Ashes of glory
Subtitle: Richmond at war
By: Ernest B. Furgurson.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; Distributed by Random House
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 419
ISBN-13: 9780679422327
Subjects: Richmond (Va.) -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
Description: In Ashes of Glory, Ernest B. Furgurson conjures up wartime Richmond in vivid detail. We meet not only with such luminaries as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson but with a strikingly broad spectrum of the community: preachers, nurses, newspapermen, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, slaves, slave dealers, bootleggers, actors, spies, prostitutes, prisoners of war, refugees, handsome widows, eager debutantes, and swarms of enlisted men and officers from all over the South.

Furgurson ushers us into the legendary Spotswood Hotel, where generals and gentry communed amid gossip and bourbon. He admits us to the hospitals crammed with amputees and infested by rats.

He plunges us into a bread riot involving several hundred citizens and spurred by a "woman huckster." He shows us that, despite universal hardship, Richmond fairly crackled with spirit: theater manager John Hill Hewitt kept melodrama flowing on the city's popular stages; taffy parties, faro parlors, and sewing circles kept various other constituencies entertained; Colonel Thomas E. Rose of Pennsylvania and dozens more tunneled out of notorious Libby Prison; the genteel Union sympathizer Elizabeth Van Lew conducted an elaborate and extraordinarily successful campaign of espionage.

Meanwhile, beneath the surface, a compound of defiance, despair, and paranoia preyed on the nerves of everyone from President Davis on down, turning a stunned and battered, once-glamorous society virtually inside out.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [367]-404) and index.
Table of contents: title: Who are not for us are against us; title: Save Virginia, and we save the Union; title: Blood before night; title: We shall smite the smiter; title: We have broken the spirit of the North; title: The perfection of true womanhood; title: Our affairs in the hands of noodles; title: The horrors of a political capital; title: You'll have your hands full; title: Shell and be damned!; title: The dazzle of it in their eyes; title: Can't you wait until we're dead?; title: At which angels might weep; title: A scheme so atrocious; title: All the patriotism is in the army; title: The awful hour has come again; title: God has broken our idol; title: Thousands of barefooted men; title: The biting frosts of winter; title: To destroy the hateful city; title: Rats, if fat, are as good as squirrels; title: A question of fearful magnitude; title: And now they will repent; title: Who will answer for the slain?; title: We may never meet again; title: The earth seemed to writhe in agony; title: Our soul bowed down to the dust; title: Epilogue : The company of kings