BGuthrie Photos: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Historical Society and Museum -- Exhibit: Story of Virginia

VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Historical Society and Museum -- Exhibit: Story of Virginia:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VHSSTO_101222_0004.JPG: Cigar store figure This c. 1870 cigar store figure from a tobacconist's shop does not depict the typical Plains Indian, but rather an Indian of the Powhatan and Pocahontas period. This "Indian," however, has unmistakably African features. The maker may have based his image on tobacco labels of the 1700s showing Indians wearing such tobacco leaf crowns and aprons but also depicted as black. Or, it may reflect the 1870s white viewpoint that lumped Indians and blacks together as "colored."
2. VHSSTO_101222_0011.JPG: [7] The Story of Virginia: An American Experience: A Long-term Exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/new_southerners.htm New Southerners After the Civil War, Virginians embraced economic development and the new technologies that were revolutionizing everyday life. At the same time, however, they resisted political and social change, especially racial equality. As a result of this dichotomy, living standards improved and Virginia attained the highest income level of any southern state, but the political system became less democratic and society was rigidly segregated by race. This was the paradox of “The New South.” Reconstruction: As black slavery had been a chief cause of the Civil War, so black freedom was the main issue of Reconstruction. Radical Reconstruction by the Republican Congress happened first in Virginia. Gains for African Americans came rapidly in Virginia in the late 1860s, but Conservatives recaptured power sooner in Virginia than elsewhere. To be recognized fully by the federal government, however, Virginia had to enfranchise black men. With self-help and the ballot, blacks were able to advance their interests for two decades. The so-called Readjuster government of the early 1880s abolished the whipping post—a form of public punishment for blacks only—and favored “readjusting” Virginia’s prewar debt. Instead of repaying the full amount with interest, it freed funds for education and social needs. The 1885 election of Governor Fitzhugh Lee, Robert E. Lee‘s nephew, however, inaugurated the heyday of the Confederate veteran in politics. One-party rule began, culminating in the 1902 constitutional convention that greatly reduced the number of eligible voters, especially blacks, other Republicans, and poor whites. Virginia politics came under the domination of Thomas S. Martin from his election to the U.S. Senate in 1893 until his death in 1919. The prohibition of intoxicating beverages was a major issue of his era, and was achieved in 1916. Then, from the 1920s to the 1960s, Harry F. Byrd virtually controlled Virginia politics. For some eighty years black equality was not part of the vision of those who held positions of power in the state. In place of slavery, they erected a thoroughgoing system of second-class citizenship and rigid segregation. Economic opportunities for blacks were few. In rural areas they often were sharecroppers kept perpetually in a form of debt bondage. In cities they were largely confined to menial jobs and domestic service. Their housing, schooling, and medical care were inferior to that of whites. The 1910s and 1920s were especially bleak and saw the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the adoption in Virginia of the Racial Integrity Act in 1924. Social segregation forced the black community to develop its own churches, colleges, banks, newspapers, barber shops, beauty salons, funeral parlors, burial societies, and sports teams. Out of these institutions emerged a black middle class and role models for youth. Economic Recovery: But if the years after 1885 were a time of political stagnation and social regression, it also was one of vibrant economic change. The industrial revolution reached Virginia in full force. Although the commonwealth remained largely agricultural, many for the first time became employees in tobacco factories, coal mines, and textile, flour, and lumber mills. Virginians actively sought the economic benefits that earning money outside of home production could bring. One of the most important industries was tobacco, which had been important to Virginia since 1612, but now the manufacture of tobacco products came to the fore as demand soared. By 1880 one-quarter of the workforce of Richmond and Petersburg was employed turning out a million pounds of smoking tobacco as pipes and cigars became popular. Equally important was the coming of the railroad. The expansion of railroads in the late 1800s was critical to economic growth, enlarging the market for Virginia’s agricultural produce, manufactures, and natural resources. Small towns sprang up along railroad lines. Roanoke (formerly Big Lick) became headquarters of the Norfolk & Western Railway, which connected the newly discovered coal fields of southwest Virginia to Norfolk and Newport News, which became two of the world’s largest coal ports. The 1873 discovery of vast high-grade coal fields also transformed southwest Virginia from a hardscrabble, sparsely populated agricultural backwater into a booming, industrialized section. Mining, however, was dangerous work, especially before government set any safety regulations, and miners would become one of the few occupations in Virginia to be heavily unionized. In the late 1800s, the coming of the machine age to Virginia coexisted with older, handicraft traditions. By about 1915, however, the postwar flood of mass-produced furniture from outside Virginia crowded out the village cabinetmaker, and the gunsmith and ironmonger followed suit. The disappearance of the blacksmith would take longer, until internal combustion automobiles, trucks, and tractors largely replaced horses and mules by the 1930s. One old Virginia tradition persisted in spite of repeated efforts to suppress it—moonshining—distilling liquor without paying excise taxes. Those charged with collecting the taxes and destroying illicit stills were called revenuers. Prohibition, which began in Virginia in 1916 and nationwide in 1919, made moonshining even more profitable. By 1923, Virginia was the third largest moonshining state. Continuity and Change: Another continuity with the antebellum era was the predominance of agriculture. Despite the growth of industry and commerce, 85 percent of Virginians in 1900 still lived in rural areas, mostly on farms. Farmers suffered from economic downturns in 1873, 1893, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, until war broke out in Europe in 1939. Although railroads had expanded the market for Virginia products, farmers were at the mercy of high railroad freight charges, fluctuating commodity prices, and periodic droughts. Unlike today, many farmers were African American. In the 1930s they produced 30 percent of Virginia’s tobacco and corn, 50 percent of its cotton, and 60 percent of its peanuts. But change came to the farms, too. The use of horses and mules gave way to steam- or gas-powered tractors, while machines such as the peanut picker reduced the need for stoop labor. Life remained hard for both man and beast, however, until electricity reached rural areas at the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit Virginia hard, but not as hard as more industrialized northern states. The Byrd Organization was philosophically opposed to much of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Nonetheless, state Democrats were willing to accept federal money for such public works projects as the Colonial and Blue Ridge Parkways, the Skyline Drive, and Shenandoah National Park. Another aspect of society that changed drastically at this time was education. In colonial Virginia, education had been a private matter for those who could afford it, not a right for everyone. There were no publicly financed schools. Teaching slaves was considered even worse and was made illegal. The wealthy did, however, favor creating institutions of higher learning, and the American Revolution raised the importance of education beyond all imagining. Consequently, a number of colleges had been founded in the commonwealth in the early nineteenth century—the University of Virginia, Washington College, Randolph-Macon College, and the Virginia Military Institute. By 1840, the state was the equal or superior of most states and many nations in higher education for young men. Below that level, however, the story was increasingly dismal. Immediately following the Civil War, formal schools for newly freed black men and women were opened by northern churches, philanthropic groups, and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Generally, northern teachers—white and black—taught in these schools. The Reconstruction Constitutional Convention of 1867–68 mandated a statewide system of free, state-funded schools, for blacks and whites. By 1871 most localities had operational public school systems—racially segregated to minimize controversy. The focus was primary education. Virginia had only a handful of true high schools before 1906. The quality of teaching and level of funding were inadequate, and black schools received the least of both. For all its flaws, however, the public school system of the late 1800s was a major, if incomplete, step in the commonwealth’s path to modernity. Streetcars to Automobiles: A conspicuous symbol of modernity in Virginia’s cities was the electric streetcar. In May 1888, Richmond became the first city in the world to have a fully operational electric streetcar system. Success in Richmond revolutionized transport in cities across the globe. Within fifteen years, 20,000 miles of streetcar tracks were laid in the United States alone. If streetcars were symbols of the new, progressive Virginia, however, they also became daily reminders of Virginia’s system of racial degradation. A 1906 law required black Virginians to sit at the back of all public transit vehicles. Conductors now had to decide a person’s race at a glance, sometimes resulting in fights or lawsuits, and visitors to Virginia were puzzled as to where to sit. Blacks decided to boycott the streetcars. These efforts failed but contributed to the emergence of a strategy of resistance more assertive than that counseled by Virginia-born Booker T. Washington. An unanticipated but ultimately important effect of the streetcar on race relations was the emergence of suburbs. For the first time it was possible to work in a city but live outside it. Streetcars inadvertently fostered segregation by race and economic class. Within fifteen years of their appearance, however, electric streetcars would be doomed by a new means of transport that completely reshaped the commonwealth—the automobile. Wood & Meagher built a prototype gasoline-propelled motor carriage in Richmond in 1896, but no manufacture of vehicles was attempted. Richmond Iron Works produced its first “Virginian” in 1910, began manufacture in 1911, and closed in 1912, the same year in which the “Kline Kar” relocated from Pennsylvania to Richmond. About 2,500 Kline Kars were produced before the company closed in 1923, one of a thousand makers that succumbed to the mass production techniques of Detroit giants such as Ford. Although the vast majority of cars in Virginia before 1923, and all of them afterward, were made elsewhere, the automobile transformed the commonwealth nonetheless. Autos, however, require good highways, which Virginia did not have. In 1910 the speed limit on Virginia’s country roads was 20 m.p.h. In cities it was 8 m.p.h. Roads were so bad that in 1921 a national automobile association advised motorists to detour the entire state if possible. As late as 1926, the only long-distance hard-surfaced road was the Staunton-Winchester Turnpike that had been built before the Civil War. That year, however, marked a new beginning with the inauguration of Harry F. Byrd, Sr. As governor from 1926 to 1930 he orchestrated an unprecedented spurt of road-building. From having a mere 4,000 miles of paved roads in 1918, Virginia had 47,000 miles by 1940 (and 65,000 today). The improved highway network vastly expanded intrastate and interstate trade, fostered the suburbanization the streetcars had begun, made possible a greatly enlarged tourism industry, and empowered ordinary Virginians. One woman claimed that it was not the vote that had made her independent but her car. Revolutions in Technology and Communications: Other technologies also were revolutionizing women’s lives. New appliances that reduced housework enabled some women to work outside the home in factories and mills. Some found work as typists and telegraph operators. Technology also reduced the need for domestic servants. Electric lighting came first. The most important labor-saving devices—electric washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators—came in the 1920s. Virginia’s urban homes and offices had begun to be electrified after 1900, but few farms had electricity until the end of the 1930s. City living became increasingly attractive, and no group made the transformation from rural to urban dwellers more completely than black Virginians. Though some went to Virginia’s cities, many left the state entirely for northern cities. As a result, the commonweath’s black population percentage dropped to a level not seen since 1700. During these same years, from 1865 to 1940, there was a communications revolution that caused the United States to become a single mass market. The telephone was invented in 1876, and service began in Richmond in 1879 and in Norfolk in 1881. The phonograph debuted in 1878 and motion pictures in 1895. In the 1890s the halftone printing process made it possible to reproduce photographs in magazines. Radio became widely available in the 1920s. These innovations lessened rural isolation and broke down state and regional distinctions. The industries they spawned operated nationally. Increasingly, people of all states bought the same phonograph records, watched the same films, heard network radio programs, read the same mass-produced magazines and syndicated comic strips, and were seduced by the same national advertisers.
3. VHSSTO_101222_0046.JPG: Gold cup and rail spike 18-karat gold cup and spike given to John Skelton Williams, president of the Seaboard Airline Railway, upon its completion at Richmond in 1900. Williams consolidated a dozen lines into a system providing through service from Washington, D.C., to Tampa, Florida. It was entirely owned by southerners—briefly—then taken over by Wall Street. Driving the spike tripped a telegraph key that sent a message along the railroad's route announcing its completion.
4. VHSSTO_101222_0049.JPG: Streetcar Beginning in 1888, streetcars were the dominant means of public transportation in Richmond until they were replaced by buses in 1949. A 1906 law required black Virginians to sit at the back of all public transit vehicles. Streetcars inadvertently fostered segregation by race and economic class. The exhibition features this Richmond streetcar, bought by the city in 1918.
5. VHSSTO_101222_0052.JPG: Carousel horse This carousel horse was made by Dentzel Carousel Company of Philadelphia c. 1895 and installed at Forest Hill Park in Richmond at the end of a popular streetcar line. In 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression, the carousel at Forest Hill Park was closed and the carousel animals were dispersed. This one made its way to West Virginia. What is the origin of the word "headman"? The carving of heads of carousel animals was reserved for the most talented master craftsmen. The term "headman" refers to a person in charge.
6. VHSSTO_101222_0068.JPG: Copper still This late nineteenth century copper liquor still, with approximately 100 gallon capacity, was used by the McConnell family of Washington County, Virginia, for its liquor business since about 1890. Moonshining: This large copper still was used in the backwoods near Abington for many years after it was made about 1890. Moonshining is distilling liquor without paying excise taxes, which have been imposed intermittently since the 1790s, and continuously since 1865. Those charged with collecting the taxes and destroying illicit stills were often called revenuers. Prohibition, which made all liquor production illegal, began in Virginia in 1916 and nationwide in 1919. It made moonshining even more profitable. By 1923, Virginia was the third largest moonshining state. The Franklin County Conspiracy, in which dozens of revenuers and government officials were shown to have been bribed by moonshiners, made national headlines for months in 1935 and earned Franklin County, such of Roanoke, the nickname "the wettest place in the United States."
7. VHSSTO_101222_0097.JPG: Maggie Lena Walker Maggie Lena Walker (1867–1934) was the daughter of Elizabeth Draper, a former kitchen slave and then cook in the Civil War household of Union sympathizer Elizabeth Van Lew. Walker grew up helping her mother run a small laundry service. This early business experience led her to be elected at age seventeen to office in the Independent Order of St. Luke, a black burial society. In 1903 she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and was probably the first woman bank president in America. St. Luke Penny Savings Bank is still in operation today as Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, the nation's oldest continuously existing African American bank. Maggie Walker's interests and energy extended beyond her business ventures. She founded the Richmond Council of Colored Women, a group that raised money for education and health programs. She was a political activist in the black community and worked for women's suffrage and then voter registration after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. She published a newspaper, The Saint Luke Herald, and was an active member of First African Baptist church. Until her death in 1934, Walker worked tirelessly to help African Americans achieve economic and social independence.
8. VHSSTO_101222_0119.JPG: The 300th Anniversary Celebration of the Founding of Jamestown by Edward Biedermann shows fifty warships representing eight nations weighing anchor in Hampton Roads and sailing past the exposition grounds (now the Norfolk Naval Base). For logistical reasons, the fair was held at Norfolk.
9. VHSSTO_101222_0126.JPG: Plaster model for equestrian statue of "Stonewall" Jackson on Monument Avenue, by Frederick William Sievers, 1916. In this model , Jackson is not on Little Sorrel but rather another of his horses, Superior. There is a popular but mistaken idea that hooves raised or on the ground indicate whether the rider lived, was wounded, or killed. In both the Lee and Jackson statues, all four hooves are on the ground, yet one lived and the other died. The sculptor, Sievers, said it was simply a matter of artistic impression.
10. VHSSTO_101222_0133.JPG: Yorktown Centennial Medal. The 100th anniversary of the British surrender at Yorktown was an occasion for reconciliation between North and South. The full rapprochement with Great Britain would come no the 150th anniversary in 1931, when even Lord Cornwallis's heir attended.
11. VHSSTO_101222_0158.JPG: Solomon Nachman Died 1929 This table commemorates the esteem in which he was held for his vision, courage, integrity, and energy, making possible the success of this firm Established 1893
12. VHSSTO_101222_0173.JPG: Hetty (Cary) Harrison (1871-1943) c. 1900, by Charles Dana Gibson. Hetty Cary married Fairfax Harrison in 1894 and lived in Belvoir, Fauquier County, after 1907. The artist, Charles Dana Gibson, is perhaps best known for the "Gibson Girl," a stylish, athletic confident model of young womanhood that he based on his wife Irene (Langhorne) Gibson of "Mirador", Albemarle County.
