James river, at the falls, visited the tract in September 1733, and decided to found there the town of Richmond, at the same time selecting and naming the present site of Petersburg. The name Richmond was suggested probably by the similarity of the site to that of Richmond on the Thames. The settlement was laid out in April 1737 by Major William Mayo (c. 1685–1744), and was incorporated as a town in 1742. The public records of the state were removed thither in 1777 from Williamsburg, and in May 1779 Richmond was made the capital. On the 5th of January 1781 the town was partly burned by a force of about 800 British troops under Gen. Benedict Arnold, the 200 or 300 Virginians offering little resistance, and much of the damage being done by Lieutenant-Colonel John G. Simcoe’s celebrated Rangers. Richmond was first chartered as a city in 1782, and in 1788 it was allowed a representative in the House of Delegates.
The importance of Richmond during the Civil War was principally due to its having been made the capital of the Confederate States (by act of the Provisional Government on the 8th of May 1861). Its nearness to Washington, the material and manufacturing resources concentrated in it, and the moral importance attached to its possession by both sides, caused it to be regarded as the centre of gravity of the military operations in the east to which the greatest leaders and the finest armies were devoted from 1861 to 1865. (See American Civil War.) The city’s system of defences, which began to take form in May 1861, included a line of 17 heavy batteries, completely encircling it at an average distance of about 2 m.; another line of smaller batteries and trenches, from about a mile (or less) to about 2 m. beyond the heavy batteries, and practically unbroken from the north bank of the James (west of the city) to about 1 m. west of that river (south of the city); and the outer works, approximately paralleling the inner line, at distances of from 2 to 3 m. from this line north and east of the city. There was much confusion and lawlessness in Richmond during the earlier stages of the war. The city’s police force was unable to cope with the situation created by the influx of soldiers, gamblers and adventurers, and on the 1st of March 1862 President Davis (by authority of a secret Act of the Confederate Congress passed on the 2nd of February) declared martial law in the city and the country within a radius of 10 m., suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and appointed General John H. Winder (1800–1865) to enforce military rule. General Winder’s arbitrary exercise of his power was, however, resented so vigorously by the citizens that on the 19th of April the Confederate Congress materially modified the law under which he received these powers from the president. The opening of M‘Clellan’s Peninsula Campaign (see Yorktown; Seven Days, &c.) in 1862 caused great apprehension in Richmond, and in May 1862 some of the government records were packed up and preparations made to ship them to a place of safety. The approach of the “Monitor” and the Union gunboats up the James river caused a partial and temporary panic; President Davis appointed a day for prayer, and the families of some of the cabinet secretaries and many citizens fled the city precipitately; but confidence, restored by the checking of the fleet at Drewry’s Bluff (Fort Darling), about 8 m. below the city, on the 15th of May 1862, was increased by the battle of Fair Oaks and the Seven Days, after which the Army of the Potomac retreated. Unsuccessful attempts were made in February and March 1864 to free the Federal prisoners in Richmond by means of cavalry raids. The most important of these was that of General H. Judson Kilpatrick, a portion of whose force, under Col. Ulric Dahlgren (b. 1842), was annihilated, Dahlgren being killed (2nd March).
General U. S. Grant began the final campaign against Richmond in May 1864 (see Wilderness and Petersburg). Sheridan’s cavalry, during the “Richmond Raid,” carried the city’s outer defences (May 12), but found the river line too strong to be taken by assault and moved away. In June Grant’s army crossed the James and attacked Lee in Petersburg. Then followed many months of unintermittent pressure upon both Petersburg and Richmond. General Benjamin F. Butler captured the southern outer line of the Richmond defences on the 29th of September 1864. On the 2nd of April 1865 Petersburg fell. Richmond was evacuated that night, after the ironclads, the bridges and many of the military and tobacco store-houses had been set on fire by order of General R. S. Ewell, so that when the Federal troops, under General Godfrey Weitzel (1835–1884) entered the city on the following morning (3rd April) a serious conflagration was under way, which was not extinguished until about one-third of the city, including several of its historic buildings, had been destroyed. During the war the principal iron foundry of the Confederacy (Tredegar Iron Works) was in Richmond, and here most of the cannon used by the Confederate armies were cast. In 1910 the city of Manchester was annexed.
See William W. Henry, “Richmond on the James” in Historic Towns of the Southern States (New York, 1900), edited by Lyman P. Powell; and Samuel Mordecai, Richmond in By-Gone Days (Richmond, 1856; 2nd ed., 1860).
RICHMOND AND DERBY, MARGARET, Countess of (1443–1509), mother of the English king, Henry VII., and foundress of St John’s and Christ’s colleges at Cambridge, was the daughter and heiress of John Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and was born on the 31st of May 1443. In 1455 she married Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond, who died in the following year; she then took for her husband Henry (d. 1482), son of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, and later Thomas Stanley, afterwards earl of Derby. She was in constant communication with her son, the future king, during his exile in Brittany, and with her husband, Lord Stanley, aided him to gain the crown in 1485. The countess was very pious and charitable, and under the influence of her confessor, John Fisher, afterwards bishop of Rochester, she founded the Lady Margaret professorships of divinity at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She completed the foundation of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and after her death, in accordance with her wishes, much of her wealth was devoted to building and endowing St John’s College in the same university. She survived her son, whose title to the English throne was derived through her, and died on the 29th of June 1509. The countess translated some devotional books into English, and Fisher said of her, “All England for her death had cause of weeping.”
See C. H. Cooper, Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1874).
RICHMOND AND LENNOX, FRANCES TERESA STEWART, Duchess of (1648–1702), daughter of Walter Stewart, or Stuart, a physician in the household of Queen Henrietta Maria when in exile after 1649, was born in 1648 and was brought up in France. Notwithstanding the desire of Louis XIV. to keep her at his court, she was sent to England by Henrietta Maria in 1683, when she was appointed maid of honour to Catherine of Braganza, Queen of Charles II. Pepys describes her at this time as the greatest beauty he had ever seen, and Henrietta Maria called her the prettiest girl in the world. Charles II., who is said to have first seen “La belle Stewart” in the apartments of his mistress Lady Castlemaine (afterwards duchess of Cleveland), quickly became enamoured of her; but for some
