Adam Badeau, Military history of Ulysses S. Grant from April 1861 to April 1865. Volume 2

[540] to and fro, but of no use. The negroes stood silent, wondering what would be their fate. Next, all horses were impressed. Then, committees were appointed by the city government to visit the liquor shops and destroy the spirits. Hundreds of casks were rolled out of doors and the heads knocked in. The streets ran with liquor, and women and boys—black and white—were seen filling their buckets from the gutters. The commissariat stores were also opened, and their contents thrown out to the excited throngs. Some of the shopkeepers offered clothes to the departing soldiers. The streets were filled with people hurrying to the different avenues of exit; porters, carrying huge loads, ran hither and thither; the banks were all open, and depositors were anxiously collecting their specie, directors as anxiously getting off their bullion. Millions of dollars of paper money were carried to the Capitol square, and buried there.

After nightfall Ewell's command, the garrison of Richmond, was withdrawn, burning the three bridges across the James in its flight; and, worse still, an order was issued to fire the four principal tobacco warehouses. The magistrates protested, but, in the mad excitement of the hour, the protest was unheeded, and the torch was applied. These stores were near the centre of the city, side by side with important mills, and the flames soon seized the neighboring buildings, and involved a wide area of the richest portion of the town.

And now Pandemonium seemed let loose. The guards of the penitentiary fled from their posts, in imitation of their superiors, and numbers of the lawless and desperate villains incarcerated for crimes of