13. VHSSTO_101222_0194.JPG: Gravity-flow visible gas pump, c 1927 made by Progress Manufacturing Company of Arthur, Illinois, with the company name and place etched in the glass. This pump was used near Petersburg, Virginia. After 1927, clock-face pumps became the industry standard, replacing gravity-fed pumps. Progress Manufacturing stopped making pumps in 1928. Serial number 9329 is one of their later ones.
14. VHSSTO_101222_0201.JPG: Anti-billboard cartoon by Fred O. Seibel, 1929. New technologies such as automobiles created new problems as well as opportunities.
15. VHSSTO_101222_0218.JPG: Mercury Rocket Savings Bank
16. VHSSTO_101222_0239.JPG: Richmond from Hollywood Cemetery, by James Mooney, 1908. Mooney's vantage point was practically the same as George Cook's in 1924, although Hollywood Cemetery was only founded in 1849. Cooke produced an oil painting that is now lost, but the resulting print is well known as has been widely reproduced even to the present day. By 1908, the scene was less bucolic than in Cooke's time, yet in all likelihood James Mooney, a Confederate veteran, took pride in this environment dominated by smokestacks because it showed Richmond had recovered from the devastation of April; 1865 and had prospered.
17. VHSSTO_101222_0255.JPG: Natural Bridge, by Flavius Fisher of Lynchburg, 1882. Natural Bridge had been o a major tourist destination since the early 1800s. First stagecoaches, then railroads, brought visitors to one of North American's two most famous natural wonders (the other was Niagara Falls). Automobile travel, however, made visitations possible for a much wider segment of the population.
18. VHSSTO_101222_0274.JPG: Reindeer fur parka worn by polar explorer Richard E. Byrd.
19. VHSSTO_101222_0311.JPG: P.[O.]W. CAMP WHITE HALL, VA. depicts Camp Albemarle, where 260 soldiers from Adolf Hitler's army were incarcerated in the summer of 1944. Secker, the artist of this work, may have been among the prisoners.
20. VHSSTO_101222_0324.JPG: The Slap-a-Jap Club was formed in the aftermath of Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor without having declared war and while still professing peace.
21. VHSSTO_101222_0332.JPG: Deck of aircraft identification playing cards of the type used by plane spotters at aircraft observation stations across Virginia in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor and American entry into World War II. For example, some 1,300 volunteers staffed twelve to fifteen posts in Albemarle County, including one on the University of Virginia campus and another at Monticello.
22. VHSSTO_101222_0338.JPG: Blackout light bulb that produced a very dim light
23. VHSSTO_101222_0349.JPG: British war relief contributors received ceramic tokens and enameled pins as expressions of thanks.
24. VHSSTO_101222_0366.JPG: Carved wood penguin stamped on the bottom "Byrd's South Pole Ship / A Century of Progress 1933." "A Century of Progress" was the motto of the 1933 world's fair in Chicago, commemorating the centennial of the city. Probably this penguin was made from the wood of one of Byrd's vessels and was sold as a souvenir to raise money for another expedition.
25. VHSSTO_101222_0373.JPG: Leather flight jacket of bomber pilot Robert Grant Willis, Jr.
26. VHSSTO_101222_0387.JPG: General George S Patton (1885-1945), commander of the US Third Army in World War II, was born in California, but from Virginians on both sides. In World War I, he claimed that his Virginia ancestors appeared to him in the sky and exhorted him to have the courage to take a German machine gun nest. Patton's briefcase and corncob pipe descended to his godson Henry H Whiting, brother of the donor.
27. VHSSTO_101222_0397.JPG: Give a Virginian's Share appealed to Virginians' pride and sense of history. Can you identify the three background figures? [Lee, Washington, and Jackson]
28. VHSSTO_101222_0403.JPG: Victory Liberty Loan Banner This award banner was typical of the devices used to stimulate sale of war bonds. School rivalries were activated to try to outdo each other in sales. Companies took pride in 100 percent employee participation.
29. VHSSTO_101222_0408.JPG: Fighting the Big Bad Wolf, a 1942 cartoon by Fred Seibel, exhorted housewives to make sacrifices and wise choices to hold down inflation.
30. VHSSTO_101222_0443.JPG: Miller & Rhoads dedicates this plaque in honor of the members of its staff who served in the defense of their country during World War I and World War II
31. VHSSTO_101222_0447.JPG: [9] The Story of Virginia: An American Experience: A Long-term Exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/equal.htm Becoming Equal: Although Queen Victoria did not reign over Virginia, Victorian values did. It is ironic that, although a woman ruled over a quarter of the globe, Victorian values excluded women from the public sphere and from politics through the second half of the 1800s. Women’s Rights: While men continued their monopoly of politics and near monopoly of business, women were able to carve out a sphere of action in social work. Indeed, before 1930, to the extent that there was any social safety net, women mostly made and mended it. But women’s agitation for social change was still within a conservative framework. Seldom did reformers speak of gender equality. Rather, they spoke of women’s special obligations as society’s designated caregivers and childraisers to protect the weak and downtrodden by fighting for health and education reforms. These arguments were respectable enough to persuade Virginia politicians, yet bold enough to effect real improvements. Another area to which women born after the Civil War contributed was the arts. Although women generally were discouraged from having careers, the arts were thought suitable for women because of their presumed greater sensitivity. Many women combined an interest in the arts with concerns for social justice. Among them were Richmond’s Nora Houston, and Ad�le Clark, who said “I’ve always tried to combine my interest in art with my interest in government.” Not surprisingly, therefore, both women were members of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. Equal Suffrage: Orra Gray Langhorne of Lynchburg organized a Virginia Suffrage Association in 1893, but the serious push for votes for women came from the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia from 1909 to 1920. It was unsuccessful. Men feared that politics would degrade women more than their participation would elevate politics. They preferred to keep women on a pedestal. Virginia women, too, were divided over the issue, and politicians never were convinced that most women really wanted the vote. There also were fears that woman suffrage meant enfranchising black women, perhaps endangering white supremacy. By 1912 there was a Virginia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. Women’s contributions to the victory in World War I got them the vote in August 1920, when Tennessee’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment put it into the Constitution. But Virginia did not ratify it until 1952, when its action was purely symbolic. The Equal Suffrage League became the League of Women Voters. Sarah Lee Fain and Helen Timmons Henderson became the first women members of the General Assembly in 1924. There would be no congresswoman until Leslie Byrne was elected in 1992. Mary Sue Terry of Patrick County became the first woman to win statewide office, becoming attorney general in 1986. She also was the first and only woman nominated for governor, but she lost. Some former suffragists shifted to other battles. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the College of William and Mary admitted women as undergraduates in 1918, but the University of Virginia did not until 1970. In fact, those suffragists who supposed that the enfranchisement of women would substantially change the political culture of Virginia were disappointed. Women voted very much like men until the 1980s, when a gender gap appeared, women being more liberal, and men more conservative, than the electorate as a whole. The suffrage movement, social work, and the arts, were prerogatives of middle- and upper-class women. Ordinary Virginia women still labored hard on farms, or in mills, factories, and offices. Ironically, 1920—the year of enfranchisement—marked the recurrence of pressure for women to stay at home. But many could not afford to do so. Despite such pressures, 42 percent of Virginia women in 1970 held jobs, although most were low paying. After 1970, the number of working women grew rapidly, and the gender gap in earnings began to close. Struggle for Civil Rights: Just as World War I spurred the women’s suffrage movement, so World War II gave strength to the civil rights movement. A world war fought in defense of democratic values naturally drew attention to the anomaly of inequality at home. The New South doctrine of “separate but equal” facilities for whites and blacks had been upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1896 and its sanction led to a host of state “Jim Crow” laws that segregated other aspects of everyday life. The civil rights movement that gained impetus from World War II aimed, first of all, at reversing the 1896 decision in regard to schools. As 1954 dawned, it was not apparent that change was in the air. P. B. Young, Sr., publisher of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, wrote that “A hundred years after the Emancipation, Negroes in Virginia have no more reason to hope for freedom and first-class citizenship, plus their acceptance as persons created by God with certain inalienable rights, than they had in 1865.” A resounding victory, however, came in May 1954, when the Supreme Court forbade governments from operating schools segregated by law. The so-called Brown v. Board of Education decision consolidated four lawsuits, including one in which black students in Prince Edward County, Virginia, having first gone on strike, sued to protest unequal education. Virginia’s governor, Thomas B. Stanley, responded to the desegregation decision by declaring that “I shall use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools. “ Thus began “Massive Resistance” under the overall leadership of U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. In 1958 Governor J. Lindsay Almond closed schools in Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Warren County rather than integrate them. When “Massive Resistance” ended in 1959 (except for Prince Edward County), after all attempts to continue formal segregation had failed, “passive resistance” began, including white flight to private schools and to suburbs. Ending Segregation: In 1971 federal judge Robert Merhige, Jr., ordered quotas and citywide busing in Richmond. But the U.S. Circuit Court overturned his attempt to force Henrico and Chesterfield counties to consolidate with Richmond into one school district with massive busing. It ruled that centuries-old county lines not drawn to promote segregation should not be destroyed to facilitate judicial social engineering. The U.S. Supreme Court let the reversal stand. Had Merhige been upheld, his approach would have been forced on communities nationwide. Busing was highly divisive and hastened “white flight” to suburbs which, combined with housing patterns, prevented much integration from occurring. Nonetheless, Brown v. Board of Education was no mere pyrrhic victory. As black leaders had hoped, the repudiation of the principle of “separate but equal” sounded the death knell for the whole system of second-class citizenship for African Americans. The second chapter in the civil rights struggle was for equal access to public accommodations such as theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Progress was made even before 1954. In 1946 the United States Supreme Court overturned a 1930 Virginia law requiring segregation by rows on bus travel between states. In 1949 President Harry S Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order. It took the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, to end segregated facilities such as water fountains, bathrooms, hotels, restaurants, and theaters, and public parks. Student sit-ins at restaurants that would not serve them had brought the issue to the fore in 1960. The students’ motto was “sit until served.” Voting Rights and Political Victories: It was clear, however, that African Americans never could approach equality without the vote that most southern states had denied them since at least 1900. In 1964 the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution banned the poll tax in federal elections. In 1966 the Supreme Court struck down the Virginia poll tax that since 1902 had been used to disenfranchise blacks and poor whites. The federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests and provided federal registrars to enroll black voters in southern states. As a result, in 1969 L. Douglas Wilder became the first black state senator of the twentieth century. Twenty years later he became the first black elected governor of any state. Richmond came under black political control in 1977. Many Virginia municipalities elected their first black mayors. In 1992 Robert C. Scott of Newport News became the first Virginian of African descent elected to Congress since John Mercer Langston in 1890. Blacks largely voted as a block for Democratic candidates and thus became an important voice in the Democratic Party. This had the effect of moving the Democratic Party well to the left of where it had been under the Byrd Organization, turning many white Democrats to the Republican Party, which became competitive for the first time in the twentieth century. A. Linwood Holton, elected in 1969, was the first of three consecutive Republican governors in the 1970s. The Democrats then won the governorship three times in the 1980s. Then, the Republicans won again in 1993 and 1997. Such alternation now seems likely to continue indefinitely.
32. VHSSTO_101222_0465.JPG: White Power poster promoting a rally in Alexandria (c. 1966) aimed at students of George Washington High School and other area high school students.
33. VHSSTO_101222_0472.JPG: The King William [County] Declaration of 1957 breathed defiance of the Supreme Court ruling on segregated schools. It adopted the motto "Liberty or Tyranny" (seen also on the coin they struck). Virginia, however, had been integrated into the United States. It was not 1776 or 1981 again.
34. VHSSTO_101222_0477.JPG: This was the scene at the Rose's Variety Store lunch counter in Portsmouth on February 16, 1960, minutes before a fight erupted. The lunch counter sit-in tactic spread almost immediately from Greensboro, North Carolina to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Hampton University students staged sit-ins at the WF Woolworth store in Hampton. Students in Norfolk sought meals at Bradshaw-Diehl's department store and at Woolworth's. The next week, 150 black students demonstrated at Rose's in Portsmouth and fistfights broke out between young blacks and whites. A crowd of 3,000 later gathered at the shopping center, and twenty-seven people were arrested. In the days following, lunch counters at some establishments were closed. Other store owners voluntarily desegregated their facilities, while others awaited court orders before doing so. Most, however, were forced by economic pressures to give in long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 guaranteed equal access at public facilities.
35. VHSSTO_101222_0502.JPG: KKK Robes Although the Klan was not as powerful in Virginia as it was in other regions of the South, this group of white supremacists still terrorized individuals and communities in the Commonwealth during the mid-twentieth century. This three-piece KKK ensemble from the 1960s includes a full length robe, a pointed hood with red tassel, and a blue cloth belt. The symbols on this robe imply that its owner was a high-ranking Klan member.
36. VHSSTO_101222_0512.JPG: John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert F Kennedy were regarded as martyrs by many members of the civil rights movement. President John F Kennedy's administration did not push for civil rights legislation, but was forced to react to events. The Department of Justice, under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, forced the governors of Alabama and Mississippi to allow black students to enroll at their respective state universities. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B Johnson, was more committed to civil rights and was able to pass momentous legislation in 1964 and 1965. Martin Luther King Jr first gained recognition for his leadership in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955. He became head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, until his murder in April 1968, was the leading spokesman for African Americans. Robert F Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 while running for president, a campaign which attracted widespread black support.
