Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Nelson D. Lankford, author of After the Fire: Richmond in Defeat

What inspired you to write this book? 

After I finished Richmond Burning, which described Confederate collapse and the fire that consumed the business district of Virginia’s capital, I went on to other projects. But in the back of my mind there always lurked the question, What happened next? I finally decided to scratch that itch and find out for myself exactly how the people of Richmond confronted the aftermath of war and fire. How former Confederates faced the burdens of defeat. How Black Richmonders pushed for equal rights and built a thriving parallel community. How political compromise led to a biracial democracy that ultimately failed.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

In my writing I learned that great uncertainty persisted in postwar Richmond long after the immediate end of the war: uncertainty about how to eke out a living amid the ruins, uncertainty about political rights, uncertainty whether the promise of emancipation would be fulfilled. I hope readers will leave After the Fire with a sense that society had an especially precarious tenor in the aftermath of devastation and a feeling that things could have turned out quite differently at many points along the way.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

I supposed the greatest surprise I encountered, other than the pervasive sense of uncertainty, was the sweep of characters who populated the postwar city. They truly constituted an amazing kaleidoscope of personalities, all grappling with their altered circumstances in their different ways. A minority of white Unionists forging a new polity amid the ruins of the old, the former Confederates who opposed them because they could not envision a new Virginia, Black entrepreneurs building new businesses, industrialists trying to revive their shattered fortunes—they all played their roles in the Richmond that arose from the devastation and loss of total war.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

My favorite anecdote is about Garland White, a chaplain with a Black Union regiment that entered Richmond on April 3, 1865, the day of Confederate collapse. White had been born into slavery in Virginia but as a child escaped to the North. When freed people crowded around his regiment to welcome their liberation, an old woman bend with age and toil quizzed White. When he answered her queries to her satisfaction, she told the startled chaplain she was his mother. A true story!

What’s next? 

The immediate aftermath of the Civil War has always fascinated me, and my next book fits into that time frame too. It will present the story of John Surratt, the rebel plotter who, for a time, eluded the manhunt after John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln. He had been Booth’s principal associate in the criminal conspiracy to abduct the president but was away from Washington when the actor switched the plan from kidnapping to murder. Friends in Canada hid Surratt during the military tribunal that led to the execution of four defendants, including Surratt’s mother. He eventually escaped to Europe and joined the pope’s army but was captured and returned for trial two years after the assassins hanged. In his return to judgment, Surratt became a pawn in the rancorous disputes over Reconstruction and between Andrew Johnson and Congress.