Richmond

Richmond, Virginia: The Revolutionary Capital Forged in Fire and Oratory

Few American cities can claim that their role in the Revolution began with one of the most electrifying speeches in the English language and culminated with their streets set ablaze by a traitor in the service of the British Crown. Richmond, Virginia, holds both distinctions, and the arc between those two moments—Patrick Henry's immortal call to arms in March 1775 and Benedict Arnold's devastating raid in January 1781—reveals a city that was not merely a backdrop to the war but an active crucible in which ideas about liberty, governance, and religious freedom were tested by philosophy and by fire.

In the spring of 1775, Richmond was still a modest town of perhaps six hundred residents, perched on the falls of the James River and far overshadowed by Williamsburg, the colonial capital. A village of roughly three hundred homes, its residents were concentrated in the modern neighborhoods of Shockoe Bottom and Church Hill, with most houses lining Main Street and warehouses and workshops along the waterfront where the James River runs shallow. Yet it was precisely Richmond's relative obscurity that made it attractive to Virginia's most radical patriots. When the Second Virginia Convention needed a meeting place beyond the easy reach of Royal Governor Lord Dunmore and his marines, the delegates chose Henrico Parish Church—now known as St. John's Church—on Richmond's Church Hill. St. John's was the largest available public building in the city , and William Byrd II had donated the land and timber for the church when it was built in 1741. Beginning on March 20, 1775, one hundred and twenty delegates gathered in the small wooden church to debate the colony's response to the escalating crisis with Great Britain. The delegates came and went over the course of the convention, which lasted from Monday, March 20 through Monday, March 27, 1775; on the first day, ninety-five delegates were present, and the number rose to one hundred and twenty as the days went by. Among them sat George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and Peyton Randolph, men whose names would soon be inseparable from the founding of a nation. Other notable delegates included Benjamin Harrison V, Thomas Mann Randolph, Richard Bland, and Francis Lightfoot Lee. The Reverend Miles Selden, rector of St. John's, was chosen as chaplain of the convention and was popularly referred to as the "Patriot Parson." But it was Patrick Henry, the fiery Hanover County lawyer already famous for his opposition to the Stamp Act, who seized the moment with a resolution calling on Virginia to organize its militia for armed defense.

On March 23, 1775, Henry rose to speak. According to the recollection later reconstructed by William Wirt from the memories of those present, Henry built his argument with lawyerly precision before arriving at a peroration that still reverberates across centuries: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" His resolution passed, but barely. The convention created a committee that included George Washington to develop a plan for organizing and arming Virginia's men. In its final acts of business, the delegates appointed Thomas Jefferson to serve as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress if Peyton Randolph was unable to attend, and thanked Miles Selden and the town of Richmond for their hospitality. The convention adjourned on March 27—and less than a month later, on April 19, the first shots of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord.

St. John's Church was not finished with history after the Second Convention's adjournment. The Third Virginia Convention reconvened in the same church on July 17, 1775, after Lord Dunmore had fled the colonial capital and taken refuge aboard a British warship. Meeting through August 26, the Third Convention took major steps to build a real military force for Virginia: it created a two-regiment army with Patrick Henry as commander in chief, authorized counties to organize their own militia units, established a force of minutemen ready to march anywhere on short notice, and created the eleven-member Virginia Committee of Safety to act as the executive arm of the revolutionary government. By the end of August 1775, the conventions and the Committee of Safety had effectively replaced royal government in Virginia. The Fourth Virginia Convention also assembled in Henrico Parish Church beginning December 1, 1775, largely focusing on defensive measures and enlarging the colony's armed force from two to nine regiments.

On August 5, 1776, Richmond witnessed another milestone: the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in the town. A large crowd gathered at the Henrico County Courthouse on Main Street to hear the document read aloud before a concourse of freeholders and upwards of two hundred militia—a scene replicated in communities across the newly declared states that summer.

The war years also transformed Richmond's political stature. In 1779, the Virginia General Assembly voted to move the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond at the suggestion of Governor Thomas Jefferson, who argued that the new seat of government would be safer from British warships, more centrally located for Virginia's western counties, and would benefit from being an inland port on the navigable James River. Richmond also housed fewer Loyalists than Williamsburg, where royal governors had cultivated a long-standing base of support. The move was completed by April 1780, with government books, documents, and furniture shipped up the James River, and the General Assembly convened for its first session in Richmond on May 1, 1780. The small town had no proper capitol building; instead, the legislators met in commercial buildings confiscated from Loyalist merchant William Cunninghame at the corner of Pearl (now 14th) and Cary Streets—structures that would serve as the seat of government until 1788, when the new Capitol designed by Jefferson, modeled on the Roman temple known as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes in southern France, was ready for occupancy. It was in these same makeshift legislative halls that Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom—drafted by Jefferson and shepherded through the General Assembly by James Madison—was adopted on January 16, 1786. That statute, which decoupled religion from government and guaranteed freedom of conscience for all Virginians regardless of faith, laid the foundation for the religion clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

But Richmond's new status as capital also made it a target. In early January 1781, the Revolutionary War struck Virginia with violence and destruction. British General Sir Henry Clinton had sent the turncoat Brigadier General Benedict Arnold to Virginia with more than 1,600 troops—a force consisting of British regulars, Hessian riflemen, and Loyalist soldiers of Arnold's own American Legion—with orders to raid Richmond, disrupt the flow of supplies to General Nathanael Greene's Continental Army in the Carolinas, and establish a fortified British post at Portsmouth. Arnold's fleet sailed from New York in late December 1780, entered the Chesapeake Bay by December 30, and pushed up the James River. On January 4, 1781, Arnold landed his entire army at Westover Plantation, about twenty-five miles from Richmond. Governor Jefferson initially hesitated to call out the militia, believing the ships were merely foraging, but Arnold's troops marched swiftly overland and arrived at the virtually undefended capital on January 5. On the eastern edge of Richmond, Hessian troops dispersed the roughly two hundred Virginia militiamen who had assembled on Church Hill—the very hill where Henry had called the colony to arms six years before. Arnold sent word to Jefferson that he would spare the city if allowed to remove its tobacco stores uncontested, but Jefferson refused. Arnold then set his forces to work destroying public buildings and military supplies. He dispatched Lieutenant