37. VHSSTO_101222_0519.JPG: [10] The Story of Virginia: An American Experience: A Long-term Exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/new_virginia.htm Becoming a New Virginia: World War II set in motion forces that eventually transformed Virginia. In 1945, however, much of Old Virginia remained. Cartoonist Fred Seibel’s personification of the state was “the colonel,” a presumed Confederate veteran, dressed in a white suit, and with a white goatee. The fact that the commonwealth usually was referred to as Old Virginia or the Old Dominion hinted at the continued supremacy of traditional values and beliefs. Among these were a code of honorable conduct—the Virginia gentleman—a tradition of gracious hospitality, a Jeffersonian political culture that favored decentralized power, as well as less pleasant features such as America’s own apartheid system in which status was fixed and immutable and everyone knew his place. Romantic View of Virginia: The public image of Virginia in 1945 was little different than it had been fifty years earlier. In the 1880s and 1890s Thomas Nelson Page had glorified the pre–Civil War South, especially Virginia, in a series of popular novels. More than anyone else of his generation, he was responsible for creating the stereotype of a golden age of harmonious plantation life and honorable living unstained by material concerns. At the same time, author Ellen Glasgow began a career that looked “beneath social customs, beneath the poetry of the past, and the romantic nostalgia of the present.” It was the romantic view of Virginia, however, that got into the mass popular culture of the first half of the 1900s. Many songs were written about Virginia and disseminated through sheet music. Most of them were penned along New York City’s “Tin Pan Alley” by men who had never been to Virginia, but those written by Virginians were little better. In both, sentimental lyrics conjure up a Virginia of moonlight and magnolias, heavy with racial stereotyping of a degrading character, or else they were vapid compositions that could easily be retitled with the name of any state. Virginia on the Silver Screen: Few Hollywood films were made with stories set in Virginia. One, Brother Rat (Warner Brothers, 1938), starred future president Ronald Reagan and his future wife Jane Wyman. It was a lighthearted but positive portrayal of life at Virginia Military Institute, where freshmen are called rats and alumni refer to each other for life as brother rats. The Howards of Virginia (Columbia, 1940) was based on a novel The Tree of Liberty by Elizabeth Page and followed a Virginia family in the American Revolution. It was corny even by 1940 standards, was a commercial flop, and confirmed studio executives in their prejudice against stories where people write with feathers. Virginia (Paramount, 1940) was a pale imitation of 1939’s best picture, Gone with the Wind, right down to the Tara-style mansion. A light drama, it was replete with stereotypes of Virginia as a land of hoop-skirted ladies, columned mansions, deferential blacks, and fox hunting gentlemen. The best of the lot was The Vanishing Virginian (MGM, 1941), based on an autobiographical novel by Rebecca Yancey Williams. Set in Lynchburg after the Civil War, it introduced such historical figures as Gen. Jubal Early, Mr. “Chillie” Langhorne, father of Lady Astor, and Carter Glass. The dust jacket referred to “one of the most gracious and carefree periods in our American life” and, patronizingly, to the “ever refreshing colored servants.” It was a conventional depiction of old Virginia, but it was also about change because it frankly recognized, albeit with regret, the irrevocable passing of an era. A generation later, amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War and Watergate, Americans would find solace in a nostalgic evocation of life in Virginia in the 1930s. “The Waltons,” set in the Blue Ridge Mountains, ran on CBS Television from 1972 to 1981, and in re-runs ever since. The Waltons were a fictional family, but were based on the real experiences of writer Earl Hamner. The portrayal of southern life was idealized to be sure, but the transcendence of family values and virtues had strong appeal at a time of cultural disintegration. Revolutions in Faith: In 1945 evangelical Protestantism still dominated the culture of both black and white Virginians. As early as the 1890s, however, some evangelicals, especially in Appalachia and on the Eastern Shore, rebelled against Baptist and Methodist churches, which they thought had become too conventional, too comfortable as part of the establishment. These people formed “Holiness” churches that emphasized visitations by the Holy Spirit, and they were the forerunners of modern Pentecostals. In the early 1900s church-based political activism tended to favor progressive causes such as prohibition and social work. Black churches would become cornerstones of the civil rights movement. Seminarians frequently led lunch counter sit-ins, and Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels, a VMI graduate, was killed in Alabama in 1965 for his role in promoting voting rights for blacks. However, the perceived collapse of traditional values and beliefs in the 1960s led to a backlash so that, by the 1980s, most religiously based political activism in Virginia was on behalf of conservative causes. The nation’s two best-known religious conservatives were Virginians—Jerry Falwell, a Lynchburg fundamentalist who founded the Moral Majority—and Pat Robertson of Virginia Beach, a charismatic who founded the Christian Broadcasting Company and the Christian Coalition. Yet, the world they faced was a new one. The religious profile of Virginia was far more diverse than ever before, not only from a greater Roman Catholic presence, but from the establishment in the commonwealth of Muslims, Buddhists, Mormons, and Hindus. The greatest threat, however, came from secularism and religious apathy. Stores would be open on Sunday. The state would sponsor gambling. Lent, which once suspended virtually all weddings and celebrations in Virginia, would go almost unobserved. Revolutions in Education: The years since 1945 also have witnessed a revolution in education in Virginia. As late as 1950 the commonwealth ranked 47th of 48 states in the percentage of children actually enrolled in schools. World War II , however, inaugurated a decades long influx of well-off newcomers who have demanded--and whose taxes have supported--quality schools. After the fiasco of “Massive Resistance” ended, Governor Mills Godwin launched an ambitious program of educational modernization. One of his greatest achievements was creation of a community college system, a network of low cost, open admission, two-year colleges that brought higher education within the reach of thousands who previously found it impossible. Moreover, 29 senior colleges and universities in the mid-1960s became 44 thirty years later. New universities such as Fairfax’s George Mason rose to prominence. Such smaller schools as Harrisonburg’s Madison College evolved into gigantic James Madison University. These schools were racially integrated by the mid-1970s and had become open to women. Indeed, most single gender schools in Virginia converted to co-education during this period. Generous state support enabled the commonwealth’s flagship research universities—the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary—to be consistently ranked among the best in the nation in their categories. These improvements in higher education were paralleled by changes in primary and secondary education. By the 1990s, high school graduation rates and student performance on standardized tests were consistently above the national average. At the same time, however, American students, including Virginians, consistently ranked lower than students in many other countries. The educational debate changed from one of quantity—the number of schools, teachers, students being reached, and money being spent—to one of quality. What is being taught and what is being learned? Are graduation rates evidence of educational achievement, or are graduates entering the world undereducated, ill-prepared, and perhaps even functionally illiterate? Cultural and Economic Transformations: Today, many more women work, and in far more varied careers, than in 1945. Many are executives, almost unimaginable then. Blacks no longer are confined to menial jobs and no longer are predominantly poor. Black millionaires, too, were inconceivable in 1945. The one party state and Democratic Solid South are long gone. Agriculture has a much diminished role. Tobacco is under attack. One of the largest components of the economy—at $11.7 billion—is tourism. Much of that is heritage tourism to sites from Virginia’s incomparable history. Another major industry is communications technology. Half of the world’s Internet traffic passes through northern Virginia, and high-tech companies, combined with high-paying federal jobs, have made Fairfax the county with the highest average household income in the nation. Prosperity, however, is not spread evenly (nor ever has been). Many rural communities throughout the commonwealth are slowly dying. The bulk of Virginians live in suburbs, and a swath of Virginia from Fairfax to Stafford to Hanover to Chesterfield to Newport News to Virginia Beach has become part of the megalopolis that encompasses Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. The process of “becoming” is unending and change often is unsettling. As we become something new, we inevitably lose something of the old. Virginians, 46% of whom were born elsewhere, must decide what from the past to carry into the future. For example, the 1990s controversy about admitting women to Virginia Military Institute pitted a longstanding and apparently successful tradition against demands for a more inclusive society, especially at tax-supported institutions. Eventually, women were admitted. When the Disney Corporation proposed to build an American history theme park at Haymarket in Prince William County, some Virginians were thrilled at the recognition of Virginia’s historical primacy, and welcomed the anticipated economic benefits. Others, however, feared that the park would promote congestion and destroy the authentic landscape of the northern Piedmont. They banded together to stop it. Many of the commonwealth’s recent controversies have dealt with race. The state song “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” although written by an African American, was dropped because it used such terms as “old darkey” and “massa and missus.” To date, no substitute has been chosen. Virginia is not among the states that flew the Confederate flag in recent years, but any recognition of the Confederacy—such as gubernatorial proclamation of Confederate Heritage Month—pits those determined to equate any mention of the Confederacy with Nazism against those who still think the Civil War was not about slavery. Legacy and Change: More than sixty years ago philosopher Arnold Toynbee observed that the predominant characteristic of Virginia was resistance to change. Surveying those six decades, however, the remarkable thing is how much has changed nonetheless. Change is the only constant. Much of it has been for the better, some for the worse. Of course, not everyone agrees about which was which, but Virginians today are wealthier, healthier, better educated as a whole, more equal before the law, and better able to advance themselves based on individual merit, than ever before. The principles that George Mason set on paper in June 1776 continue to transform Virginia, America, and the world.
38. VHSSTO_101222_0522.JPG: Ellen Glasgow Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), one of the founding members of the Equal Suffrage League, won a Pulitzer in 1942 for In This Our Life. Her novels attacked the Old Dominion's "coloured spectacles of evasive idealism."
39. VHSSTO_101222_0540.JPG: Nancy Witcher (Langhorne) Shaw Astor, Viscountess Astor (1879-1964) Born in Danville, Nancy Langhorne later lived at Mirador in Albemarle County and in 1901 she married American expatriate millionaire Waldorf Astor and moved to England. In 1919, she was elected to the seat her husband had vacated to move to the House of Lords, becoming the first woman to take a seat in Parliament, where she was Conservative member for Plymouth for twenty-six years. Her causes were temperance, women's and children's welfare, and opposition to socialism. She reveled in the romantic nostalgia that Ellen Glasgow disdained -- at her death in 1964 she had her body wrapped in a Confederate flag before burial at Cliveden, her English home.
40. VHSSTO_101222_0546.JPG: Radford Farm, Virginia Ernest Lawson, c 1936 A member of the famous early modernist group named "the Eight," Ernest Lawson painted colorful landscapes with thick impastos and broken brush strokes. He won acclaim for his views of the bridges of the Hudson, Harlem, and East rivers of New York City. "Color affects me like music affects some persons," he said, "emotionally." He developed what critics called a palette of "crushed jewels." Impressionist Theodore Robinson praised the "primitive rudeness" of views like this rare Virginia scene.
41. VHSSTO_101222_0563.JPG: Waiting for the Ox Team, by Frank E. Schoonover, was painted to illustrate Ellen Glasgow's novel The Deliverance, published in 1904.
42. VHSSTO_101222_0574.JPG: Jukebox Jukeboxes take their name from the Gullah word for "disorderly." This colorful Wurlitzer Model 1015, manufactured in 1946 and used in Thaxton, Virginia, is loaded with Virginia-related songs, including "Cover Me Up with the Sunshine of Virginia" and "Clinch Mountain Waltz."
43. VHSSTO_101222_0578.JPG: Waltons lunch box The Waltons, set in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains in the 1930s, ran on CBS television from 1972 to 1981. The Waltons were a fictional close-knit family, but were based on the real family experiences of writer Earl Hamner. The portrayal of southern life was idealized, but the transcendence of family values and virtues had strong appeal during the upheaval of the Vietnam War and Watergate.
44. VHSSTO_101222_0586.JPG: The original Carter Family consisted of Alvin Pleasant Carter (1891-1960) of Maces Spring, Scott County; his wife Sara; and her cousin Maybelle. The first Carter Family recordings, made in Bristol on August 1-2, 1927, are regarded as the birth of modern country music. Maybelle later formed a singing troupe with her daughters Anita, Helen, and June, and they performed on Richmond's WRVA radio in the 1940s. This photograph is from the estate of June Carter, who married singer Johnny Cash.
45. VHSSTO_101222_0593.JPG: Patsy Cline Decca record album (c. 1961–2) Patsy Cline (1932–1963) is one of the most important artists in the history of country music and is arguably Virginia's most significant contribution to twentieth-century American popular culture. Her songs "Crazy," "Sweet Dreams," and "Walkin' After Midnight" remain among the most beloved ever recorded. More than forty years after her death, the life and music of this Winchester native continue to fascinate and entertain. And her role as a female pioneer in a male-dominated industry remains a powerful source of inspiration.
46. VHSSTO_101222_0596.JPG: Ella Fitzgerald by Richard Frooman, c. 1912 Ella Fitzgerald (1918–1996) was a native of Newport News. She had her first hit ("A-Tisket, A-Tasket") with the Chick Webb Band in 1938. In the 1940s she gained renown as a jazz singer and for scat, the wordless vocal improvisation that became her signature. Already known as "The First Lady of Jazz", she became the "First Lady of Song" for her masterful renditions of "The Great American Songbook" in the 1950s—songs by Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. In the 1960s she was among the most famous entertainers in the world. She won thirteen Grammy awards. Bing Crosby said, "Man, woman, or child, Ella is the greatest of them all."
47. VHSSTO_101222_0603.JPG: Arthur Ashe Jr (1943-1993), winner of the men's single title at the 1968 US Open and the 1975 Wimbledon championship, was widely considered not only a great tennis player but also a humanitarian and man of outstanding character.
48. VHSSTO_101222_0616.JPG: Child Under Tree, Virginia Rockwell Kent 1956 Rockwell Kent's style seems distinctly American: it is linear and reductive, with attention to basic geometric shapes and relationships that are dynamic because of their simplicity. Clean and vivid color is integral to his vision. Kent found at Oak Ridge in Nelson County an unspoiled portion of the Virginia landscape. The large estate belonged to his patron, the grandson of its builder, Thomas Fortune Ryan.
49. VHSSTO_101222_0622.JPG: The Passing Storm, Shenandoah Valley As late as the 1920s, painters still looked to find bucolic scenery in the Valley. Here Alexis Fournier (1865–1948) shows that nature is always renewing itself, and in turn the spirit of those who depend upon the land for their well being. Fournier was a Minnesota painter who in 1893 he had traveled to Paris for training. Working on site in the Valley, probably in Rockingham County or further north, he adapted French Impressionism to an idyllic setting.
50. VHSSTO_101222_0628.JPG: Arthur Ashe. This is full-scale plaster model, by sculptor Paul Di Pasquale, of the statue placed on Monument Avenue in Richmond in 1996.
51. VHSSTO_101222_0635.JPG: Virginians on Time [magazine]
52. VHSSTO_101222_0649.JPG: Powhatan County Kitchen: This c. 1824 building is from a farm along the Buckingham Road in the unincorporated Belona section of Powhatan County. It is traditionally known as the kitchen but it was not originally built for that purpose. The fireplace is too small, the grained interior doors too fancy. There always were slaves on the farm until 1865, but it is too fine a building to have been a slave quarter. Probably, it was the main dwelling house, later relegated to being a kitchen when a larger farmhouse (still standing) was built. Kitchens usually were separate buildings so that kitchen fires would not burn down the main house. Virginia Becomes Home: There have been people in Virginia for at least 16,000 years. The first to reach here probably were descendants of those who had crossed the land bridge from Asia during the last great Ice Age. Succeeding generations made their way east across the continent and reached what we call Virginia before there even was a Chesapeake Bay, but we cannot exclude the possibility that people arrived by sea from other directions. During thousands of years, these inhabitants adapted to a changing environment and, in turn, developed practices that shaped the environment. The domestication of plants or beginning of farming allowed villagers to develop. Bands became tribes and tribes combined into chiefdoms. Speaking different languages and holding various beliefs, these people numbered about 50,000 in Virginia when the English arrived in 1607.
53. VHSSTO_101222_0679.JPG: This cross-section model of a Powhatan bark lodge holds more objects than would have been in any one Indian dwelling, but the complexity of Powhatan culture is evident from the array of tools, weapons, articles of adornment, and recreational and ritual objects.
54. VHSSTO_101222_0709.JPG: Seal of Sir Walter Raleigh (c. 1552-1618) as governor of Virginia. He never came to North America, but the second expedition he sent was intended to establish a self-sustaining colony. Led by Lieutenant Governor John White, it consisted of 117 colonists, including nine children and seventeen women. On August 18, 1587, White's daughter Ellinor White Dare gave birth to Virginia Dare -- the first English child born in North America -- named for the place and its patroness.
55. VHSSTO_101222_0726.JPG: Two silver badges made by order of the Virginia General Assembly, c. 1662, each engraved "Ye King of" on one side, and the other side engraved with the name of a tribe, "Patomeck" [Potomac] on the one and "Machotick" [Machodoc] on the other. The badges served as passports for Indians visiting English settlements. The badges were fashioned of copper for warriors and of silver for chiefs. An act of 1661 read "If any damage or injury be done to any Englishman by them or any of them, that then the king or great man of the place the badge denote shall be answerable for it." Both medals were found on the same Caroline County farm, the Potomac badge in 1832 and the Machodoc badge in 1964.
56. VHSSTO_101222_0734.JPG: User comment: The University at Henrico Destroyed in the Massacre XXII March, M. DC. XXII [1622] This bronze lead plaque, of unknown origin or purpose, but probably made in the 1800s, shows the Powhatan attack that killed 347 English colonists. It also destroyed the first university in British America, which had been founded in 1619 to Christianize the Indians. This is one of ten medals commissioned by Chapter One of the Colonial Dames about 1900 by Civil War artist and Baltimore Dentist, Dr. A. J. Volck. They were awarded between 1903 and 1918 to graduates of Johns Hopkins for writings that advanced the knowledge of early colonial history. They are lead filled bronze 11 inches in diameter and weigh a hefty 13 Lbs. They are signed with an almost microscopic signature under the hand by the axe in lower right.
