Richmond, VA

As a Virginia’s Appalachian hotspot, Richmond has America's richest culture and history. Here is the home of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” during American independence and the President Jefferson Davis’s White House of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Three days in April 1865, no other city had experienced so much concentrated fighting during the war and the drama of its final days. On Sunday, April 2, 1865, when the news of General Robert Lee’s defeat at Petersburg reached Richmond, Confederate troops began to evacuate the city and set fires to military, tobacco, and cotton warehouses throughout the city, the last bridge across the James River was also destroyed. On Monday, the Union army marched into Richmond. The next day, on April 4, Abraham Lincoln arrived unannounced in the city and walked up Main Street toward Capitol Square. When Richmond fell, so did the Confederate cause. Exactly one week after Jefferson Davis fled the city, General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Five days later, President Lincoln was assassinated.Read more