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. 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!" According to Edmund Randolph, the convention sat in profound silence for several minutes after Henry's speech ended. George Mason, who later drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, said that the audience's passions were not their own after Henry had addressed them. Thomas Marshall told his son John Marshall, who later became Chief Justice of the United States, that the speech was "one of the boldest, vehement, and animated pieces of eloquence that had ever been delivered." The resolution passed. Virginia began arming. Barely three weeks later, musket fire erupted at Lexington and Concord, and the war Henry had prophesied was underway. Richmond's St. John's Church thus became the site where the South's revolutionary commitment found its voice—a moment as pivotal, in its way, as the Boston Tea Party or the ringing of the Liberty Bell.

St. John's Church would host not just one but multiple revolutionary assemblies. The Third Virginia Convention met in Henrico Parish Church from July 17 through August 26, 1775, after Lord Dunmore had fled the capital to take refuge on a British warship. The convention created a two-regiment army with Henry as commander in chief, supplemented with county militia and a force of minutemen, and created the Virginia Committee of Safety to act as the executive arm of the revolutionary government.

The convention also divided Virginia into sixteen military districts and resolved to raise regular regiments.

The Fourth Convention met from December 1, 1775, to January 20, 1776, also in Henrico Parish Church, and largely focused on defensive measures, including enlarging the colony's armed force from two to nine regiments. In this way, the modest wooden church on Church Hill served as the de facto seat of Virginia's revolutionary government during the critical months when royal authority collapsed and a new political order was being forged.

On August 5, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was publicly proclaimed in the town of Richmond, "before a large concourse of respectable freeholders of Henrico county, and upwards of 200 of the militia, who assembled on that grand occasion."

The reading took place at the steps of the Henrico County Courthouse on Main Street. The words Thomas Jefferson had written in Philadelphia now echoed through the small riverside town that would, within a few years, become the capital of the Commonwealth.

The years that followed drew Richmond ever closer to the center of Virginia's revolutionary politics. In 1779, Thomas Jefferson succeeded Patrick Henry as Governor of Virginia, and one of Jefferson's first major acts was to champion the relocation of the state capital from Williamsburg to Richmond. The move, formally enacted in 1780, was driven by both strategic and democratic logic. Jefferson publicly declared that the capital would move to the small town of Richmond due to its centralized and defensible location.

However, a major deciding factor was political: Richmond housed fewer Loyalists compared to Williamsburg, where British governors such as Lord Dunmore had created a long-lasting loyalist base.

When the legislature convened in Richmond on May 1, 1780, it met in a makeshift building near Shockoe Bottom —there was as yet no proper statehouse. Jefferson would later design Virginia's permanent State Capitol, conceived by Jefferson and French architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau based on the Maison Carrée, an ancient Roman temple in Nîmes, France.

Construction began in 1785 and was completed in 1788 , creating the first adaptation of the Roman temple form to a public building, a design that has been enduringly influential in the use of Classical models for such structures.

But before Richmond could enjoy the fruits of its new status, it would endure one of the most humiliating episodes of the entire war. Sailing from New York in December 1780 with more than 1,600 troops, Benedict Arnold moved up the James River on December 31, 1780, landing at Westover Plantation on January 4, 1781, before marching on Richmond. The new state capital was dangerously unprepared. Arnold's force of Loyalist "greencoats," consisting of infantry, dragoons, and artillery, arrived at Richmond, which was defended by approximately 200 militiamen. His timing was excellent; most of the defenders were nearing the end of their enlistment periods and were so confident that Richmond was safe from attack that they had not bothered to establish defenses or post sentries. Upon seeing the