Some of those passes had been used and their bearer had arrived at last, having made the slowest time on record since the first camel bore the pioneer traveler over an Oriental desert. The queen city of the South had fallen. The story of the great nation that had hovered upon the horizon of our visions had been written out to its last sorrowful word.
On the morning of Sunday, April 2, in the holy calm of St. Paul's Church, we had assembled to ask the great Father of Heaven and earth to guard our loved ones and give victory to the cause so dear to us. Suddenly the glorious sunlight was dimmed by the heavy cloud of disappointment, and the peace of God was broken by the deep-voiced bells tolling the death-knell of our hopes.
There was mad haste to flee from the doomed city. President Davis and his Cabinet officers were in the church, and to them the news first came. They hurried to the State House to secure the Confederate archives and retreat with them to some place of safety.
Fear and dread fell over us all. We were cut off from our friends and communication with them was impossible. Our soldiers might have fallen into the hands of the enemy—we knew not. They might have poured out their life-blood on the battlefield—we knew not. In our helpless deserted condition all the world seemed to have been struck with sudden darkness.
The records having been secured, an order was issued to General Ewell to destroy the public buildings. The one thing which could intensify the horrors of our position—fire—was added to our calamities. General J. C. Breckenridge, our Secretary of War, with a wider humanity and a deeper sense of the rights of our people, tried in vain to have this order countermanded, knowing that its execution could in no way injure or impede the victorious army, while it would result in the ruin of many of our own people. The order was carried out with even greater scope than was intended.
The Shockoe warehouse was the first fired, it being regarded as a public building because it contained certain stores belonging to France and England. A breeze springing up suddenly from the south fanned the slowly flickering flames into a blaze and they mounted upward until they enwrapped the whole great building. On the wings of the wind they were carried to the next building and the next, until when the noon hour struck all the city between Seventh and Fifteenth Streets and Main Street and the river was a heap of ashes.
The flames leaped from house to house in mad revel. They stretched out burning arms on all sides and embraced in deadly clasp the stately mansions which had stood in lofty grandeur from the olden days of colonial pride. Soon they became towering masses of fire, fluttering immense flame-banners against the wind, and fell sending up myriads of fiery points into the air, sparkling like blazing stars against the dark curtain that shut out the sky.
A stormy sea of smoke surged over the town—here a billow of blackness of suffocating density—there a brilliant cloud, shot through with crimson arrows. The wind swept on and the ocean of smoke and flame rolled before it in surges of destruction over the once fair and beautiful city of Richmond.
The terrified cries of women and children arose in agony above the roaring of the flames, the crashing of falling buildings, and the trampling of countless feet.
Piles of furniture and wares lay in the streets as if the city had struck one great moving day, when everything was taken into the highways and left there to be trampled to pieces and buried in the mud.