How the Confederate capital’s citizens, white and Black, faced their future in the wake of Union victory

In April 1865, the Civil War that had consumed the lives of the residents of Richmond, Virginia, for four years ended in a vast conflagration that nearly destroyed their city. As Confederate troops fled and Union forces streamed in, the world they had known literally went up in flames. None could predict what would replace it when the smoke cleared. After the Fire, the highly anticipated follow-up to Nelson Lankford’s Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital, tells what happened next. Lankford deftly narrates the desperate struggle of Confederates and Unionists, men and women, and white and Black Americans to shape the postwar landscape, emphasizing above all the far-reaching contingency of that pivotal moment.

Offering a kaleidoscope of perspectives from individuals living at the epicenter of the great social and political cataclysm of the nineteenth century, After the Fire evokes a vanished world of privation, defeat, jubilation, false starts, engrained antagonism, and the lost causes of Confederate nostalgia and of racial reconciliation. Most important, Lankford unsettles the sense of inevitability that conditions so much contemporary thinking about this deeply transformative time and puts the reader in the shoes of those who lived through it.