e
daily journals came out as usual, filled with soothing accounts; that
night came vague rumors of reverses; in the morning vaguer rumors of
evacuation; by Sunday night the public records were burned in the
streets, and the only remaining railway carried off the specie of the
banks; before daylight on Monday, the explosions of bridges and
half-built ships of war shook the houses; in the imperfect day, women,
and old men, and children began to sway and surge before the guarded
depot, which refused to admit them; then the town fell afire; no
remonstrance could pacify the incendiaries; the spring wind carried the
flame from the burning boats on the canal to the great Galligo Mills, to
files of massive warehouses groaning with tobacco, into the heart of the
town, where stores, and vaults, and banks, and factories lined the wide,
undulating streets; it filled the gray concave with flame till the stars
of the dawn shrank to pale invisibility in the advancing glare, and the
crackle of hot roofs and beams, and the crash of walls and timbers,
drowned the cries of the frightened and bankrupt, who beheld their
fortunes wither in an hour, and the inheritance of their children fall
to ashes. By the red, consuming light, poured past the straggling
Confederate soldiers, dead to the acknowledgment of private rights, and
sacking shop and home with curses and ribaldry; the suburban citizens
and the menial negroes adopted their examples; carrying off whatever
came next their hands, and with arms full of "swag," dropping it in the
highway, lured by some dearer plunder. Negroes, with baskets of stolen
champagne and rare jars of tamarinds, sought their dusky quarters to
swill and carouse; and whites of the middle, and even of the higher
class, lent themselves to theft, who, before this debased era, would
have died before so surrendering their honor. All was peril, terror, and
license; all who had nothing to lose were thieves; all who had anything
left to lose were cowards. The conflagration swept through the densest,
proudest blocks, driving off, not only the resident worthy, but the
resident corrupt. Where were the lewd contractors, who had hoarded
Confederate scrip by the basest exactions? With the fall of the capital
their dollars dwindled to dust; four years of crime had resulted in
beggary; still, with grasping palms, they adhered to their valueless
paper, bearing it away. But of all the wretched, the Cyprians were the
foremost. These in