habited the dense and business part of the town, where
their houses were serried and compact; and, driven forth by the fire,
they sought the street in their plumes and calicoes, to spend a cold and
shivering bivouac in the square of the Capitol. From afar, the rich men
of Sunday watched the flames of Monday sweeping on in terrible
impetuosity, knowing that every tongue of light which leaped on high
carried with it the competence they had sinned to acquire. And behind
all, plunderer, incendiary, and straggler, came the one vague,
overlapping, dreadful fear of--the enemy. Would they finish what friends
had commenced,--the sack, the desolation, the slaughter of the place?
Richmond had cost them half a million of lives, a mountain of blood and
wealth, four years of deadly struggle; would they not complete its ruin?

The morning came; the Confederates were gone; cavalry in blue galloped
up the streets; a brigade of white infantry filed after them; then came
the detested negroes. Behold! the victors, the subjugators, assist to
quench the flames,--and Richmond is captured, but secure!

Many of the churches were open on the Sunday of April 9, 1865, and were
thinly attended by the more adventurous of the citizens, with a
sprinkling of soldiers and Northern civilians. Mr. Woodbridge, at the
Monument Church, built on the site of a famous burnt theatre, prayed for
"all in authority," and held his tongue upon dangerous topics. The First
Baptist Negro Church has been occupied all the week by Massachusetts
chaplains, and Northern negro preachers, who have talked the gospel of
John Brown to gaping audiences of wool, white-eyeball, and ivory,
telling them that the day of deliverance has come, and that they have
only to possess the land which the Lord by the bayonet has given them.
To-day, Mr. Allen, the regular white preacher, occupied the pulpit, and
told the negroes that slavery was a divine institution, which would
continue forever, and that the duty of every good servant was to stay at
home and mind his master. Half of the enlightened Africans got up midway
of the discourse and left; the rest were in doubt, and two or three
black class-leaders, whom the parson had wheeled over, prayed lustily
that the Lord would keep Old Virginny from new ideas and all Yankee
salvations; so that in the end the population were quite tangled up, as
much so as if they had read the book of Revelation. I attended Saint
Paul's, the fashionable Episcopalia