Source

Ruins in Richmond, Virginia

Classification

primary

Type

photograph

Date

1865~

Citation

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, 1865

Rights

public-domain

Credit

Library of Congress

A photograph of the burned district of Richmond, Virginia, taken in the weeks after the Confederate government set fire to warehouses and military stores while evacuating the city in early April 1865.

Images like this one, widely reproduced in Northern periodicals, fixed the devastation of the war -- and of Richmond as the former Confederate capital in particular -- in the public imagination just as the questions of Reconstruction were beginning to be debated.