57. VHSSTO_101222_0750.JPG: The colonial seal of Virginia, c. 1720 shows an Indian on bended knee presenting tobacco to King George I. The Latin inscription translates "and Virginia makes the fourth," meaning that the king had four kingdoms: England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia.
58. VHSSTO_101222_0757.JPG: The Dugout Canoe: The shallow-draft dugout canoe was an Indian concept, but one so well suited to Virginia that Europeans and Africans also made them from the 1600s through the 1800s. They were so much easier to make with metal tools than by the Indian method of burning and scraping with clamshells that the Indians switched over to European technology almost immediately. This canoe made from a chestnut tree with European tools may have been made by either Europeans, Indians, or Africans. For many years buried in a fresh water marsh, it became exposed in a mud bank of upper Machodoe Creek in King George County.
59. VHSSTO_101222_0763.JPG: [2] The Story of Virginia: An American Experience: A Long-term Exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/contact.htm Contact and Conflict Although there were cultural misunderstandings, competition for land was the main cause of conflict between the English and the Indians. The American Indians needed the land to maintain their political and cultural independence. The English needed it to achieve the goal of economic independence that had drawn them here. When the English discovered that tobacco was as good as gold, they brought enslaved Africans to Virginia to work the fields seized from the Indians. After three wars, they confined the Powhatans to the first American reservations. But why did the English come? They did not come, at first, for political or religious freedom. From the outset Virginia was an establishment colony in both church and state, unlike later-settled dissident Massachusetts. Rather, Virginia was conceived in the 1580s by English merchants, mariners, and gentlemen-at-arms who wanted to build an empire in America. They thought the New World’s lands and riches would enable England to become a world power. They sought gold and precious gems, a passage to China and the Indies, and a base for preying on treasure-filled Spanish galleons. They also hoped to convert the native peoples to Protestantism and challenge the ambitions of Catholic Spain and France. Virginia’s Namesake: These Englishmen called their dream Virginia after Elizabeth I, their virgin queen. But Virginia was an idea rather than a place. The first man to make the dream a reality was Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1585 this adventurer and favorite of Queen Elizabeth founded a military base on Roanoke Island in Pamlico Sound, between what today is mainland North Carolina and its Outer Banks. In 1587 Ralegh tried to convert Roanoke—as it became known—into a self-sustaining colony. But war with the Spanish Armada in 1588 cut off communications with England, and in 1590 a relief expedition found the colony mysteriously abandoned. The “Lost Colony” of Roanoke failed, but the idea of Virginia lived on. Twenty years later the idea was revived, but in a different form. In 1606 the Virginia Company of London—an investment scheme—was granted the right to settle those parts of North America’s mainland not already occupied by Spain or France. The Virginia Company focused its attention on the promising Chesapeake Bay region. In December 1606, the ships Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, carrying 104 passengers, set sail from England. Sixty miles from the capes of the Chesapeake Bay, up a river they named the James after their king, they found an easily defensible peninsula with good anchorage on May 13, 1607. They called it Jamestown. Conflict: Wahunsenacawh, the Powhatan leader, was ambivalent about these strangers. Like the Spanish who had come more that thirty years earlier, they might present a danger. Yet he recognized the value of their trade goods and thought they might make useful allies against other tribes. In 1608 the English at Jamestown traded away nearly all their tools for food. That same year, Powhatan sent food in exchange for a grindstone, fifty swords, some guns, a cock and hen, copper and beads, and an English-style house. Within a few years, however, the Indians had become more dependent on the English than vice versa. The Powhatans wanted guns and ammunition, metal knives and tools, warm woolen clothes and blankets, and durable metal pots. In the Anglo-Powhatan wars that followed, the English found that a trade embargo was among their most effective weapons. They also used the promise of trade to enlist the Powhatans’ Indian enemies as allies. The Powhatans became hostile as soon as they thought that the English had come, in the words of their leader, “not for trade but to invade my people and possess my country.” To the Indians, open land was a source of food and materials to be shared by all. The idea of individual ownership of land was foreign to them. To the English, however, the land of Virginiaseemingly unoccupied apart from the Indian villages themselveswas there for the taking. Once tobacco proved profitable, increasingly they took it. The Powhatans had grown a native variety of tobacco. But the strain that became the cash crop of Virginia (Nicotiana tabacum) was introduced from the West Indies by John Rolfe, who is best remembered by history as Mr. Pocahontas. His marriage to Pocahontas and their trip to England in 1616 seemed to hold out the promise of peaceful relations. Pocahontas: Pocahontas, meaning “playful one,” was the nickname of Matoaka, the daughter of the Powhatan leader. As a child she was sent as an emissary to Jamestown. She befriended the colonists and risked her life on several occasions to warn them of Indian attacks. The most famous incident was her intervention to save the life of Captain John Smith. She probably did it for humanitarian reasons rather than the romantic ones of legend, because she was only twelve at the time. In 1613 the English kidnapped her, but her father refused their demand for ransom. Left to live with the English, she adopted many of their ways. In 1614, at the age of nineteen, she married John Rolfe. Baptized a Christian, and taking the name Rebecca Rolfe, she was regarded as an example of the possibilities of converting the Indians. In fact, she was almost the only Indian ever converted, and nothing but total immersion in English culture brought it about. But in their day Rebecca and John Rolfe and their infant son seemed the perfect family to promote Virginia in England. They were entertained as celebrities in London. He sought to relieve fears about disease, the climate, and Indian hostility in Virginia. She impressed Londoners with her grace, intelligence, and competent English. She was touted as a princess, a European misconception about Indian society that persists to this day. She died suddenly—possibly of tuberculosis or smallpox—as she prepared to return to Virginia. She was just twenty-two, and Anglo-Powhatan relations deteriorated soon afterward. The Anglo-Powhatan Wars: In the three Anglo-Powhatan wars, the English had two principal advantages. One was firepower. The other was a secret weapon unknown even to themselves—European (and later, African) diseases to which the Indians had no immunity. Germs killed far more Indians than guns. Within forty years of Jamestown’s founding, the Powhatans had been defeated by warfare, smallpox, and measles. Their empire disintegrated, and its people were forced to live on disconnected pieces of tribal territory far from traditional hunting and fishing grounds. As early as 1646 the Virginia General Assembly reported that the Indians were “so routed and dispersed that they are no longer a nation.” By 1677 all the Indians of eastern Virginia accepted the status of vassals of the English king. They paid tribute for the small reservations allowed to them. Their numbers had plummeted from perhaps 20,000 to fewer than 3,000. After 1677 their numbers continued to dwindle, and in 1705 the size of their reservations was halved. The Rappahannocks and Chickahominies lost their reservations entirely by 1718. The Nansemonds sold their last remnant in 1792. By that time the only Indians officially recognized were a small group on the Eastern Shore and the Pamunkeys and Mattaponis on their reservations. Those who lived off reservations, or whose tribes no longer had one, were absorbed into the ranks of slaves or the lower parts of English society as squatters on poor land. Until the mid-1700s Indians on reservations were able to live a semi-traditional lifestyle, hunting deer for skins to trade rather than for food, and collecting bounties from the English for killing wolves. But by 1800 virtually all Virginia Indians spoke only English, dressed like their white neighbors, and had become Christians, their native religion having become extinct. The Tobacco Boom: Much of the land taken from the Indians went to grow tobacco, which was not only a way of making money, but also served as money itself to pay salaries and wages. However, tobacco farming required not only land, but also backbreaking labor. When the tobacco boom gained momentum, white indentured servants were brought in to cultivate the crop; but Virginia’s precarious society did not stabilize until Africans were brought in to work the fields. The labor of these servants and slaves, and Europe’s insatiable demand for tobacco, made Virginia an economic success at last. Virginia Becomes a Colony: Of the 8,500 colonists sent to Jamestown by the Virginia Company, only 1,218 were left by 1624. Some had returned to England, but most had died of starvation, disease, oppression by their own leaders, or Indian attacks. In the great 1622 Powhatan uprising alone, 347 colonists were killed. The company came under increasing criticism. Finally, King James I revoked its charter and declared Virginia a royal colony—England’s first. Its appointed royal governor, elected assembly, and established church became the model for English royal colonies throughout America. The elected legislature or House of Burgesses had begun in 1619. Its powers were ill-defined, but at least the principle of some representation by the people in their own government was recognized. It was the first such representative body in the New World. Africans Arrive in Virginia: The year 1619 also is famous for being the first in which we have written evidence of the presence of Africans in Virginia. In August a Dutch man-of-war carrying Africans dropped anchor near Hampton. Probably these were indentured servants rather than slaves. But from the outset they were regarded as a separate, degraded class, and often were held in a form of lifetime service little different from slavery. Historians argue over why Europeans enslaved Africans. Did they do it because of inherent prejudice against the color black, which they associated with evil, darkness, and the devil? Did they do it because some African groups enslaved members of neighboring groups, giving rise to a degraded view of all Africans? In any case, establishment of the tobacco plantation system as the economic mainstay of Virginia, and the reality that slave labor produced the greatest tobacco profits, transformed an inconsistent prejudice into chattel slavery—a rigid system of perpetual racial bondage. Beginning in 1661, Virginia codified slavery into laws that were copied throughout the later British colonies.
60. VHSSTO_101222_0769.JPG: Slave shackles These wrist shackles date from the late 1600s or early 1700s, and were the type worn by Africans who were carried across the Atlantic on slaving vessels. Between 1701 and 1760, historians estimate that over 188,600 African slaves were brought to North America. How Slavery Came to Virginia: 1639. Act X: All persons except negroes are to be provided with arms and ammunition or be fined at the pleasure of the governor and council. 1667. Act III: An act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage. Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made pertakes of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should be verute of their baptisme be made free; It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly, and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedome; that diverse masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity by permitting children, though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be admitted to that sacrament. 1662. Act XII. Children to be bond or free, according to the condition of their mother. Whereas some doubts have arrisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be salve or free. Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother. And that if any christian shall committ fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act. 1670. Act V. Free Negroes and Indians not permitted to buy Christian servants, but may those of their own nation. Whereas it hath beene questioned whither Indians or negroes manumited, or otherwise free, could be capable of purchasing christian servants. It is enacted that noe negroe or Indian though baptized and enjoyed their owne freedome shall be capable of any such purchase of christians, but yet not debarred from buying any of their owne nation. 1670. Act XII: Indians taken in war, & sold by Indians, not to be slaves -- Servants, not Christians, imported by shipping, slaves; if by land, to serve a certain term only. Whereas some dispute have arisen whither Indians taken in warr by any other nation, and by that nation that taketh them sold to the English, are servants for life or terme of years. It is resolved and enacted that all servants not being christians imported into this colony by shipping shalbe slaves for their lives; but what shall come by land shall serve, if boyes or girles, untill thirty yeares of age, if men or women twelve years and no longer. 1680. Act X. No negro, or other slave to carry arms, offensive or defensive; or go from his owner's plantation without a certificate, &cc. Bee it enacted by the kings most excellent majestie by and with the consent of the generall assembly, and it is hereby enacted by the authority aforesaid, that from and after the publication of this law, it shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword, or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions. 1682. All servants, except Turks and Moors, while in amity with the king of England, whether Negroes, Moors, mulattoes or Indians, not being Christians, when purchased, tho' afterwards converted, and brought in by sea or land to be slaves. Also all Indians sold by neighbouring Indians or others trading with us to be slaves. And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid that all servants except Turkes and Moores, whilst in amity with his majesty which from and after publication of this act shall be brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether negroes, Moors, Mullatoes or Indians, who and whose parentage and native country are not christian at the time of their first purchase of such servant by some christian, although afterwards, and bringing into this country, they shall be converted to the christian faith; and all Indians which shall hereafter be sold by our neighbouring Indians, or any other trafiqueing with us as for slaves are hereby adjudged, deemed and taken, and shall be adjudged, deemed and taken to be slaves to all intents and purposes, any law, all intents and purposes, any law, usage or custome to the contrary notwithstanding. 1691. White man or woamn, bond or free, intermarrying with a negro, mulatto or Indian, to be banished forever. Be it enacted by the authoritie aforesand, and it is hereby enacted, that for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever. 1705. XXXIV. Killing slaves, under corection, no felony. And if any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her rder, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony; but the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit or all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such accident had never happened. 1723. XVII. How slaves may be emancipated. And be it further enacted, by the authority aforesaid, That no negro, mullato, or indian slaves, shall be set free, upon any pretence whatsoever, except for some meritorious services, to be adjusted and allowed by the governor and council for the being, and a licence thereupon first time had and obtained. 1923. XXIII. Free negroes, not to vote. And be it further enacted, by the authority aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted and declared.
61. VHSSTO_101222_0777.JPG: The only written memoir by an enslaved African brought to Virginia is "The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa, the African" published in London in 1789. As a child of eleven, Equino (1745-1797) was snatched from his Ibo village in southeastern Nigeria and transported to Barbados, then Virginia, and finally England, where he gained his freedom in 1766. He married an Englishwoman in 1792.
62. VHSSTO_101222_0785.JPG: Map showing where slaves to Virginia came from. 37.7% of natives stolen from the Bight of Biafra were sent to Virginia.
63. VHSSTO_101222_0798.JPG: The Woodson Musket. By Woodson family tradition, this gun is the one used by a man named Ligon who helped Sara Woodson defend her Prince George County home on April 18,1644. According to this tradition, "his first shot killed three Indians, his second two, and his third two more Indians." The account goes on to say that, as a tribute to Ligon, his name was carved on the stock. However, this gun has been stocked several times, which would explain the absence of Ligon's name. This seven foot four inch weapon, best described as an English fowler, designed for shooting birds, largely dates to 1740 and after, but it is just possible that the barrel only may coincide with the earlier Woodson-Ligon tradition. The barrel is approximately .80 caliber or 12 gauge and has a slight swell at the breach and also a slight flare at the muzzle. Proof marks appear on the barrel near the breech and the flintlock is marked "Collicott," the name of a lock maker in Bristol, England about 1750. The brass furniture consists of a cast butt plate with a graduated four-step tang, a convex side plate with a tail, an unmarked escutcheon plate at the wrist, a trigger guard, and three ramrod pipes of equal length, with a fourth possessing a tail where the ramrod enters the lower stock.
64. VHSSTO_101222_0809.JPG: The Abduction of Pocahontas: "The Abduction of Pocahontas" by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, c. 1910, recreates the arrival of Captain Samuel Argall (at left) at Jamestown with Pocahontas as his captive. He had kidnapped her in 1613 "for the ransoming of so many Englishmen as were prisoners with Powhatan: as also to get ... armes and tools ... [and] some quantities of Corne, for the colonies relief." The Europeans, who regarded Pocahontas as a princess, were surprised that her father did not redeem her, but in a matrilineal society she could not inherit her father's power and so was relatively unimportant.
65. VHSSTO_101222_0817.JPG: The most accurate likeness of Pocahontas is probably this modern reworking by Mary Ellen Howe of the so-called "Booton Hall" portrait of Pocahontas (at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington) that, in turn, derived from the Van de Passe engraving. Howe aimed at producing a color image as truthful as the Van de Passe black-and-white engraving. The facial features are correct, as probably are the colors of the skin and clothing. Pocahontas's hair is black and she wears none of the lipstick and rouge invested by the "Booton Hall" artist.
