'On to Richmond!'

Battle Cry of Federals Found Stirring Reply
In Aged Handbill Just Discovered

When I was a child, it was considered the thing to do for those of us who lived in Ginter Park, to go to the breast-works and coast when the snow fell. Vast hills these breast-works looked to be; and if you knew anything at all about coasting, you could get up enough speed going down one hill to send you at least half way up the opposite hill. There were casualties, of course; but those didn't keep the crowd away. We all thought we were pretty lucky to have such a winter playground and we were having too much fun to bother about why those hills were known as the breast-works.

Now, almost on the spot where those fine hills used to be (on Brook Road at Wilmington Avenue) is a marker that tells you that here was where General Kilpatrick was turned back on his raid, in March, 1864. I had not known that when I was praying for snow and bumming sleigh rides at the breast-works. I thought of Yankees as fearsome objects who had once infested Richmond and I was sure that General Lee was in the Bible; but that was all. Down in our celler we had a rusty old sword my father had picked up at Seven Pines and there were enough Confederate flags in our house to supply a regiment; but I wasn't unduly curious: The Yankees had been here and now they were gone. It made me light-hearted, but not too much so; for I was just entering upon fractions.

When I was a child the Yankees had been gone more than fifty years. Yet the war was closer to me than the World war ever got. I looked upon the North as an alien country--an enemy country even, and I sang "I hate the nation's eagle, its uniform of blue" with all the spirit that I should have put into "Onward Christian Soldiers." It takes much more than 50 years to forget a war that came to your mother's and father's home.

I wonder if that printer who got out those handbills at white heat during those hours of Kilpatrick's raid and if the man who worded them so thrillingly and so poignantly had any notion how close they would make the War Between the States seem to 1938--to people who are going about their business over 70 years later. All the busy people I showed this handbill to, stopped their business to read it and re-read it. (Some of them, like the old New England lady who had just finished "Gone With the Wind" said "damn the Yankees").

'Enemy Approaching the City'

"The enemy undoubtedly are approaching the city," this handbill tells you, "and may be expected at any hour with a view to its capture, its pillage and its destruction. The strongest considerations of self and of duty call every man to arms! A duty which none can refuse without dishonor. All persons, therefore able to wield a musket, will immediately assemble upon the Public Square where a regiment will be found in arms, and around which all can rally, and where the requisite directions will be given for arming and equipping those who respond to this call. The Governor confidently relies that this appeal will not be made in vain."

No wonder that we who were the grandchildren of the men who defended Richmond had grown up with the feeling for this war in our hearts. For that handbill was not a newspaper scare. The enemy were approaching the city and they were, in truth, bent upon its pillage and its destruction.

"once in the city it must be destroyed," read the official papers telling of this raid, that were found on the body of Colonel Dahlgren, who, attacking Richmond from the West was to join with Kilpatrick who was coming from the North. "Jefferson Davis and his cabinet must be killed. Pioneers will go along with combustible material. Horses and cattle which we do not need immediately must be shot rather than left. Everything on the canal and elsewhere of service to the rebels must be destroyed."

What brought panic to the people of Richmond when they heard of this approaching raid was the fact that there was not much reason to hope that it would not be successful. The chief purpose of the raiders was to free the 13,000 Federal prisoners in Richmond. And even so excellent a soldier as General Wade Hampton believed that they would have been successful had not Colonel Bradley Johnson intercepted a dispatch from Dahlgren to Kilpatrick asking what hour the latter had fixed for an attack on the city. "I regard the force to defend Richmond inadequate as at present located," General Hampton observed a few days after the attempted raid, "and if a determined and concentrated attack is made grave apprehensions of the result are to be entertained."

As early as October 1863 General Lee had forseen that these Northern prisoners in Richmond were a constant danger and menace to the food supply and that the North would in all likelihood make an attempt to free them.

The inadequacy of the guard at the prisons, Libby Hill, Belle Isle and Castle Thunder (affectionately known as Particular Hell by the inmates) had kept Richmond in constant dread of an uprising of the prisoners. Early in 1864 it was reported that 600 stands of arms had been concealed among the prisoners on Belle Isle. Double guards were immediately posted on the island. But in spite of these precautions, there was known to exist an organization of Federal officers at Libby prison in preparation for the time when they would be able to break forth and take the city.

In February, 1864, not many days before the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren raid, 109 officers escaped from Libby Prison by excavating a 57-foot tunnel to a shed near the prison. When the tunnel was opened they crept through it under cover of night. Only 48 were captured before they reached Union lines.

These prisoners were not only enemies. They were hungry (as were the inhabitants of Richmond) and, wrote Provosttary of War Seddon: "no force under my command can prove adequate to the control of 13,000 hungry men."

When the two columns under the command of Kilpatrick and Dahlgren advanced on the city with the avowed purpose of freeing these men there was panic-stricken fear among those who had to do the defense of the city.

Would these thousands of people outside the city who had not had enough to eat for months on end join with the freed prisoners in the hope of bread for their families?

The bread riot not quite a year before had shown what hungry people would do. The militia was woefully inadequate and could it be depended upon to turn against Richmonders? The army had all it could do in field and there were no men to be spared to aid the militia.

In the midst of such terror the authorities decided that there must be a desperate remedy: As the raiders approached the city Libby Prison was undermined and 200 pounds of powder were placed in a hole. If they attempted to break out, the prisoners were told, the whole prison would be blown up.

The raiders never reached Richmond. But it was the closest call that Richmond ever had until Evacuation Day. Dahlgren who had planned to cross the James River at Dover Mills hung his innocent Negro guide, because he believed that he had deceived the Federals in saying that there was a ford at the river there. The Negro had not deceived him, but the river had: It was swollen from the spring rains.

A few days later Dahlgren was killed. And the fearless Wade Hampton pursued Kilpatrick, who beat an inglorious retreat back to Washington.

There is this old yellowed handbill which fell out of a book the other day, and was discovered by chance, you see part of the story---and you almost hear the bell in the old tower in Capital Square ring...