-Confederate vit- called it "an autocracy the most supreme riol came from the very same fire-eaters of modern times...
...Furgurson tells the tale so well that, when the Union troops charge in to put out the flames of the surrendered city, one needn't be a Northern sympathizer to feel relief at their arrival...
...Stalwart Unionists were scattered everywhere, including one petite, eccentric spinster named Elizabeth Van Lew...
...Author of an acclaimed study of Lee's greatest victory, Chancellorsville 1863, Furgurson this time relegates the generals and battles to the background, focusing instead on the no-less-heroic struggles of an entire population under siege —a microcosm of antebellum Southern society in its death throes...
...Her work earned a thank-you visit from Union general U.S...
...was a humble native son, barred in Jim Crow days from the city's whites-only tennis courts, immortalized in dark bronze alongside Lee, Jackson, and the rest of the martyred good-ol' boys...
...The trapped residents suffered no less...
...Centuries-old class structure and decorum went by the wayside as the antebellum good life unraveled...
...he died soon afterward...
...Daniel relentlessly disparaged Davis's military strategy as too defensive and conservative...
...The American Spectator • March 1997 events took place in Virginia and "[a]11 of them— indeed, directly or indirectly, most of the campaigns of the Civil War—were fought for the ultimate prize of Richmond...
...And to us, shivering our thunderbolts against it for four years, Richmond is still a mystery...
...The sculpture is as tawdry as any found at shopping-mall fountains — contemporary kitsch next to its venerable neighbors on the Avenue, those aged figures of epic proportions...
...From page one of Furgurson's gripping narrative, Richmond's inevitable fall hangs over the events—and the doomed characters—like the dreadful portent in some Old Testament parable...
...Home to the region'slargest ironworks, it ranked as the most important industrial center in Dixie...
...Virginia had been one of the last states to secede, and even after Fort Sumter, Richmond opinion remained sharply divided...
...Utilizing newly discovered diaries and manuscripts, Furgurson lends a storyteller's touch to a saga that reads like a novel...
...The News Leader, which earned a national reputation in the fifties and sixties for its stubborn stance against school integration, no longer exists...
...stewed rats began to appear on dinner tables of the formerly wealthy...
...They were even more appalled at before the city went up in flames...
...The ened one of his contributors with a pair of proud capital was now the battered bull's pistols: a frail, pale scribbler named Edgar eye of the entire conflict...
...Naturally Daniel considered Lin- puts it, more than 2,000 military coln something less than human, "an ugly, ferocious old Oran-Outang from the wilds of Illinois," but he was equally harsh on Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his government's "milkand-water" approach to the war...
...He once threat- was slowly being strangled to death...
...The u n re-federate First Lady Varina Davis—not pentantly misanthropic Daniel—whose because she wasn't well-bred, but because literary role model was Jonathan Swift—her paternal grandfather had been a North- died of tubercular fever at age 40, just erner...
...The very presence of Ashe on their hallowed street rankled many locals: here EDDIE DEAN is a senior writer for Washington City Paper...
...The humblest sons and daughters have mostly gone ignored: faceless, nameless pedestrians in the great historical pageant...
...paranoia John Moncure Daniel of the Richmond gripped the populace...
...Depicted in the particular armor of modern American knights, a sweat suit, Ashe seems small-as-life, holding aloft a tennis racket and a book, with a group of children beckoning at his feet...
...the rabble that the fighting brought to their It wasn't only Daniel's Examiner that fair city...
...Grant...
...Just 25 cents a gallon before the war, it was now fetching enough to hasten his ruin: On May 13, 1864, he paid $16o for a gallon of whiskey, and eight days later $125 for another gallon...
...Those bloody gashes remain unhealed even today...
...0 the horrible wretches...
...But soon the outburst of celebrations and patriotic parades would descend into public discord, rioting, dismal rounds of funerals, and, finally, a vanquished city in smoldering, ruins...
...Furgurson uncovers the pathetic story of a slave dealer named Silas Omohundro, who first appears as a successful entrepreneur worth 69 $75,000...
...she despised slavery, and was a Federal spy...
...From her Church Hill mansion overlooking the James River, Van Lew sheltered Union soldiers who escaped from the city's notorious hell hole, Libby Prison...
...even many of those who shun such displays don't fully deny the sentiments behind them...
...Even the devout Confederates were wracked by bitter internal dissension...
...To many Richmonders, this wasn't merely bad art, it was blasphemy...
...His love for almost two decades, she was also his slave—an antebellum romance probably more common than is usually supposed...
...Earlier in the war, they had chivalrously watched their language even in deepest agony...
...Which makes the feelings that 13-year-old Emmie Sublett expressed in a letter to a friend all the more jarring: The Yanks came in...
...In fact the 120-pound Daniel finally took up arms, not only to defend his own honor but that of his country...
...now they swore without restraint...
...Omohundro's ledger tells his tale: in the winter of 1862, he buys his beloved wife Corinna a $100 Christmas present...
...The cost of whiskey, like everything else, had hit preposterous levels...
...Yet I predict that in less than sixty days, the flag of the Confederacy will be waving over the White House...
...And Monument Avenue —that magnificent, indeed ultimate, public tribute to Dixie's Lost Cause—boasts a memorial to the late black tennis star Arthur Ashe...
...Examiner was like many a southern editor Meanwhile Richmond's economy—of the time—a hard-drinking, Yankee-hat- stung by hyperinflation and cut off from ing bachelor who spent as much time in even the most basic food and supplies—duels as behind his desk...
...She also relayed war secrets using her ingenious methods, sometimes tucking a message in a hollow shell hidden in a basket of fresh eggs, or in the double bottom of an antique plate-warmer...
...A quart cost him $32 on the twenty-fifth, and another gallon $14o on the twenty-seventh...
...Coming from such a young girl, her words can only hint at the everyday horror Richmond endured during the war...
...The Richmond citizenry was, for the most part, flushed with pride and gung-ho to repel the Northern invaders...
...A mob of women led a march for bread that ended in a downtown riot of looting and mayhem...
...he fumed in Examiner editorials that Washington was there for the taking...
...I can't think of a name dreadful enough to call them...
...Indeed, Davis imposed who had first goaded the Old Dominion martial law on the city and arrested anyone into the now bloodier-by-the-day conflict...
...Through the years, accounts of Civil War—era Richmond have preserved the nostalgic, pre-Ashe Monument Avenue view, conjuring less an actual city than a mythic realm of stoic Southern cavaliers and damsels in distress...
...Furgurson's achievement is to reveal the roots of this intractable pain and resentment—and to illuminate once again our nation's darkest period, revealing the humanity beneath the squalor and suffering...
...when the Confederate government was seizing civilian horses, she hid her steed in the study rather than let it serve the Rebel cause...
...That was the last entry in his account book...
...Even as she commended Virginia's soldiers as the "best class of men in the field," she noticed a change in her wounded charges...
...On the eve of that "whole conflict," Richmond was in full bloom, rolling in profit from the South's peculiar institution...
...s the siege dragged on, the city of Southern comfort degenerated into a Sodom of desperate survival...
...Its history is the epitome of the whole conflict," as one Northern correspondent put it during the war...
...By the next year, with health and business failing, he turned to drink...
Vol. 30 • March 1997 • No. 3
