Read Bloody Crimes for Free Online Page B

the principal thoroughfares of the city…as night came on pillage and rioting and robbing took place…Richmond saw few sleeping eyes during the pandemonium of that night.”
    Union troops outside Richmond saw the flames and heard the explosions. An army officer, Captain Thomas Thatcher Graves, observed: “About 2 o’clock on the morning of April 3d bright fires were seen in the direction of Richmond. Shortly after, while we were looking at these fires, we heard explosions.”
    A t about 3:00 A.M., while en route to Danville, Davis’s train stopped at Clover Station, about sixty miles northeast of its destination. A young army lieutenant, eighteen-year-old John S. Wise, saw the train pull into the station. Through one of the train’s windows, he spotted Davis, waving to the people gathered at the depot. Later, Wise witnessed the train carrying the Confederate treasury pass, and others too. “I saw a government on wheels,” he said, “the marvelous and incongruous debris of the wreck of the Confederate capital…indiscriminate cargoes of men and things. In one car was a cage with an African parrot, and a box of tame squirrels, and a hunchback.” From one train a man in the rear car cried out, to no one in particular, “Richmond’s burning. Gone. All gone.”
    As Davis continued his journey, Richmond burned and Union troops approached the city. Only a few miles away, Lincoln and Admiral Porter heard incredible explosions, and Lincoln feared that some U.S. Navy guns had exploded. But Porter reassured him that the thundering booms were far off, evidence, no doubt, that the Confederates were blowing up their own ironclad warships to save them from capture. U.S. Army scouts closing in on Richmond noticed a bright glow painting the sky above the city like a luminous dome. The scouts knew it was too pronounced to be the result of a celestial phenomenon or gaslight streetlamps. The city must have been on fire.
    Around dawn a black teamster who had escaped Richmond reached Union lines and reported what Lincoln, Porter, Grant, and others suspected. The Confederate government had abandoned the capital during the night, and the road to the city was open. There would be no battle for Richmond. The Union army could march in and seize the rebel capital without firing a shot.
    The first Union troops entered the outskirts of Richmond shortly after sunrise on Monday, April 3. They marched through the streets, arrived downtown, and took hold of the government buildings. They also began the work of extinguishing the fires, which still burned in some sections of the city. When Lincoln’s army raised the Stars and Stripes over the fallen capital, it signaled, for many Southerners, the end of the world. And then, scant hours after Davis had left it, the Union seized the White House of the Confederacy, pressing it into service as the new headquarters for the army of occupation.
    The population of Richmond had endured a night of terror. The ruins and the smoke presented a terrible sight. “By daylight, on the 3d,” witnessed Captain Sulivane, “a mob of men, women, and children, to the number of several thousands, had gathered at the corner of 14th and Cary streets, and other outlets, in front of the bridge, attracted by the vast commissary depot at that point; for it must be remembered that in 1865 Richmond was a half-starved city, and theConfederate Government had that morning removed its guards and abandoned the removal of the provisions, which was impossible for want of transportation. The depot doors were forced open and a demoniacal struggle for the countless barrels of hams, bacon, whisky, flour, sugar, coffee…raged about the buildings among the hungry mob. The gutters ran whisky, and it was lapped up as it flowed down the streets, while all fought for a share of the plunder. The flames came nearer and nearer, and at last caught in the commissariat itself.”
    Union officer Thomas Thatcher Graves entered the city in the early