About the Author

Ernest B. “Pat” Furgurson, formerly a correspondent and columnist for the Baltimore Sun, has spent most of his life in the nation’s capital. A native of Virginia, he is the author of Freedom Rising, Chancellorsville 1863, Ashes of Glory, and Not War but Murder. He lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews

Following his definitive analysis in Chancellorsville 1863, Furgurson offers a splendid account of Richmond during the Civil War that proves that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction. Using archival sources and first-person published accounts, he tells the story of a city that between 1861 and 1865 epitomized the experience of the Civil War as a revolutionary one. Capital of a state that had long opposed secession, Richmond now became the symbol of Southern independence. It also remained a center of clandestine Unionism that hosted a struggle between espionage networks matching anything seen in Cold War Berlin. Industrial hub of an agrarian society, Richmond, Furgurson demonstrates, was a focal point for changing race relations as blacks became ever more essential to the city's economy, inspiring fear among whites. Self-defined embodiment of traditional Southern values, wartime Richmond attracted the Confederacy's "new men" (and women): profiteers, madams, refugees. Furgurson is particularly successful in presenting the erosion of conventional standards and the increasing randomness of everyday life for everyone from congressmen to prostitutes. With each passing month, it became more apparent in Richmond that, no matter what the war's outcome, things would never be as they had been. Furgurson's dramatic depiction of the spectrum of individual responses to that fact, from resignation to affirmation, makes this work comparable to Alfred Döblin's fictional chronicle of another city in the throes of change: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Photos and maps not seen by PW. (Sept.)

In this rich, full-bodied "people's history" of the Confederate capital, freelance historian Furgurson gives us many Richmonds as he moves back and forth between affairs of state and accounts of people trying to keep body and soul together during the Civil War. Furgurson's Richmond teems with women in crinolines and men with swords and epaulets but more so with a host of ever-fraying nurses, clerks, prisoners of war, factory workers, slaves, refugees, and others caught in the swirl of inflation, corruption, profiteering, disease, espionage, and unraveling of the social order. Furgurson overstates the military significance of Richmond and often takes people's accounts at face value, but he does not exaggerate the contradictions of energy and inertia, charity and greed, and hope and horror among a people not only at war with the Union but with themselves. Furgurson's powerful narrative takes us behind the lines and never lets go. For public and academic libraries.‘Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

YA‘Furgurson has woven together a masterful account of the war years using a variety of sources, including archival newspapers, diaries, and official records. The result is a unique look at the Civil War as experienced by the people of Richmond‘the politicians, the soldiers, the workers, the women, the slaves, and the Union prisoners of war. The author chronicles their lives from the heady initial days of secession to the misery of the shortages during the later years of the war to the final agonies of the city's burning in 1865. This blend of different perspectives leaves readers with a vivid impression of what life was like in the heart of the Confederacy and how people coped.‘Robert Burnham, R. E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA