On the night of April 2, 1865, the Confederate government of the United States of America packed what it could carry and fled Richmond, Virginia, by train.

It had taken four years to reach this moment. It took approximately three hours to end.

The Evacuation

Jefferson Davis received the telegram from Lee in his pew at St. Paul's Episcopal Church during Sunday services: the Petersburg lines had broken; Richmond could not be held; evacuate the city. Davis rose and walked out without a word. Witnesses said his face was white.

The government packed its treasury — gold coin, Confederate currency, bullion from Richmond banks — into an armored train and left. Cabinet members, officials, and their families scrambled for whatever transportation existed. Many did not make it. By midnight, the orderly government evacuation had devolved into a chaotic flight.

The Fire

Confederate forces were under orders to destroy military supplies before the Union Army arrived. Warehouses of tobacco and cotton were set ablaze. Ammunition depots were detonated. The Richmond & Danville Railroad bridge over the James River was set on fire.

The fires spread beyond military targets. By dawn on April 3, much of Richmond's commercial district was burning. Looters stripped stores in the early hours of chaos. The city's enslaved and free Black population moved through the streets freely for the first time.

Union cavalry entered Richmond at 8:15 a.m. on April 3, 1865. They raised the United States flag over the Confederate Capitol building. Within an hour, Black residents were streaming out to meet them, some weeping, some shouting, some simply standing in silence watching the flag go up.

Lincoln's Visit

Abraham Lincoln arrived in Richmond on April 4, with a minimal escort and no announcement. He walked through the streets of the fallen Confederate capital for two hours, surrounded by crowds of Black Richmonders who had heard the President was in the city. Some of them knelt. Lincoln reportedly told them to kneel to God, not to him.

He sat briefly at Jefferson Davis's desk in the Executive Mansion.

The Meaning

Richmond's fall was the symbolic end of the Confederacy even before Appomattox formalized it six days later. The government had existed to defend a nation, a way of life, a social order built on enslaved labor. When it fled its own capital in the night, the argument was over.

For the Black residents who had lived under that government — enslaved, controlled, owned — the morning of April 3 was the first morning of a different world. They did not know yet what Reconstruction would bring, what legal structures would be built or dismantled, what violence would follow. They knew the flag over the Capitol had changed.

That was enough, for one morning, to warrant walking out into the street and watching it go up.