The evacuation of the government, though not yet formally announced, was clearly well under way.
At two o’clock, though it was a Sunday, the banks unlocked their doors and instructed customers to claim their deposits. Two hours later, Mayor Mayo confirmed to the City Council that the Confederate government was leaving the city. The City Council, fearful of what triumphant Yankee invaders might do if alcohol were poured upon the flames of their vengeance, appointed men to destroy all liquor supplies in Richmond. When Peter heard that the mayor had authorized a citizens’ committee to meet the federal army and arrange the peaceful surrender of the city, he decided he had learned enough. He had hurried home, pushing his way through crowds of people rushing toward the city’s bridges on foot, carriages and wagons rumbling away stuffed full of trunks and luggage, scrawny horses and mules carrying lone riders into the countryside to the west, and weary and wary servants hauling parcels and bundles to the train station, their eyes burning with expectation in their dark, carefully expressionless faces.
Lizzie had summoned her most reliable young messenger hours ago, and while Caroline kept the lad occupied in the kitchen with biscuits and simple chores, Lizzie swiftly compiled Peter’s observations into a dispatch. Sealing it, she sat back in her chair, light-headed and overcome with emotion.
This could very well be her last dispatch. General Grant might enter the city before he could receive it.
She sent it off immediately anyway, just in case it contained even a single necessary detail that would hasten the liberation of Richmond.
Soon after her messenger raced off to carry her dispatch to a Unionist compatriot who would convey it to General Grant’s camp, a knock sounded on the front door. It was a neighbor, a quiet silver-haired widower who resided with his three widowed daughters on the next block, carrying what looked to be a large box of silverware. “Will you hide this for us?” he asked urgently, glancing nervously over his shoulder. “The Yankee soldiers will not molest you, but my daughters’ husbands fought them, and they will tear our place apart.”
Speechless with astonishment, Lizzie could only nod and hold out her arms for the box. William quickly carried it off to a safe hiding place in a closet, but he had not yet returned from the errand when another neighbor called, pushing a wheelbarrow full of valuables—silver candlesticks, a portrait of a venerable ancestor on horseback in Revolutionary War costume, hatboxes stuffed with papers, and jewelry cases tied shut with twine. He too begged her to keep his family’s treasure safe from the Yankees, and this time she found her voice and promised him she would.
As the frantic day drew to a close, Lizzie observed young soldiers on horseback and on foot bidding hasty farewells to their friends and loved ones before they raced off to what could be their final battle. Some looked resolute, others pale and terrified, and one, a lad Lizzie had known since he was Annie’s age, confessed that he dreaded to report but must obey his orders.
Lizzie walked with him back to his parents’ home, hoping to persuade him to desert now that all seemed lost, but he said he would rather be shot by the Yankees for fulfilling his duty than by the Confederates for abandoning it. Lizzie would rather he not be shot at all, a sentiment she imagine he shared, but he was resolute, so she bade him a sad farewell and turned toward home.
Church Hill was in a frenzy, and from the sound of it the downtown was in an even more frantic state, so Lizzie was almost too distracted to notice the woman in the worn brown dress sitting on her front porch steps within a fenced yard, a plaid wool shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Her gaze was fixed upon the west, her expression so fiercely melancholy that for a moment in the deepening twilight, Lizzie did not recognize her and almost passed by with nothing more than a polite nod. Then, suddenly, the mousy, pinched face and the brown hair thinning along the center part and pulled back tightly into a broad bun evoked a flash of memory, and she stopped short. “Why, Mrs. Lodge,” she gasped. “You’re still here.”
Mrs. Lodge eyed her distastefully. “Of course I am. Where would I go?”
“I certainly wouldn’t know,” Lizzie managed to reply. “It seems that half the city has taken flight.”
“Well, not us, and apparently not you either. How is your sister-in-law?”
“Mary?” Lizzie was again taken aback, and she wished she had not lingered. “She is as fine as she can be, I suppose, given the circumstances.” She would leave it to Mrs. Lodge to puzzle out what that meant.
“She stopped coming to our sewing circle.”
“Well—” Lizzie was struck by the utter ridiculousness of the exchange, chatting banalities as if the city weren’t going mad with panic all around them. “You know how difficult it can be to keep up acquaintances after one moves away.”
“They moved across town, not across the sea,” Mrs. Lodge retorted, but then a disconsolate shadow came into her eyes. “I wonder how many friends I will never hear from again after this night.”
Somehow, the irritating woman’s melancholy touched Lizzie’s heart. “They’ll return,” she said. “When the panic is over, they’ll see there’s nothing to fear and they’ll come home.”
“Nothing to fear?” Mrs. Lodge echoed.
“Of course not,” said Lizzie. “It might not seem so at the moment, but this is a good day. The war will end now. The young men’s lives will be saved.”
“I have a son in the army outside Petersburg,” she said flatly.
Something in her tone made Lizzie hesitate before she replied. “You must be very proud of him—and very worried for him. I am sorry, and I hope you see him soon. You must hope for his life. All that talk about fighting to the last man—it is simply that, just talk.”
