![]() ![]() There were also 8 flour mills, a paper mill, 13 carriage manufacturers, 10 saddle and harness makers, 4 gunsmiths, a sailmaker, 4 soap and candle manufacturers, 2 rolling mills, 14 slave traders, 14 hotels, 13 newspapers, 15 restaurants, 11 private schools, 26 druggists, 9 dentists, 72 doctors, 72 saloons, a canal and 5 railroads. The Richmond Armory had a capacity for manufacturing 5,000 small arms a month. The Richmond Laboratory manufactured more than 72 million cartridges, as well as grenades, gun carriages, field artillery and canteens. ![]() The Tredegar Iron Works made more than 1,100 cannons, in addition to mines, torpedoes, propeller shafts and other such war machinery. Thirteen working foundries made it the iron-manufacturing capital of the South. Five foreign nations had consulates in the city. Prewar Richmond had become an important international city, trading coffee, spices, slaves and other commodities for cotton and tobacco. Richmond had been the capital of the Confederacy since May 1861, when the new Confederate Congress voted to move it there from Montgomery, Ala., thinking that Richmond would be more prestigious and closer to the bulk of the fighting. Now Richmond huddled behind a besieged army, listening to the perpetual boom of enemy artillery, awaiting an inevitable conclusion. They had been replaced by a citizenry that had seen many great victories on the battlefield but always the return of the bluecoats and the relentless and methodical destruction of the South’s once productive farms, railroads and cities. The true believers in a quick and decisive victory for the South were all gone by then. The residents of Richmond, Va., in early 1865 no doubt would have fully appreciated Pound’s reply. Confronted by a student in his Harvard poetry class wanting to know why he had censored his own poem, ‘Sestina: Altaforte,’ which praises war, Pound replied slowly and deliberately, ‘War is no longer amusing.’ America's Civil War: The Fall of Richmond CloseĮzra Pound, the renegade poet of the 20th century, spent his later years disavowing the actions of his youth. ![]()
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