Stay updated with breaking news from George hartsuff. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Petersburg lies at the head of navigation on the Appomattox River, twenty-three miles south of the Confederate capital at Richmond. Its role as a port contributed to its growth in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries. Railroads arrived in Petersburg in the 1830s, and by 1860 five lines converged in the city, making it one of the South’s leading transportation hubs. Petersburg also developed a vibrant manufacturing economy, with twenty tobacco factories, four cotton mills, and a number of iron foundries and flour mills. Petersburg’s 18,266 residents in 1860 were divided almost equally between blacks and whites. No Southern city on the eve of the Civil War (Petersburg would be the seventh-largest municipality in the Confederacy) boasted a higher percentage of African Americans among its free population. Voters in Petersburg cast their ballots for the Constitutional Union candidate in the 1860 presidential election, John Bell of Tennessee, and sent a conditio ....