Richmond

Richmond has been the capital of the Confederate States of America since 1862. Every President of that nation lived in the Gray House in Richmond and administered the CS from it.

During the War of Secession, the Union launched three major land campaigns and one naval campaign to take the city, but all failed. It would be many decades later before Richmond was again threatened militarily.

During the Great War, Richmond was at the end of the effective range of US aeroplanes for most of the war, and thus was only occasionally subjected to bombing raids (unlike Washington, DC and Philadelphia). During that war, Richmond was also an important port of call for Entente navies in the Atlantic.

When the war ended, the US forced the CS to agree to a number of territorial concessions. One of these expanded the state of West Virginia to put Richmond within shelling range of the US. After the war Richmond became a destination for demobilized Confederate veterans. The city's population swelled, and the infrastructure was unable to accomodate the new residents. Civil unrest ensued, with active military personnel periodically forced to fire on disgruntled veterans. It was during this time that the Freedom Party was first founded in the city. (Jake Featherston was a native of Richmond.)

Like most Confederate cities, Richmond was economically from the end of the Great War through the early 1930s. It began to recover under the Freedom Party's policies, and played host to the 1936 Olympics, an extravagant event aimed at showing the world that the Confederacy had recovered from its Great War defeat and postwar depravities.

In 1940 Al Smith became the first President of the United States to visit Richmond since before the War of Secession. There he signed the infamous Richmond Agreement with Featherston, agreeing to plebiscites in Kentucky, Houston, and Sequoyah--an agreement whose terms, of course, Featherston never intended to honor.

When war broke out between the US and CS in 1941, a US army under Daniel MacArthur advanced on Richmond but was halted by the Army of Northern Virginia at the Battles of Fredericksburg. A planned campaign by MacArthur that would copy George McClellan's 1862 Peninsula Campaign (though presumably MacArthur would have led the campaign more aggressively than McClellan did) was abandoned when MacArthur's intention to proceed with it against the General Staff's orders was betrayed by Abner Dowling.

However, the combination of Richmond being closer to US territory than it was in the Great War and improvements in airplane technology made Richmond a much easier bombing target. It is visited by US bombers nightly, and as of late 1942 few denizens of Richmond were able to live and work indoors above ground.