Mrs. Lodge fixed her with a cryptic stare. “Death would be better, anything would be better, than to fall under the tyrannical power of the United States government.”
It was useless to talk to her. “Good night, Mrs. Lodge,” Lizzie said gently, and turned away.
She was almost home when she heard swift footfalls and glanced up to see Louisa hurrying toward her. “Miss Lizzie, come quick,” she cried. “They’re going to set fire to the house!”
Lizzie went cold, but she froze only for the length of a heartbeat. As she gathered up her skirts and broke into a run, vivid memories flashed in her mind’s eye: the threatening note from the White Caps, and the red-faced, irate man who had shaken his fist at her the night Union troops had been attacked in Baltimore. That fine house of yours can burn! he had shouted. She had almost forgotten him until the note had been slipped beneath her front door, with the scrawled skull and crossbones and the gleefully malicious warning, Your house is going at last. FIRE.
When they reached home, they slipped through the garden gate and entered the mansion unseen from the rear piazza. “Where are Mother and the girls?” Lizzie asked Louisa as they hurried from room to hall to foyer.
“In the library with Judy and Hannah and the others.”
But not all the servants were hiding inside, Lizzie realized when she tore open the front door and strode out onto the portico. William, Peter, and even the aged Nelson stood there, feet planted firmly, hefting shovels and axes and her father’s ancient flintlock, which was usually displayed on the mantel above the library fireplace. They glared with firm resolve and defiance at a small cluster of men milling about on the sidewalk on the other side of the fence. Lizzie had expected a mob hundreds strong brandishing torches and pitchforks, not a handful of disgruntled fools, and relief sent courage surging through her.
“We don’t want any trouble,” Lizzie called to them sharply. “Leave now and I’ll forget you were here.”
A chorus of boos and hisses greeted her words. “If Richmond falls, you’re going down with it,” a man in a rumpled, threadbare suit snarled, his face distorted by rage.
“You’re a goddamn abolitionist Yankee,” another shouted
, balancing on crutches, his trouser cuffed at the knee where his right leg had been amputated.
“How dare you?” Lizzie exclaimed. “I’m a proud Virginian. I was born in this city. How many of you can say the same?”
“Light up the place, boys,” cried another, and a match flared, and a torch was kindled.
“Don’t be fools,” Lizzie snapped. “If my house burns, yours will follow. I know who you are,” she declared, thrusting a finger toward a man on the right. “Mr. McKinney, the shoemaker. And you, Mr. Fannin, you live above your grocery on Main Street.” Defiant, glaring, she leveled her gaze upon each man in turn. “You are all known to me. If I am what you think I am, do you really believe you could destroy my home and not suffer the consequences, with General Grant about to take the city? And if I am not what you say, may God strike you down for burning innocent women and children out of their home. Shame on you!”
The man with the torch halted, and a few of his companions exchanged wary glances.
“Leave now,” Lizzie ordered firmly. “Go home. Protect your families and your property. Leave the judgment of my actions to history and to God.”
After a long moment that crackled with tension, one by one, the men drifted away. When the last of them had disappeared into the traffic of frantic, frightened citizens hurrying to and fro, Lizzie’s knees weakened beneath her and she would have crumpled had not Louisa steadied her. “Thank you, all of you,” she breathed, forcing herself to stand.
“This is our home too, Miss Lizzie,” said William. “You’ve said so enough. No one’s burning us out, not after all we’ve suffered, not when we’ve almost reached the end.”
Had they? Lizzie wondered. They had struggled so long it was almost unfathomable that deliverance could finally be at hand. It was almost impossible to believe that there would ever come a time when they could lay down their burdens and rest.
While the men arranged to stand watch from the rooftops in shifts throughout the night, the women anxiously packed valuables and food, only what they could carry, and left them in bundles by the front door to snatch up quickly were they obliged to flee. Then Lizzie put her nieces to bed, heard their prayers while artillery rumbled in the distance, and kissed them good night. Mother and most of the servants went off to bed soon thereafter, including William, who planned to relieve Peter on the rooftop at two o’clock, but the bursting shells rending the night air and lighting up the darkness kept Lizzie and Louisa awake, pensive and watchful lest the vengeful men or an even worse threat return.
They were sitting in the library chatting wistfully about their plans after the war—Louisa dreamed of opening a dressmaker’s shop, while Lizzie longed to visit Anna and her family in Philadelphia, followed by a sojourn in Washington City—when not long after midnight, the front bell rang. Wondering why William had not raised the alarm, the women steeled themselves and hurried to the foyer. When Lizzie opened the door, she was shocked when three thin, filthy, shabbily clad men tumbled inside.
Dumbfounded, Lizzie recognized the tallest of the three. “Why, Mr. Lohmann,” she exclaimed.
“Miss Van Lew,” he greeted her, winded and weak but drawing himself up proudly. “Allow me to introduce my companions, Mr. John Hancock and Mr. William White, late of Castle Thunder.”
