All up and down, as far as the eye could reach, the business portion of the city bordering on the river lay in ruins. Beds of cinders, cellars half filled with bricks and rubbish, broken and blackened walls, impassable streets deluged with débris, here a granite front still standing, and there the iron fragments of crushed machinery,—such was the scene which extended over thirty entire squares and parts of other squares.
I was reminded of Chambersburg; but here was ruin on a more tremendous scale. Instead of small one- and two-story buildings, like those of the modest Pennsylvania town, tall blocks, great factories, flour-mills, rolling-mills, foundries, machine-shops, warehouses, banks, railroad, freight, and engine houses, two railroad bridges, and one other bridge spanning on high piers the broad river, were destroyed by the desperate Rebel leaders on the morning of the evacuation.
“They meant to burn us all out of our homes,” said a citizen whom I met on the butment of the Petersburg railroad bridge. “It was the wickedest thing that ever was done in this world! You are a stranger; you don’t know; but the people of Richmond know, if they will only speak their minds.”
“But,” said I, “what was their object in burning their own city, the city of their friends?”
“The devil only knows, for he set ’em on to do it! It was spite, I reckon. If they couldn’t hold the city, they determined nobody else should. They kept us here four years under the worst tyranny under the sun; then when they found they couldn’t keep us any longer, they just meant to burn us up. That’s the principle they went on from the beginning.”
I had already conversed with other citizens on the subject of the fire, some of whom maintained that it was never the design of the Confederate leaders to burn anything but the railroad bridges and public stores. But this man laughed at the idea.
“That’s what they pretend; but I know better. What was the water stopped from the reservoirs for? So that we should have none to put out the fire with!”
“But they say the water was shut off in order to make repairs.”
“It’s all a lie! I tell ye, stranger, it was the intention to burn Richmond, and it’s a miracle that any part of it was saved. As luck would have it, there was no wind to spread the fire; then the Federals came in, let on the water, and went to work with the engines, and put it out.”
“Why didn’t the citizens do that?”