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[Virginia:] Richmond or Babylon has fallen [opening lines of verse].
[Virginia:] Richmond or Babylon has fallen [opening lines of verse].
[Virginia:] Richmond or Babylon has fallen [opening lines of verse].

[Virginia:] Richmond or Babylon has fallen [opening lines of verse].


Unpublished(?) lyrics conceivably written just post-collapse of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, during the Civil War in Spring of 1865.

In four verses, written in “black dialect”, the narrator writes of African-American soldiers who have come to Richmond to “fight for Uncle Sam” and warn that they’ve come to fallen Babylon (Richmond) to “occupy de land”. The reader may think they see lightning flaming in “de cone break” but this is in fact “dems de darkies bayonets and de buttons on them uniform”. The final verse explains how the former slaves’ master was a colonel rebel, but was now their prisoner.

Contemporary accounts described Richmond as “Babylon” and in one instance as the “Moloch of the rebellion”.

With this curious item came a small playbill fragment printed on green paper and dated 1867 presenting a “Great satirical comical sable performance of the oldest niggers in the Colony.”


Description: [Virginia:] Richmond or Babylon has fallen [opening lines of verse].

[Np. Spring 1865?]. Blue quarto-sized sheet, folded once; very good.

[3727491]

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