“Oh, my goodness. Come in, come in,” Lizzie urged as Louisa shut the door behind them. While Louisa raced off to the kitchen to find them something to eat, Lizzie led them to the back room she and her mother had prepared more than a year before in expectation of the mass breakout from Libby Prison. After seeing to their comfort and confirming with William at his lookout post that the men had not been followed, she attended them while they ate and explained how they had made their escape. As the government was evacuating, the authorities had rounded up the Union prisoners and marched them across Mayo’s Bridge to the southern shore, determined to keep them out of reach of the advancing Union army. In the chaos, some of the men had managed to slip away from their captors, and under the cover of darkness Mr. Lohmann had led his companions to Lizzie’s front door.
An hour later, just as the men had settled down to sleep, exhausted but well fed for the first time in months, a soft rapping came upon the front door—another fugitive from Castle Thunder, this time a woman of Isle of Wight County in West Virginia named Mary Pitt, who had been imprisoned for spying since late October. Lizzie sent Louisa on to bed and tended to the woman herself, who was emaciated and covered in bruises and wept silently from relief as Lizzie, angered and horrified by her condition, fed her and washed her face and hands and helped her into a clean nightgown and bed. She could not think of Mary Pitt without imagining the fate that she herself had perhaps only narrowly escaped.
Lizzie could not sleep from anger and worry and excitement, so she went to the library and hastily wrote an account of all that had transpired that day, but whether it was the beginning of a dispatch or an entry for her occasional journal, only time would reveal.
She must have dozed off in her chair, for hours later, she was startled awake by an enormous explosion that shook the house. The smell of smoke permeated the room.
It was not yet dawn. That much she understood through the thick fog of fatigue and fright muddling her thoughts as she pulled herself to her feet and stumbled into the hall. The odor of burning hung faintly in the air, but in the foyer she saw no smoke, and as her disorientation faded, she realized that the smell dissipated as she moved away from the open windows.
She heard footsteps behind her and whirled about. “William,” she gasped. “Is it fire?”
“Yes, Miss Lizzie,” he said, “but it’s not the house. It’s the city.”
“The Yankees have done this?”
“No, the rebels. Mr. Davis left by train at about eleven o’clock last night, but he gave orders to set fire to the railroad bridges to cut off pursuit, and to the warehouses full of cotton and tobacco so the Yankees couldn’t have them.” William shook his head, his expression drawn and apprehensive. “The wind from the south has been picking up, and the fire’s spreading.”
Lizzie gathered up her skirts and raced upstairs and out to the roof, where she discovered Annie and little Eliza staring at the churning black smoke and red flames in the distance below, Eliza with her mouth agape in stunned horror. “Girls,” Lizzie cried. “What are you doing up here alone? It’s dangerous.”
“I’m holding Sister’s hand,” Annie pointed out. “I wouldn’t let her fall.”
“Will the fire burn our house too?” Eliza asked plaintively.
“No,” came Lizzie’s firm, immediate reply, but then she looked again and was relieved to see that her instinctive reassurances appeared to be true. The wind seemed to be carrying the flames toward the Capitol, away from Church Hill. But it was a dreadful sight to behold nonetheless—black smoke billowing, tongues of fire devouring, ruins of once-proud structures crumbling. A huge explosion sent a fireball curling into the sky and shook the house; instinctively she gasped and clutched the girls to herself—the fire had engulfed an armory, setting off all the ordnance within. In the early morning light, the railroad bridges over the James were clearly visible as outlines of red flame against the black water below. Strangely, Mayo’s Bridge seemed undamaged, but as Lizzie strained her eyes to see, she thought she saw wagons and men on foot racing to Manchester on the opposite shore, and flickering lights at the terminus that could have been torches, ready to set it ablaze after the last fleeing rebel crossed.
Suddenly she realized that aside from the distant roar of the flames and the occasional explosion as heat and fire set off stored ammunition, all was silent. Richmond was burning, but the alarm had not been sounded. Why had the authorities not rung the tocsin?
Lizzie stood motionless and scarcely breathing, her gaze locked in horror upon the conflagration, which threatened to engulf the entire business district. Her heart ached for anyone in the p
ath of the dreadful, hungry flames. She thought she glimpsed small figures darting about, but only a few seemed to be fighting the fire, while the others—looters, she realized with a chill. Law and order had apparently fled with the Confederate government.
“Annie, take your sister inside,” Lizzie instructed. “Hannah must wonder what’s become of you. She’s probably searching everywhere. Find her, then wash up, get dressed, and go down to breakfast—and don’t come up here again without an adult.”
“Yes, Aunt Lizzie,” Annie replied obediently, and with Lizzie’s help the girls climbed back into the house. Lizzie meant to follow immediately after, but she could not tear herself away from the nightmare scene unfolding in the distance below. Suddenly she heard a shout, and when she spun to face it, she spotted a man clad in a prison officer’s uniform sprinting for the Van Lew mansion as if death pursued him.
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