66. VHSSTO_101222_0823.JPG: The Marriage of Pocahontas is an engraving by John McRue after an 1855 painting by Henry Brueckner. During Pocahontas's captivity, "John Rolf had bin in love with [her] and she with him." Governor Sir Thomas Dale and Powhatan approved this political match and Anglo-Powhatan relations were much improved until the death of Pocahontas (or Rebecca Rolfe) in 1617. The ceremony took place in either Jamestown or Henrico in April 1814. The grand setting in this print is imaginary.
67. VHSSTO_101222_0838.JPG: "Pocahontas looks up at her father as she protects John Smith from the blow of the death mallet." Whether Pocahontas rescued John Smith has been long debated. Ethnologists are doubtful, believing that Smith was being tested or initiated, not executed. The historical evidence, however, is very strong, and afterward there was a special bond between Smith and Pocahontas. It was not until the early 1800s, however, that it was proposed that romantic love for the captain in the bosom of the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Pocahontas was the motivating forces behind her display of heroism. This is a three cel set-up with production background from Walt Disney Pictures' 1995 film "Pocahontas." Cels are no longer [used] by Disney for production, so really this is a souvenir of the film hand-colored by Disney artists from the original line drawings that generated the film's characters.
68. VHSSTO_101222_0842.JPG: Pocahontas By Thomas Sully Thomas Sully gives us Pocahontas at what might have been construed as her best moment—after her absorption into English culture and before the fateful trip to England from which she did not return. Pocahontas presents herself as a person of remarkable refinement and grace. Conscious of brewing sectionalism, Sully devised an image that would please Virginians, and he donated this portrait to the Virginia Historical Society, perhaps as a way of winning new patrons in Pocahontas's native state.
69. VHSSTO_101222_0852.JPG: Pocahontas by an unknown artist after a print (shown on the adjoining wall) by Simon van de Passe. Probably in the 1700s, an English artist made an oil painting that is loosely copied after the print drawn in Pocahontas's lifetime. However, the artist was insensitive to the subject's Indian features. Her dark skin and black hair were Europeanized to be white and brown respectively. Even her white beaver hat was mistakenly changed to black. The original eighteenth-century painting is called the Booton Hall portrait. This, in turn, is a 1929 copy of that picture. Mary Ellen Howe's painting on the adjoining wall shows how this picture would look if the artist had been faithful to details in the print.
70. VHSSTO_101222_0859.JPG: John Smith's meeting with Chief Powhatan and Pocahontas, gouache painting by J. Sanford Hulme, 1929, probably done as a magazine illustration. Hulme sidestepped the well-known but unsubstantiated episode of the rescue of Captain Smith, selecting instead to depict a meeting between the two leaders that would have occurred in the desperate winter of 1608-09, "The Starving Time," when relations with the Powhatan Indians were so bad that the English could no longer trade for food.
71. VHSSTO_101222_0865.JPG: [3] The Story of Virginia: An American Experience: A Long-term Exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/virginians.htm Becoming Virginians In 1610, Richard Rich declared that the English would “establish a nation where none before had stood”—conveniently forgetting about the native inhabitants. But Virginia never became the intended replica of England. Instead, a distinctive, hybrid culture emerged out of English, African, Indian, and later German and Scotch-Irish influences. Over a century and a half the colonists came to think of themselves as Virginians, a term formerly applied to the Indians. English Rule in Early Virginia: Virginia in the 1600s and through most of the 1700s was an extremely inegalitarian society like the Stuart England that produced it. This was the result of conscious choice, largely the vision of one man—Sir William Berkeley—royal governor from 1642 to 1652 and from 1660 to 1677. When he assumed authority in Virginia, the colony was a society in flux in many ways. Sir William’s ideal society was authoritarian, like the one he had known at home. It would have a few ruling gentry families, a small class of yeomen farmers, a larger group of white tenant farmers, and at the bottom, numerous indentured servants (and eventually enslaved Africans). Social mobility would be at a minimum, and everyone would know his place. These plans were hindered by the staggering death rate in early Virginia, which made for a highly fluid, unstable society. But as death rates dropped in the late 1600s, and slaves replaced troublesome indentured servants, Berkeley’s goal was largely achieved. Thereafter, the colony was run by and for a small governing elite. This class ruled Virginia until after the American Revolution. Ironically, many scions of these dynasties would be the leaders in the rebellion against King George III. Sir William Berkeley’s ideal society, however, needed not only a ruling class, but also a people to be ruled. Most of Virginia’s white immigrants were either indentured servants or convicts. In 1618 Virginia had adopted the headright, which gave fifty acres of land for each settler brought to Virginia. Although England’s unskilled and unemployed laborers had no money to pay the ship’s passage, it was paid for them if they signed an indenture or contract to become a servant for four to seven years. The fifty acres went to the man who actually paid their passage, not to the immigrants themselves. They came with few possessions, were examined like livestock, and worked under grueling conditions. Besides those who became servants voluntarily, convicts, prostitutes, and prisoners of war were forcibly “transported” from England to Virginia in large numbers. Life in Early Virginia: In the 1600s, three-quarters of all English colonists experienced a term of servitude. Half of them died before their service was completed. One quarter remained poor afterward. The other quarter achieved a degree of prosperity. Even so, the raw conditions of society before 1690 permitted a degree of social mobility impossible in England. As a whole, women fared somewhat better than men. Because of the preponderance of men in early Virginia, wives were highly prized. A female servant who had completed her service could easily find a husband, perhaps one of those fortunate servants who, having gotten fifty acres upon completing his service, had saved enough money for the legal fees, tools, seed, and livestock needed to become a planter (which then meant farmer). Apart from Pocahontas, women do not appear prominently in histories of early Virginia. Yet, in 1619, the General Assembly declared that “In a newe plantation it is not knowne whether man or woman be the most necessary.” Women were central to the economy, producing not only necessities of life such as food and clothing, but also adding to the work force by bearing and raising children. In that age of inequality, however, women were seen as inferior to men in mind and body, and a woman’s duty was to find a man to govern her. Slaves, servants, and mistresses of typical households worked from dawn to dusk grinding corn, milking cows, butchering meat, brewing beer (water was usually contaminated), growing vegetables, and washing and mending clothes. Slave women were as likely as men to be sent into the fields. Life was fleeting. Early Virginia was a land of widows, widowers, and orphans. Of necessity, men often made their wives their executors and legal guardians of their children. Daughters often were the only heirs. As colonists moved inland and acquired immunity to disease, the death rate dropped. But with increasing stability came a return to the ideal, and the ideal then was patriarch—the absolute authority of the husband and father. Thereafter, white women had few rights, free black women fewer, and slave women none. Slavery: Within a few decades of Jamestown, Virginia was a society with slaves, but it was not yet a slave society. As late as 1640 there were more Africans in New England than Virginia. Only after the supply of European indentured servants declined in the late 1600s did tobacco planters turn increasingly to enslaved Africans. In the mid-1600s, before social and racial hierarchies hardened, the slave Anthony Johnson—the black patriarch of Pungoteague Creek on the Eastern Shore—could gain his freedom, acquire a farm, and own a slave himself. But, by the late 1600s, Virginia began passing laws that made hereditary slavery binding on Negroes, mulattoes, and some Indians. Virginia slaves came from many different parts of Africa, where they spoke different languages. Once in the colony, they had to learn English to communicate with each other. But they developed a distinct dialect that became the vehicle of a unique culture. By 1776, African Virginians were 40 percent of the population. Various African cultural traditions, including food and cooking preferences, music, dance, vocabulary, religious and healing practices, and folklore mixed to form a new African Virginian culture that strongly affected white culture as well. The Gentry Class: At the same time, slave labor made possible the emergence of a gentry class with a gracious lifestyle unimaginable to the first settlers at Jamestown. In the 1600s the high death rate had made the colonists, even the better-off ones, think in the short term. They built flimsy wooden houses without foundations, not one of which survives. By the mid-1700s, however, standards of gentility were rising rapidly. Benches and stools gave way to chairs. Dining replaced eating. Silver substituted for pottery. Walls or paneling were expected to have paintings or prints on them. There was a spate of mansion-building from the 1720s onward. Menokin was typical of the more than three dozen mansions built in late colonial Virginia in imitation of the best architecture of Georgian England. It was built by John Tayloe, II, of Mount Airy, as a wedding present for his daughter Rebecca. She married Francis Lightfoot Lee, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The couple’s new house even contained a special purpose “dining room,” a novelty, which was the most formal room of the house. This room was as large as the entire houses in which most Virginians then lived. Cavaliers and Pioneers: By the mid-1700s the cavalier dynasties—founded mostly between 1650 and 1680—had become closely related through intermarriage. To prevent recurrence of a rebellion like Bacon‘s, they reduced taxes on middling and poor white farmers and bribed them at election time. In return, yeomen farmers deferred to the gentry in politics. In time, these Virginia gentlemen came to think of themselves as Virginians as well as Englishmen. Having largely governed the colony to their liking for a hundred years, they had come to see that arrangement as their right. Increasingly, the gentry resented the smallest interference from London in how they governed Virginia. These gentry rulers sat on the Governor’s Council—the upper house of the legislature. They had awarded themselves huge tracts of frontier lands as settlement of Virginia moved inexorably westward in the 1700s. However, the gentry would make no money from these western lands unless they were actually settled. The Church of England’s religious monopoly—so carefully defended by Governor Sir William Berkeley—was broken in order to attract foreign Protestants—Huguenots (French Calvinists), German Lutherans and Pietists, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Dutch Calvinists, the Swiss, and even Swedes. Virginia’s rulers also calculated that these people would form a human shield protecting the Virginia heartland from the French and their Indian allies in the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys. Frontiers and Outposts: After the last Anglo-Powhatan war ended in 1646, settlers had built forts at the fall line of the rivers—where they cease to be navigable. These forts became trading posts to which the Indian tribes and white trappers brought furs, beaver pelts, and deerskins tanned for leather. By 1674 the fur trade was second only to tobacco farming as a source of wealth. The high point of the trade was about 1704, when 34,387 deerskins and 2,841 beaver pelts were exported. The fall line forts also were launching points for exploration and settlement of the Piedmont, defined as the region between the fall line and the westward mountains. Migration mostly occurred up two river valleys—the James and the Rappahannock. The Randolph family established large plantations along the James River. Bollings, Carters, Pages, Flemings, Walkers, Meriwethers, Lewises, and Jeffersons all intermarried with the Randolphs and acquired large tracts. They moved up the James to the Rivanna and westward into a large area that was organized as Albemarle County. Alexander Spotswood and the Shenandoah Valley: The Rappahannock River valley above the fall line was settled in a different way than the James. The largest role was played not by a family like the Randolphs, but by a single individual, Alexander Spotswood. As lieutenant governor of Virginia (the governor drew a large salary but never left England), Spotswood brought German miners to excavate iron ore found on his vast holdings in the Rappahannock River basin. By 1727, settlement nearly had reached the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1716 Spotswood and a retinue he dubbed the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe penetrated the mountains into the Shenandoah Valley that lay between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains. Germans and Scotch-Irish flooded into the Valley from Pennsylvania. Winchester was founded in 1744, Staunton in 1748, and Strasburg and Woodstock in 1761. By the mid-1750s three counties had been established west of the Blue Ridge—Hampshire, Frederick, and Augusta—the last of which was then the whole southern valley. Germans in Virginia: Who were these new Virginians, who had come into the colony not by sea, but down the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia? The Germans were part of a migration of about 100,000 Protestants who came to British America between 1683 and 1775. They were fleeing war, conscription, ruinous taxes, and persecution. Initially, they sailed to Philadelphia, which welcomed religious heterodoxy. But as the good land west of Philadelphia was occupied, they drifted southwest through Pennsylvania and Maryland and, after 1730, into the northern Shenandoah Valley. They brought a distinctive culture with them. By 1790, 28 percent of white Virginians were German-speaking. They often built stone houses with the kitchen as the principal room. They preferred stoves to fireplaces for heating. A distinctive diet included kraut, pfanhass (scrapple), and raisin pies. Food was served on stoneware with bright glazes. The German language was perpetuated in schools and churches. After 1800, Germans assimilated rapidly to English culture. The language soon died out, but other elements of the culture remain to this day. Generally, Germans were uncomfortable with slavery. To them, liberty meant their churches, communities, and families being left alone by government, which traditionally oppressed them. The Scotch-Irish: The Germans had to share the Shenandoah Valley with another group, which followed on their heels ten years later. These were the Scotch-Irish. Between 1715 and 1775 perhaps 250,000 people from the northern parts of the British Isles came to British America. Most were Scotch-Irish (Scots settled in Northern Ireland—Ulster—after 1603), but there also were Irish as well as people on both sides of the Scottish-English border. They shared a heritage of living in disputed, unstable regions wracked by violence that bred warrior cultures. Not welcomed in eastern settlements, they hurried on their way west and began settling the Shenandoah Valley after 1740. Theirs became the dominant culture of the Appalachians from Pennsylvania to Georgia, partly by weight of numbers, but mostly because Old World border culture was exceptionally well suited to New World frontier conditions. The Scotch-Irish largely leapfrogged the Germans and concentrated in the southern part of the Valley of Virginia. One leader was Col. James Patten, an ancestor of General George Patton (who embodied much of this culture). In 1745 Colonel Patten obtained 100,000 acres on the New, Holston, and Clinch rivers, drawing Scotch-Irish settlements into southwest Virginia. Claiming the Land: The first land grants in the Northern Neck of Virginia—the peninsula between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers—were made in the 1650s. Among the early recipients was a royalist who came to Virginia—John Washington, great-grandfather of the future president. The Northern Neck was owned, however, by several English aristocrats who had received it in 1649 as a gift from the exiled young king Charles II. In the late 1600s the grants were consolidated by one family—the Culpepers—whose heiress married into the family of the lords Fairfax. Thomas, the sixth Lord Fairfax, defended his inheritance against the Virginia government, which disputed its size. The long case ended in Farifax’s favor in 1745. Lord Fairfax came to Virginia and, indeed, lived out his life here. Among his contributions was seeing promise in the teenager George Washington, whom he employed as a surveyor. Winchester, the seat of Frederick County, served as a staging area for probes toward the Ohio Valley, one of which, on behalf of Northern Neck land speculators, precipitated the French and Indian War. In 1753, twenty-one-year-old George Washington was sent to the forks of the Ohio River (now Pittsburgh) to demand that the French evacuate the Ohio Valley, which Great Britain (through Virginia) claimed. The resulting incident triggered the French and Indian War, which after seven years ended in the expulsion of France from the mainland of North America. The new British king, George III, then tried to reserve the West beyond the Appalachians for the Indians, but the Virginians would have none of it. The Indians’ response to repeated white incursions led to Lord Dunmore’s War, named for Virginia’s royal governor. The defeat of the Indians at Point Pleasant in 1774 opened up western Virginia (now West Virginia) and Kentucky (which was part of Virginia until 1792) to further settlement. The vast migrations into Virginia in the 1700s had made it a multicultural society, one where ethnically and religiously diverse people had to learn to peacefully coexist. In the Piedmont and beyond, initial English ideas of toleration blossomed into new American ideals of freedom, which broke down the closed Virginia society of the 1600s, lessened Virginia’s English identity, and laid foundations for the American Revolution.
72. VHSSTO_101222_0875.JPG: Keystone from Menokin, home of Francis Lightfoot Lee and one of about two dozen great houses built during the heyday of Virginia's tobacco prosperity between the 1720s and the Revolution.
