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By Root 1320 0

carry Jefferson Davis out of the Confederate capital. When Lumpkin reached the railway station, however, he found a panic-stricken crowd held back by a line of Confederate soldiers with drawn bayonets. Upon learning that he could not remove his blacks, the dealer marched them back to Lumpkin’s Jail, a two-story brick house with barred windows, located in the heart of Richmond’s famous slave market—an area known to local blacks as “the Devil’s Half Acre.” After their return, the slaves settled down in their cells for still another night, apparently unaware that this would be their last night of bondage. For Lumpkin, the night would mark the loss of a considerable investment and the end of a profession. Not long after the collapse of the Confederacy, however, he took as his legal wife the black woman he had purchased a decade before and who had already borne him two children.2

With Union soldiers nearing the city, a Confederate official thought the black residents looked as stunned and confused as the whites. “The negroes stand about mostly silent,” he wrote, “as if wondering what will be their fate. They make no demonstrations of joy.” Obviously he had not seen them earlier that day emerging from a church meeting with particular exuberance, “shaking hands and exchanging congratulations upon all sides.” Nor had he heard, probably, that familiar refrain with which local blacks occasionally regaled themselves: “Richmond town is burning down, High diddle diddle inctum inctum ah.” Whatever the origins of the song, the night of the evacuation must have seemed like a prophetic fulfillment. Explosions set off by the retreating Confederates left portions of the city in flames and precipitated a night of unrestrained looting and rioting, in which army deserters and the impoverished residents of Richmond’s white slum shared the work of expropriation and destruction with local slaves and free blacks. Black and white women together raided the Confederate Commissary, while the men rolled wheelbarrows filled with bags of flour, meal, coffee, and sugar toward their respective shanties. Along the row of retail stores, a large black man wearing a bright red sash around his waist directed the looting. After breaking down the doors with the crowbar he carried on his shoulder, he stood aside while his followers rushed into the shops and emptied them of their contents. He took nothing for himself, apparently satisfied to watch the others partake of commodities long denied them. If only for this night, racial distinctions and customs suddenly became irrelevant.3

Determined to reap the honors of this long-awaited triumph, white and black Yankees vied with each other to make the initial entry into the Confederate capital. The decision to halt the black advance until the white troops marched into the city would elicit some bitter comments in the northern black press. “History will show,” one editor proclaimed, “that they [the black troops] were in the suburbs of Richmond long before the white soldiers, and but for the untimely and unfair order to halt, would have triumphantly planted their banner first upon the battlements of the capital of ‘ye greate confederaci.’ ” Many years later, a former Virginia slave still brooded over this issue. “Gawdammit, ’twas de nigguhs tuk Richmond,” he kept insisting. “Ah ain’t nevuh knowed nigguhs—even all uh dem nigguhs—could mek such uh ruckus. One huge sea uh black faces filt de streets fum wall tuh wall, an’ dey wan’t nothin’ but nigguhs in sight.” Regardless of who entered Richmond first, black newspapers and clergymen perceived the hand of God in this ironic triumph. The moment the government reversed its policy on black recruitment it had doomed the Confederacy. And now, “as a finishing touch, as though He would speak audible words of approval to the nation,” God had delivered Richmond—“that stronghold of treason and wickedness”—into the hands of black soldiers. “This is an admonition to which men, who make war on God would do well to take heed.”4

To the black soldiers, many of them recently slaves, this