73. VHSSTO_101222_0890.JPG: Banjo This instrument is a derivation of the African xalam, and was developed by African slaves who brought their culture with them when they arrived in Virginia. This particular banjo was used in an African American family from Smyth County in the 1800s. No Virginia banjos from the 1600s or 1700s survive today.
74. VHSSTO_101222_0895.JPG: Rebecca Bonum Eskridge: Rebecca Bonum Eskridge (d. 1715) was a member of the gentry class, but not until well into the 1700s was that class fully self-confident, exuberant, or ostentatious. There is a tentativeness in her eyes that reflects the harsh world of the 1600s—its sudden and often early death, economic fluctuations, and civil unrest. She knew life was too brief to be wasted, and she was determined to enjoy the comforts conferred by a good marriage—to George Eskridge of Westmoreland County—for whom George Washington was named. The artist is unknown.
75. VHSSTO_101222_0925.JPG: Grymes children This group portrait is one of the most interesting and appealing images to survive from colonial America. It speaks loudly and clearly about gentry children and family in colonial Virginia. It is evidence that at early ages children were instructed in manners, dressed as genteel adults, and so groomed to perpetuate family status in a highly structured society. Whoever the artist, probably the young John Hesselius, he was bold and inventive. To fit four figures in this composition, he devised an imaginary landscape pieced together with the types of imagery found in the backgrounds of English portrait prints. The result is more charming that awkward, an image of an English life-style. As such, the painting no doubt satisfied its Middlesex County patrons. Comparison of this painting with an English portrait of the FitzPatrick children, c. 1752–53, by George Knapton, shows remarkable similarities. Not only do London-produced costumes and behavior patterns repeat, but so too does the extraordinary toy wagon, a product of new, permissive attitudes about childrearing. From the evidence of this painting, gentry society in England and Virginia were in fact more similar than we might be inclined to believe. At the least, that was the goal of Virginia parents. The four eldest children of Phillip Grymes (1721-1762) of Brandon, Middlesex County, are shown in this c. 1750 portrait, probably by John Hesselius. The three eldest children are dressed as genteel adults who already have been taught to act in accordance with their social status and assigned gender roles. The roles of the youngest child, and his extraordinary toy wagon, are evidence of a change in attitude toward children. In the 1600s, children were seen as mischievous, even dangerous little animals susceptible to being instruments of Satan. In the 1700s, however, childhood was becoming seen as an innocent, blessed stage of human development. The American Revolution divided this happy family. Lucy Grymes (on the left) married Thomas Nelson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The brother next to her, John Randolph Grymes, became a Loyalist who fought for the British.
76. VHSSTO_101222_0932.JPG: The first cookbook published in British America was printed by William Parks -- Virginia's first printer -- in Williamsburg in 1742. It is a reprint of the fifth edition of a popular English recipe book by Mrs. E. Smith. In the 1600s, the average Virginia woman would have boiled everything together in a pot. By the 1700s, she had more cooking vessels and utensils. More sophisticated cuisine was expected. Books of recipes were available. Unfortunately, few women could read them.
77. VHSSTO_101222_0939.JPG: The Lady's Law was a treatise on the English common law as it pertained to women. Single women and widows had many of the rights of men. Married women, however, lost their independence. Her property became his. The husband had absolute custody of the children. Wife beating was legal within limits. There was no divorce.
78. VHSSTO_101222_0945.JPG: Witchcraft trial transcript concerning Grace Sherwood (c. 1660-1740) of Princess Anne County (now Virginia Beach), who was accused in 1705 of being a witch and was tested by being put into water "above man's depth" to "try her how she swims therein." People then believed that water was pure and would only accept the innocent, so by floating Sherwood was guilty. But Virginia had no laws concerning witchcraft, and she seems only to have undergone brief house arrest, or perhaps gone unpunished. She was lucky not to have lived in Salem, Massachusetts, which hanged twenty persons for witchcraft in 1692.
79. VHSSTO_101222_0952.JPG: William Fitzhugh (1651-1701) by an unknown artist, copied in 1751 by John Hesselius from a portrait of 1697. This powerful image is one of the most important to survive from early America. Fitzhugh, who wrote of the need to present a "creditable" appearance in order to be respected in Virginia, is dressed in the finest and most stylish of English wigs and costumes. In his own words, he lived "comfortably & handsomely." He entertained visitors with "good wine, ... three fiddlers, a jester, a tight-rope dance, [and] an acrobat who tumbled around." He furnished his thirteen-room house with tapestries and an extraordinary collection of 122 pieces of English silver. Fitzhugh, however, was never entirely comfortable in Virginia. Born and raised in England, he called the colony "a strange land." The unpredictable fluctuations of the tobacco economy made him acquire vast tracts of land as a guard against failure. The silver answered well his conflicting urges for luxury and moderation. He terms his collecting both "reputable" and "politic," meaning that silver made a social statement yet could be melted down if he needed cash.
80. VHSSTO_101222_0961.JPG: Henry Fitzhugh (1614–1664) This portrait of Henry Fitzhugh (1614–1664) was copied in oils by John Hesselius in 1751. Like the portrait of the Virginia dynasty founder William Fitzhugh, this painting of William's father, the last Fitzhugh ancestor to live his entire life in England, is apparently faithfully copied from a lost original; it bears none of the mannerisms of John Hesselius' own, developing style. The two copies were commissioned by William Fitzhugh's second son, Captain Henry Fitzhugh, who did not inherit the originals, or Captain Henry's son, Colonel Henry Fitzhugh, for the paintings hung in their home Bedford through most of the nineteenth century. They are of great importance because so few paintings survive from seventeenth-century Virginia. The original portrait from which this canvas was copied must have been painted in England and carried to the colony by the son, for the sitter never set foot in Virginia. This image of the 1630s is far removed from the lavish style of painting and pretentious deportment seen in Anthony van Dyck's portraits of the same decade from the court of Charles I. It is influenced instead by Dutch middle-class portraiture, best known today from the imagery of Rembrandt. Though the palette may be somber and the sitter's clothes simple, this image is a spirited example of provincial English portraiture. Beneath discolored varnish and overpaint, the face is deftly rendered, that of a young man of good breeding, energy, and intelligence; an inscription on the rear of the canvas identifies him as then but twenty years of age. He seems to have been at least moderately successful as a merchant dealing in woolen goods in the family's ancestral town of Bedford. That he sat for a painter is evidence enough that he was local gentry.
81. VHSSTO_101222_0965.JPG: Lucy Randolph Burwell Lucy Randolph Burwell (c. 1744–1802) belonged to one of the wealthiest families and so posed in an elegant gown and headdress of the latest style. She plays a string instrument but does so idly, a fashionable accomplishment rather than a passion. Virginia's ruling elite had intermarried for a century, and Lucy Randolph maintained this tradition by marrying Lewis Burwell of Kengsmill plantation in James City County when she was twenty. The portrait was painted c. 1773, probably by Matthew Pratt.
82. VHSSTO_101222_0972.JPG: This portrait of Sir William Berkeley (c . 1608-1677) by Sir Peter Lely, 1661-62, was not merely an image of the man himself, but also of the royalist ideas he brought to Virginia. The cavalry charge probably refers to Berkeley's service to Charles I in the English Civil War. The painting reveals another identify with the king. The pose imitates Charles I in a famous portrait by Van Dyck now in the Louvre.
83. VHSSTO_101222_0980.JPG: Bacon's Epitaph "Bacon's Epitaph, made by his Man" is called the first American poem, and eulogizes Nathaniel Bacon, leader of Bacon's Rebellion in 1675–76. Some historians interpret the rebellion as a proto-democratic movement against Governor Berkeley's autocratic regime. Others see it as merely a pretext to seize Indian land.
84. VHSSTO_101222_0986.JPG: James Balfour (d. 1775) with his son George and James's wife Mary Jemima Balfour (d. 1785). The Balfours were in Virginia in 1741 and lived in style at Little England, their residence near Hampton. Probably, both paintings were the work of Matthew Pratt, who advertised in Williamsburg's Virginia Gazette that he would work in Hampton during the summer of 1773.
85. VHSSTO_101222_1017.JPG: Benjamin Grymes (1725-1776) and his brother Ludwell Grymes (1733-1798), attributed to Charles Bridges, c. 1735. These are the youngest surviving sons of John and Lucy (Ludwell) Grymes of Brandon, Middlesex County. Unlike three of their eight brothers and sisters, they survived the hazards of childhood in the 1700s and lived to maturity. As befitted their social position, both boys married well. Benjamin took as his first wife Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Fitzhugh of Eagle's Nest, King George County. Ludwell married Mary, daughter of William Dawson, a member of the governor's Council and president of the College of William and Mary.
86. VHSSTO_101222_1024.JPG: Elizabeth Fitzhugh, at age eighteen, by John Hesselius, 1771. This marriage portrait is considered by some eminent authorities to be the finest portrait executed in colonial Virginia. The subject, too, has been admired. In 1835, one gentleman who saw the portrait remarked on this "most voluptuous looking woman... her round figure and lovely bosom partly covered by a rich brocade heightening the charms which it half conceals." Like her husband, she died young -- age thirty-five. The frame is original.
87. VHSSTO_101222_1033.JPG: Henry Fitzhugh (1750-1777), at age twenty-one, by John Hesselius, 1771. Henry Fitzhugh was heir to the Fitzhugh's ancestral estate Bedford on Virginia's Northern Neck. Initially, however, he lived at nearby Fitzhughburg. This portrait was painted on the occasion of his marriage and coming of age. A mere six years later, however, he was dead. The frame is original.
88. VHSSTO_101222_1040.JPG: Mahogany arm chair This mahogany arm chair was made in Williamsburg c. 1760–80 in the shop of Peter Scott. It reflects one of the most common designs for formal seating furniture in colonial Virginia, which, despite its simplicity, would only have been found in the homes of the wealthy.
89. VHSSTO_101222_1045.JPG: Mann Page (1749-1803) and his sister Elizabeth Page (b. 1751?) are depicted c. 1755 in this portrait by John Wollaston commissioned by the sitters' father -- the owner of Rosewell, Virginia's largest mansion -- as evidence of his children's aristocratic heritage and genteel breeding. The six-year-old boy holds a "Virginia red bird," already a symbol of the region, while his four-year-old sister uses as a toy a fashion doll that demonstrated adult clothing styles.
90. VHSSTO_101222_1058.JPG: Lucy Parke Byrd (1687-1716), the daughter of Daniel Parke II, married William Byrd II in 1706. Her husband recorded their tempestuous yet loving relationship in his secret diary. They quarreled over many things -- his flirtations with other women, her treatment of slaves, the goods she ordered from England, even the plucking of her eyebrows. But love and caring are present in the entries too, and when she died of smallpox at age twenty-nine, he wrote, "How proud I was of her, and how severely I am punished for it." The presence of an African slave was both appropriate and a touch of exoticism favored by the artist. The basket hints at the domestic responsibilities that called even to ladies of Lucy Parke Byrd's status. The portrait is from the school of Sir Godfrey Kueller.
91. VHSSTO_101222_1075.JPG: Cast iron fireback This cast iron fireback would have been placed at the back of a fireplace to reflect the heat outward. This one shows only a little exposure to fire. Perhaps because of its elegance, it was mainly for show. Dolphins, fleur-de-lis, Virginia roses, flowering dogwood, and hickory surround a bust portrait of a woman wearing a crown. This motif appeared on the seal of the Virginia Company and later on several versions of the seal of the royal colony of Virginia. This fireback is a rare touchstone of the career of a remarkable man, Alexander Spotswood (1676–1740), by title lieutenant-governor, but in reality governor of Virginia from 1710 to 1722. He developed the iron industry in Virginia, he made the state more ethnically diverse, and he led exploration and settlement of the Rappahannock and Shenandoah Valleys. Spotswood found iron ore on his western lands, so in 1714 he brought over 42 German miners and iron workers to a remote site overlooking the Rapidan River, which he appropriately named Fort Germanna, in what now is Orange County. It was then the most westerly settlement in Virginia. This fireback, made at either Spotswood's Massaponax Furnace or Tubal Furnace, was in a fireplace at Spotswood's Germanna mansion which burned in 1750 and collapsed in ruins. In 1984 the fireback was uncovered intact under piles of stone and rubble.
92. VHSSTO_101222_1096.JPG: John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore (1732–1809), was Virginia's last royal governor. He became a hero among Virginians for walking on foot and carrying his own pack during the Indian war that bore his name. Less than two years later, however, these same Virginians would hate him above all others for promising freedom to slaves who would fight for the king against the Continental Congress.
93. VHSSTO_101222_1103.JPG: Washington sends captured Frenchmen to Williamsburg. This letter to Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie dated May 29, 1754, introduced a group of French prisoners taken by twenty-two-year-old George Washington in what now is Pennsylvania, but which then was part of Virginia's (and France's) claims in the West.
94. VHSSTO_101222_1110.JPG: C�loron plate This lead plaque was placed at the junction of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers in 1749 by Captain Pierre Joseph C�loron de Blainville. Five other plates were laid along other tributaries of the Ohio River to assert France's claims to all the lands watered by those rivers. Under its 1609 charter, Virginia claimed those lands, too. News of the lead plates reached Williamsburg and young George Washington was sent west to expel the French. This is the only plaque that survives intact. Our most significant artifact? In 1749, on orders from the governor of New France (Canada) at Quebec, Pierre Joseph Celeron de Blainville laid lead tablets along the Ohio River at the junctions with its tributary rivers. This one, the only one to survive intact, was laid at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha rivers, now in West Virginia. Indians sent news of the tablets to Williamsburg, where Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie gave orders to a twenty-one-year-old with no military experience, George Washington, to tell the French to get out of the Ohio Country, which Virginia claimed. When they did not leave, Washington was sent a second time, with troops. Blood was spilled, beginning the French and Indian War of 1754. The conflict between Great Britain and France spread to Europe, India, and the high seas and was known as The Seven Years War (1756-63). In London, Horace Walpole wrote that "a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire." French surrendered Canada and all its claims to North America in 1763. The future of the continent would be largely Anglo-American. More than a century later, Germany's famous chancellor Otto von Bismarck said that the most important geopolitical fact in the world was that Americans spoke English.
95. VHSSTO_101222_1139.JPG: The Confederacy saw itself as a holy crusade. Its Constitution went beyond the US Constitution in invoking God's favor, and ministers of all denominations were quick to cite early victories as proof of it. President Jefferson Davis frequently proclaimed days of fasting and prayer and himself was baptized into St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond. As shown here, the Confederacy even had its own Sunday School hymn books.
96. VHSSTO_101222_1167.JPG: Patrick Henry's spectacles, perhaps the very ones shown pushed up over his brow in the portrait above.
97. VHSSTO_101222_1183.JPG: Patrick Henry (1736-1799) by Thomas Sully, 1851, after a miniature from life. Henry was as complete a master of Virginia politics as Samuel Adams was of Massachusetts politics. Both were early advocates of independence. When independence came, Henry became the Commonwealth of Virginia's first governor. One of his most important acts was sending George Rogers Clark to expel the British from the Illinois country, then part of a Virginia county. Clark's success ensured that the Midwest became part of the United States rather than part of British Canada.
98. VHSSTO_101222_1191.JPG: Patrick Henry arguing the Parson's Cause, attributed to George Cooke, c. 1830, depicts the event that propelled Henry to prominence. On December 1, 1763, at Hanover Court House, he gave a blaze of oratory on behalf of the defendants in a legal case called "The Parson's Cause." His daring defense asserted that a king who vetoed popular laws was no king, but a tyrant who ought not to be obeyed. In 1765, passage of his resolutions opposing the Stamp Act made the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer Virginia's most influential politician. His speech included the passage "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George III." The Speaker of the House, John Robinson, interrupted with a cry of "Treason!" "And George the Third may profit from their example," Henry continued. "If this be treason, make the most of it," he calmly concluded.
99. VHSSTO_101222_1196.JPG: Peyton Randolph (c. 1721-1775) by John Wollaston. Speaker of the House of Burgesses from 1766 to 1775, Randolph was president of the First Continental Congress in 1774 and 1775 and was called "the father of the country." He did not serve in the Second Continental Congress, ceding his place to John Hancock of Massachusetts and his nickname to fellow Virginian George Washington.
100. VHSSTO_101222_1208.JPG: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) by Rudolph Evans, a plaster study for the freestanding full figure marble statue of Jefferson in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington. Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the youngest of the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress. Income from his land and slaves supported him when he had to give up his law practice after the courts were closed in 1774.
101. VHSSTO_101222_1212.JPG: Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776 Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776, by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin were named to a committee to prepare a declaration of independence. Jefferson (standing) did the actual writing because he was known as a good writer. Congress deleted Jefferson's most extravagant rhetoric and accusations. The Declaration of Independence -- mostly the work of Thomas Jefferson -- reflected the duality of the American Revolution as an anti-colonial struggle for independence and a revolution in thinking about the nature of government. As a propaganda document, it indicted the king for the separation rather than Parliament because it was easier to hate an individual than an institution. It is remembered, however, for making "the pursuit of happiness" by ordinary people the chief object of government; for vesting sovereignty in the people rather than in kings; and for its assertion that all men were created equal, which reversed thousands of years of class presumptions. Although it meant white men, even that was revolutionary in 1775, and the new nation's founding on principles of liberty and equality ultimately doomed conditions that oppressed women and blacks.
102. VHSSTO_101222_1222.JPG: George Mason (1725-1792) was called on in 1776 to draft the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Thomas Jefferson rephrased a few weeks later in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. Mason opposed ratification of the US Constitution because it lacked a bill of rights. Mason's 1776 document was the model for the federal Bill of Rights, adopted as amendments to the US Constitution in 1791. Mason was an active opponent of the slave trade, but he was not an abolitionist.
103. VHSSTO_101222_1226.JPG: George Washington: George Washington's experience as commander of the Continental army under the Articles of Confederation hastened his transformation from Virginian to American. He remained devoted to Virginia, but only as part of the new nation. Washington has been called "The Father of our Country" and "The Indispensable Man" for his crucial role in winning the war for independence and as the first president. "Light-Horse Harry" Lee -- Robert E. Lee's father -- extolled him as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Washington lost as many battles as he won during the Revolutionary War, but he was "first in war" because he held the Continental army together for eight years until victory was achieved. Washington was "first in peace" because his endorsement of the Constitution helped secure its adoption and ratification, and his tenure as the first president set the republic on a sound foundation. He was "first in the hearts of his countrymen" because he used power for the public good, relinquished it voluntarily, and put service above self. The Revolutionary War: The American Revolutionary War was Great Britain's equivalent of the Vietnam War. There were British "hawks" and "doves." The war's morality was questioned. Rebel leaders were both reviled and revered. There was a "domino theory" that Ireland would follow America. After six years of fighting, public opinion finally concluded that the war was unwinnable. The decisive event occurred at Yorktown. The British army was besieged by a combined Franco-American army. The French fleet sealed Chesapeake Bay, preventing the British from resupply, reinforcement, or escape. Lord Cornwallis's whole command was surrendered. The British prime minister took the news "as he would have a [musket] ball in the breast" and moaned, "Oh God, it is all over, it is all over."
104. VHSSTO_101222_1231.JPG: Vest of Peter Francisco (1760-1831), worn after the Revolution, probably about 1810. Its girth is fifty-four inches at the bottom. It was made on his Buckingham County plantation.
105. VHSSTO_101222_1237.JPG: Arthur Lee (1740-1792), by Charles Willson Peale, c. 1785. Lee was a successful pamphleteer for American liberties who, in 1775, became the London correspondent of the Continental Congress. He coordinated a strategy of resistance to Parliament with representatives of other colonies. During the Revolutionary War, he was one of three commissioners who negotiated the vital alliance with France in 1778. Empowered with his brother William to procure arms for Virginia, they were circumvented by Jacques LeMaire, who obtained the swords displayed below.
106. VHSSTO_101222_1249.JPG: Daniel Morgan (1736-1802) by Charles Willson Peale. Morgan had come to the Shenandoah Valley from New Jersey by age eighteen. As captain, he commanded Virginia riflemen in the assault on Quebec. As colonel, his corps of sharpshooters was critical at Saratoga, New York -- the turning point of the war. As brigadier general, he and troops under his command annihilated a whole wing of the British army at Cowpens, South Carolina on January 17, 1781. He retired to his Clarke County home, Saratoga.
107. VHSSTO_101222_1255.JPG: Lafayette Lafayette rallying troops of the 8th Virginia Regiment, by Frank Schoonover, 1921. At the Battle of Brandywine, to prevent a rout, Lafayette dismounted and rallied the 8th Virginia. Moments later he was wounded in the leg. On December 1, 1777, he was assigned command of the division of Virginia light troops with the rank of major general.
108. VHSSTO_101222_1264.JPG: John Paul Jones (1747-1792) was born in Scotland but at age twelve came to Virginia, where his older brother William was a merchant. His career as master of the merchant vessel John ended in controversy. He changed his name from John Paul to Paul Jones and spent about twenty months in Fredericksburg. In December 1775, he joined the new American navy. He raised the English and Scottish coasts. During combat between Jones's vessel, the Bonhomme Richard, and the British Serapis, the captain of the latter asked if Jones was ready to surrender. "I have not yet begun to fight" replied Jones, who went on to capture the Serapis and Countess of Scarborough. This plaster bust is based on the original made from life by Jean Antoine Houdon, but was produced in the twentieth century by PP Caproni & Brothers of Boston.
109. VHSSTO_101222_1266.JPG: The Federalist was a collection of eighty-five newspaper essays by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of New York and James Madison of Virginia that were published together in 1788 in a two-volume first edition. They were written in defense of the proposed United States Constitution.
110. VHSSTO_101222_1279.JPG: James Madison (1751-1836), by Joseph Wood, 1817. This portrait was done at the end of Madison's two terms as president. Even more important was the work that earned him the name "The Father of the Constitution." Once the federal government was established, however, Madison opposed George Washington's administration as too centralizing in domestic matters and not supportive enough of the French Revolution. He and Thomas Jefferson organized the opposition Republican (now Democratic) party. He was Jefferson's secretary of state 1801-09 before himself becoming president. The Constitution Legacy: George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights was the pattern for the federal Bill of Rights. James Madison is called "The Father of the Constitution." Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was the most sweeping call for freedom of conscience of any legislative enactment in history. John Marshall made the Supreme Court a co-equal branch of government. Eight of the first nine presidential terms were served by Virginians. Its leaders determined the character of the infant republic more than any other people. But not everything developed as the founding fathers had hoped. The Revolution's egalitarian ideals had the largely unintended consequence of discrediting almost all ideas of dependence, hierarchy, and deference. Money became the principal determinant of status. Thomas Jefferson's election as president in the "Revolution of 1800," overthrowing the conservative, centralizing Federalist party, seemed to augur well for what Virginians favored -- liberal, limited, and cheap government in a physically expanding nation. But by the time of Jefferson's death on July 4, 1826, raucous democracy was replacing genteel republicanism, public spiritedness was giving way to narrow individualism and materialism, and the Virginia Dynasty was about to be displaced by a succession of "log cabin" presidents. Moreover, to the surprise and dismay of Thomas Jefferson, evangelical Christianity, not deism, swept the country and became the core culture of Virginia and the nation for the next century.
111. VHSSTO_101222_1286.JPG: Edmund Pendleton (1721-1803), by Thomas Sully, after a miniature by William Mercer. As president of the Virginia Convention of 1776, Pendleton was instrumental in framing Virginia's first constitution and in revising the legal code. In 1778, he interrupted his judicial career to serve as president of the convention that ratified the federal constitution.
112. VHSSTO_101222_1289.JPG: John Marshall (1755-1835), by John Reid Lambdin, 1832. Marshall was secretary of state to President John Adams before Adams appointed him Chief Justice of the United States, a position he held from 1801 until his death in 1835. Marshall was a Federalist -- a supporter of a strong central government -- which put him at odds with Jeffersonian states' rights Virginians. He made the Supreme Court a co-equal branch of government. His rulings in favor of property rights greatly strengthened American capitalism while other "isms" were gaining an audience in Europe.
113. VHSSTO_101222_1300.JPG: African Virginians 1775 By the time of the American Revolution, over 186,000 enslaved blacks lived in Virginia. Most worked on the larger plantations in Tidewater and Piedmont. The Revolution and African Virginians: The rhetoric of the American Revolution about liberty and equality, though not intended for African Virginians, was heard by them nonetheless. The irony of fighting for liberty while owning slaves troubled some whites, and for a time it seemed that something would be done. When no proposal proved economically acceptable to slaveowners, some slaves too matters into their own hands. Like whites, African Virginians were divided by the Revolution, unsure which was the path to freedom. In November 1775, the last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed the freedom of any slave who would join the British cause. Thousands of black Virginians did. A smaller number served with the American forces. In 1789, the Virginia legislature freed Caesar, a slave of the Tarrant family, who had piloted the Patriot, a Virginia vessel on which other black seamen also served. For his services as a spy and guide, Saul Matthews was praised by such generals as baron von Steuben and Nathaniel Greene. The Commonwealth acted ambivalently. In 1778, Virginia outlawed the slave trade, but two years later the legislature voted to reward Revolutionary War veterans with three hundred acres of land -- and a slave. In 1782, when the General Assembly allowed slaveowners to free their slaves, a minority did -- often religious evangelicals. But outright abolition seemed too costly, and the momentum for reform died out. Some black Virginians decided to act. In 1800 and 1802, two slave rebellions were planned. Both were betrayed by informers. Gabriel, leader of the first revolt, had been owned by a friend of Patrick Henry, whose famous words the slave rebels intended to invert and put on a banner -- "Death or Liberty." Another slave revolt, led by Nat Turner in 1831, was symbolically scheduled for July 4.
114. VHSSTO_101222_1303.JPG: Tom Molineaux Born a slave on a Virginia plantation, Tom Molineaux (1784–1818) fought fellow slaves while plantation owners wagered on the contests. After winning one of these matches against a rival, Molineaux was granted his freedom and the sum of $500. By 1809, he had traveled to New York and subsequently to England where he pursued a title in London's boxing rings. Two notorious fights with English champion Tom Cribb in 1810 and 1811 won him a place in boxing history. Molineaux is considered the second notable American boxer, preceded by his Virginia-born trainer, Bill Richmond. A hand-colored etching of Molineaux at an English boxing match (London, 1812) is now part of the VHS collection.
115. VHSSTO_101222_1308.JPG: James Armistead Lafayette, a slave carpenter of William Armistead of Richmond, was recruited by the Marquis de Lafayette to spy on the British during the Revolution. For his services, he successfully petitioned for his freedom. He took the surname Lafayette and lived in New Kent County. When Lafayette returned to Richmond in 1824, James Armistead Lafayette posed for this portrait by John B. Martin (reproduction courtesy Valentine Museum), and a portrait of James A. Lafayette with a facsimile of the Marquis de Lafayette's wartime testimonial was engraved and distributed as a print.
116. VHSSTO_101222_1315.JPG: Tragical Scene (Broadside, 1832) This broadside recounts Nat Turner's (1800–1831) slave rebellion in Southampton County in 1831. It was published in New York in 1832. Previous uprisings, like Gabriel's in 1800, had been exposed by informers, so Turner kept his plans to himself, counting on the revolt to attract recruits spontaneously once set in action, which is what happened. Turner was born in 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia, to a slave woman born in Africa and a father who possibly escaped to the North. Turner learned to read, probably from his master's son. Turner always was religious and became a lay preacher, but after he was twice sold he became convinced that God wanted him to liberate the slaves and punish the guilty white world. A solar eclipse was taken as a sign to act. Originally, the revolt was scheduled for July 4th, but illness forced postponement until August 21, 1831, when Turner and four or five associates killed the Travis family that owned Turner. By August 23, when the militia crushed the insurrection, Turner's followers had grown to 60 to 80 and his white victims—men, women, and children—numbered between 57 and 65. For six weeks Turner eluded capture. Then he was tried and executed at the county seat of Jerusalem (now Courtland), which led to slave songs comparing his sufferings to Christ's at his Jerusalem. In the aftermath, the militiamen killed about 120 innocent blacks. Many Virginians wrongly blamed northern agitation for what was a very homegrown rebellion. A legislative proposal to gradually end slavery was narrowly defeated and a harsh new slave code was instituted in Virginia and throughout the South.
117. VHSSTO_101222_1326.JPG: Dolley Madison Dolley (Payne) Todd Madison (1768–1849) lived through three wars, knew eleven presidents, and was a gracious and influential personality in the political landscape of Washington for fifty years. Born while her Virginia parents were temporarily in North Carolina, Dolley Payne was raised at Scotchtown near Ashland, Virginia. Her parents were Quakers, and in 1783 the family moved to Philadelphia where Dolley later married John Todd, Jr. Her husband and infant son both died during a yellow fever epidemic in 1793, and Dolley and her other son, John Payne, barely survived. A year later Aaron Burr introduced her to James Madison, whom she soon married. Dolley, seventeen years younger than her husband, outgoing and socially skilled, was a contrast and a complement to James, a brilliant yet reserved statesman who valued his wife's abilities as a host. Her abilities enhanced her husband's popularity, and one of his opponents once lamented, "I was beaten by Mr. and Mrs. Madison. I might have had a better chance had I faced Mr. Madison alone." The Madisons lived at his Orange County estate, Montpelier, until President Thomas Jefferson appointed James as his Secretary of State in 1801. As the wife of the ranking Cabinet official, Dolley served as the unofficial First Lady for the widowed Jefferson. Her genuine graciousness and political tact made her a popular, if unconventional, figure on the Washington scene during her husband's two administrations. Despite her Quaker upbringing, Dolley played cards, dipped snuff, and enjoyed the latest fashions. And she ensured her place in history textbooks by rescuing important state papers and a portrait of George Washington when the British set fire to the White House during the War of 1812. This portrait was painted in 1817 at the end of her tenure as First Lady.
118. VHSSTO_101222_1353.JPG: The War of 1812: Important events took place on Virginia soil during the War of 1812. Although the war ended in stalemate, Americans remembered only the victories, resulting in an upsurge of national unity and patriotism. The United States declared war in June 1812, citing British interference with America's trade with Europe, then under the control of Britain's enemy, Napoleon. Also, the British had seized American seamen as deserters and had encouraged Native American attacks on US frontier settlements. Some American politicians hoped to conquer and annex British Canada. In 1813, an intended British attack on Norfolk was skillfully driven off. Chosseurs d'Angleterre or English hunters [actually French loyalists serving with the British] looted Hampton. Alexandria was spared destruction in 1814 by surrendering without firing a shot, but the enemy took away twenty-one ships and all they could carry. The British then made Tangier Island the staging area for their unsuccessful attack on Baltimore. One of the last military actions in Virginia was the plundering of Tappahannock in December 1814, the month in which the peace treaty was signed. Virginia created a state army in 1813 out of fear of a slave revolt but disbanded it when the national government agreed to post regular soldiers in Norfolk to suppress any insurrection. Several hundred Tidewater slaves sought refuge with the British and were resettled mostly in Canada.
119. VHSSTO_101222_1356.JPG: General Washington and the Lull in the Battle of Monmouth, by Julian Scott, 1874-75
120. VHSSTO_101222_1369.JPG: The Original Tomb of Washington, by Russell Smith, 1836
121. VHSSTO_101222_1379.JPG: George Washington This depiction of George Washington (1732–1799) as commander of the Continental army was painted in the 1790s by Charles Peale Polk, who derived the image from portraits taken from life by his more famous uncle Charles Willson Peale. Washington was keenly aware of physical appearance and paid considerable attention to both proper dress and proper demeanor. He said, "nothing adds more to the appearance of a man than dress." Washington concerned himself with the buttons, trimmings, and all manner of details of his uniform. He even powdered his hair to enhance the sense of dignity. Washington was as attentive to his demeanor as to his dress. Gifted with an extraordinary personality and presence, he knew how to project those qualities and make the most of them. It was by the force of that personality that Washington held together the Continental army in the face of overwhelming odds, limited enlistments, and shortages of materials. Somehow Washington could be both formal and warm at the same time. Abigail Adams said, "he has a dignity that forbids familiarity, mixed with an easy affability that creates love and reverence." As a gentleman in Virginia he had learned to treat people of "low Degree," as he put it, "with affability & Courtesie, without Arrogancy." As a Virginia colonel, he had learned to combine benevolence with what he called "the strictest discipline" and "the strictest justice," and so win the confidence and admiration of his men. Washington commanded the Continental army from June 14, 1775, until December 23, 1783. He fought only nine major battles, often losing, but he held the army together until the French alliance tipped events in his favor.
122. VHSSTO_101222_1399.JPG: [5] The Story of Virginia: An American Experience : A Long-term Exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/southerners.htm Becoming Southerners Before 1776 Virginians spoke of the West as the back-country, back settlements, or back parts. After independence, however, Virginians and other Americans turned away from Europe in an intellectual sense, faced the interior of their own continent, and saw their futures there. This was especially true in Virginia because after 1800 the commonwealth’s agriculture collapsed from centuries of farming without enough crop rotation or use of fertilizers. Leaving Virginia: Soil exhaustion in the Tidewater became chronic, and the Piedmont was “worn out, washed and gullied.” Conditions were better in the Valley of Virginia, where wheat rather than tobacco was dominant, but even there people saw a brighter future outside Virginia. Many German families made their way to the Midwest, while the Scotch-Irish continued down into Tennessee and beyond. A huge numbers of slaves were taken west with masters or were sold to the emerging Cotton South. In all, perhaps one million Virginians left the commonwealth between the Revolution and the Civil War. It was at this time, in 1831, that a group of Virginians came together to form the Virginia Historical Society. They were proud of the state’s glorious past, but they were equally certain that its glory days were behind it. Virginia fell from first to seventh place in population, and its number of congressmen dropped from twenty-three to eleven. Although this mass exodus of Virginians caused the state to slip into a secondary role both politically and economically, these westward-bound settlers spread their culture, laws, political ideas, and labor system across America. Many of these settlers were black, and this migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of Virginia created a system of slavery and black culture that was of continental dimensions. Cotton and the Slave Trade: The agricultural depression in Virginia meant that, in many places, slaves cost more to maintain than they produced. This did not lead, however, to the elimination of slavery. One reason for its survival was that slavery, although unproductive in Virginia, was thriving elsewhere, creating high demand and prices for slaves. The invention of the spinning jenny in England and the cotton gin in New England enabled cotton to replace wool as the staple for clothes. Cotton harvesting required stoop labor performed by slaves. Virginia was not a major cotton producer, but it became the major exporter of slaves to large-scale cotton-producing regions farther south. For the American South, cotton revived and strengthened slavery so that the generation of the Revolution, which had been uncomfortable about slavery, was succeeded by a southern generation that largely defended slavery as a positive good rather than an unfortunate necessity. They rationalized slavery by convincing themselves that African Americans were inferior, that they were better treated than northern white laborers, and that the Bible sanctioned the institution. As free discussion of the issue was discouraged, southerners began to think of themselves as a culture apart from the rest of the nation. Virginians move to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio: Throughout the 1700s, Virginians moved southwest down the Valley of Virginia, leading inexorably into Tennessee. In 1769 William Bean of Virginia became the first white settler in what would become Tennessee. Many Virginians followed in his footsteps and became the first families of the state. Kentucky remained a Virginia county from 1776 until it became a separate state in 1792. In 1778, Virginia governor Patrick Henry sent George Rogers Clark there to expel the British. His victories ensured that the region became part of the United States rather than British Canada. To Virginians of that period, Kentucky seemed to be the gateway to a better life. As part of a coordinated effort to promote national unity, however, Virginia ceded its claims north of the Ohio River to the federal government in 1784. Nonetheless, large numbers of Virginians poured into southern Ohio after the Indians there were defeated in 1794. Slavery was outlawed in the Northwest, but the Virginia elite transplanted much of its culture. Both the 1850 and 1860 censuses show that more native-born Virginians had migrated to Ohio than to any other state. Ironically, in the Civil War that would be fought largely because of the westward movement of slavery, Virginia found that it had supplied as many people to the North as to the South. The Lure of Distant Land: These expatriate Virginians, not only in Ohio, but also in Indiana, Illinois, and elsewhere in the Midwest, found themselves with tracts of farmland that were huge by Virginia standards. But they lacked the traditional Virginia slave labor force to work these broad acres. A Virginian came to the rescue. In 1831 Cyrus McCormick successfully demonstrated a mechanical reaper for harvesting wheat. He made no profit from it, however, until he relocated his business to the tiny town of Chicago in 1847. His firm later became known as International Harvester. By the time McCormick moved to Chicago, Texas was exerting the same kind of appeal to Virginians that Kentucky had in the 1790s. Some Virginians had settled there earlier, when it was a Mexican province. Stephen F. Austin, a native of Wythe County, led settlers there in 1822. In 1836 at least twelve Virginians were among the fifty-nine signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence from Mexico. Texas independence was secured when an army led by Sam Houston, another Rockbridge native, defeated and captured the Mexican president, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Some Virginia emigrants, however, returned to the Old Dominion. After the Civil War, William Byrd returned to Winchester and became the grandfather of future Governor Harry F. Byrd, Sr., and Admiral Richard E. Byrd. Moving West: The annexation of Texas in 1845 sparked the Mexican War, which resulted in California and much of the Southwest becoming part of the United States. The leading American generals both were Virginians—Zachary Taylor, who won the initial victories, and Winfield Scott, who ended the war by capturing Mexico City. Then, in 1849, news of “Gold in California!” reached Virginia. Newspapers quickly filled up with advertisements by ad hoc companies that proposed to transport men there for $300. Many were young men who, in depressed Virginia, looked forward at best to scraping by. Generally, Virginians got there too late to get rich by mining. But many stayed and became successful in the professions and in politics. Back in Virginia: Of course, not all Virginians moved west. Nor was the state entirely moribund. There was a spate of canal-building that later gave way to railroad development. Such men as Peter Minor and Edmund Ruffin introduced scientific farming to restore agricultural productivity. By the 1840s manufacturing was taking root in several cities, especially Richmond. Craftsmen enjoyed a golden age. Cabinetmakers, chairmakers, silversmiths, blacksmiths, ironmongers, tinsmiths, clock and watchmakers, saddle and harness makers, gunsmiths, and many other craftsmen produced works of beauty. The vast majority of Virginians, however, lived on farms. The average family would have done almost everything by hand. The matron of a large slaveowning family might delegate all the cooking to a slave cook, but the much larger number of families who had one or two slaves merely shared the cooking chores with slaves. Women, slave or free, usually tended the vegetable or herb gardens and oversaw the dairy, the chicken coop, and the smokehouse. In preindustrial Virginia, the vast majority of clothes and textiles were made at home, either by white women or female slaves. If one had the energy, quilting, weaving coverlets and counterpanes, or stitching samplers were cherished means of self-expression for women and girls. Making fabric at home for sale was one of the few earning opportunities available to women. Few Virginia women were able to work outside the home until after the Civil War, when clothes-making was mechanized and public schools were created. Slave Life: African Americans in Virginia had one more danger to dread—the 30 percent chance that they would be sold away from family, friends, and everything they knew. As slaves they received only the barest necessities and had no real protection under the law. On plantations, a hierarchy ranked a few household slaves above the field hands. Women also cooked, served meals, washed, ironed, mended clothes, made rough cloth and shoes for themselves, cared for white and black children, did housekeeping, and tended gardens. Former slaves remembered being hungry much of the time. Their diet consisted mainly of cornmeal, salt pork, bacon, peas, collard greens, turnips, and sometimes opossum or raccoon. Masters hired out many of their slaves to iron forges, tobacco warehouses, and mines. At times, one-quarter of skilled laborers in Richmond were slaves. In their “free” time slaves played marbles, gambled, told stories, played music, danced, or plotted escape. Out of slave culture emerged proverbs, recipes, dances, songs, gospel music, and the blues tradition that led to rock-and-roll. Slavery became the political issue in American politics. In 1776 every state had held slaves. After the Revolution slavery began to disappear in the North, where it had never really taken root economically. More and more it came under attack where it remained—in the South. As slavery became exclusively southern, and under attack, white Virginians increasingly identified with the people of the other slave states. They began to think of themselves not only as Virginians and as Americans, but also as southerners.
123. VHSSTO_101222_1403.JPG: Conestoga wagon The Conestoga wagon was developed in the 1700s by Germans near Conestoga, Pennsylvania, and they were introduced to Virginia by German immigrants coming down the Great Wagon Road into the Shenandoah Valley. Most Conestoga wagons were used for hauling freight and cigars are called stogies because the tobacco for them was hauled in Conestoga wagons. When the wagons were used by families moving west, the wagon carried household goods while the people rode or walked alongside. At night the wagon provided some shelter for people sleeping beneath it. The wagon is one of twelve surviving Conestoga-style wagons that were probably made in Virginia. This is the best-documented example. Look for the maker's name and address stenciled on the wagon's rear door. The name Conestoga reflects the origins of this type of wagon in the Conestoga Valley of Pennsylvania in the 1700s. This wagon was made by John Kiger, a wheelwright and wagon maker who was born in Pennsylvania in 1775 and was in Winchester by 1803. He was still alive at the time of the 1850 census, which lists him and a son John B. Kiger living in Sperryville. Most Conestoga wagons were used to haul freight locally. When they were used by families moving west, the wagon carried the household goods while the people rode or walked alongside. At night, the wagon provided some shelter for people sleeping beneath it. The curved wagon bed was designed to travel up and down steep slopes. Contents would settle at the middle of the wagon rather than shifting abruptly n one end or the other. The prairie schooner, used for travel across the flat plains, did not have this curved bottom. Americans in the 1800s, sometimes became as attached to their wagons as modern travelers are to their cars. One Virginian on the Oregon Trail named his wagon "Old Dominion." Why are cigars called "stogies"? Tobacco used to make cigars was often hauled in Conestoga wagons.
124. VHSSTO_101222_1421.JPG: Richmond about 1822, attributed to JL Boqueta de Woiseri, a Frenchman. Virginia's major towns -- Richmond, Norfolk, and Alexandria -- did not keep pace in the early 1800s with Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. At the time of the Revolution, Virginia's commerce was four times that of New York. By 1853, New York's was 360 times greater.
125. VHSSTO_101222_1433.JPG: Ruins of Jamestown The Ruins of Jamestown, Virginia, America by Alexandria-born artist John Gadsby Chapman, 1834. Although Jamestown declined for special reasons—the transfer of the capital to Willliamsburg—the ruins nonetheless seemed symptomatic of the general decline of Tidewater Virginia in the early 1800s.
126. VHSSTO_101222_1438.JPG: A View of Salem, Virginia Churches, Blacksmith Shop and College: A View of Salem in Virginia in 1855 was painted by Edward Beyer, who worked in Virginia for a few years in the 1850s. This is a rare landscape commissioned by wealthy Virginia gentlemen, at a time when most commissioned paintings in Virginia were portraits. Nineteenth-century Salem was a market town, where produce from nearby plantations was sold, and with the income from the sales planters bought hard and soft goods of every description as well as farm equipment, seed, and feed. In the late 1800s a visitor described the town: it "lies in a broad valley, is surrounded by large estates, and an air of prosperity and pleasant home-life pervades the whole scene." Some twenty residents of Salem commissioned Edward Beyer to paint this panorama. He shows us the buildings of the town, their positions in the landscape, and how people dressed, worked, and traveled. We view the canvas almost as if it were a moving panorama. Like the foreground couple on horseback, we enter the town on Main Street and then proceed to tour Salem, at least visually. In the distance to the right is the classical main building of Roanoke College.
127. VHSSTO_101222_1453.JPG: John Randolph (1773-1833), by an unknown artist after Arthur J Stansburg c. 1825. Randolph never fully matured sexually and retained a boy's voice. He was described as a "nondescript of a man, whose personal appearance is as singular as his talents are rare."
128. VHSSTO_101222_1461.JPG: Where Did Virginian Go? Where native-born Virginians lived in 1850
129. VHSSTO_101222_1471.JPG: Carriage This vehicle was made 1827–30, probably in the Northeast, possibly by Lawrence, Bradley & Pardee of New Haven, whose "Caleche Coach" it resembles in some ways. One account says it was purchased "before 1830" in Winchester, Virginia, by John Glasgow of Rockbridge County, who had forty-two slaves in the 1850 census. The carriage is unlikely to have been made in Winchester, however, as there was very limited demand outside large northeastern cities for vehicles of such opulence. About 1860 the carriage was refurbished and overhauled by John Hardy and Son of Staunton, Virginia, who then affixed a plate with their names to the rear, rococo-carved panel, which drops for the footman to stand upon. The carriage was used by the Glasgow family of "Tuscan Villa," which was five miles from Lexington, Virginia, until automobiles supplanted carriages. In 1964 it was purchased by another local family, but plans to restore it went unfulfilled. The Virginia Historical Society purchased it in 2001 with funds provided by Nicholas F. Taubman. It was conserved by Woodlyn Coach Company of Millersburg, Ohio. The windows can be raised or lowered and the sides panels can be removed for summer driving. The mounts are polished nickel that in the 1800s was called German silver. Two horses sufficed to pull the carriage, but for show an additional front pair of high-stepping horses would be used. It is said that troops of Union General David Hunter, who burned Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, plundered the fine original harness.
130. VHSSTO_101222_1476.JPG: Corner cupboard Corner cupboard, Harrisonburg area, 1790–1810. The arched doors, fluted pilasters and complex dentil cornice reflect the architectural character of many Shenandoah Valley cupboards. The white putty inlay is a local characteristic.
131. VHSSTO_101222_1483.JPG: Whipping post This whipping post from what was called the "negro jail" in Portsmouth, Virginia, was taken to upstate New York as a war trophy by Private Charles C. Miller of Company I of the 148th New York Volunteers. A committed abolitionist, Miller wrote in his Civil War diary, "I will pour hot oil into anyone's bowels that upholds slavery." Miller first mentioned the whipping post in his diary entry for April 2, 1863. On seeing the post he made an oath to destroy it and got several escaped slaves to help him. They sneaked out of camp and made their way to Portsmouth, but found they could not detach the post from its platform without a saw. They had to return to camp to get a saw, then sneak out a second time. Finally, they sawed the post off, disassembled it into smaller pieces, and shipped them off to Miller's brother "to be preserved as a relic of barbarism." Based on what he had heard, Miller believed that at least a thousand blacks had been whipped at the post. During a campaign parade when Ulysses S. Grant ran for president in 1868, the post was paraded through the streets of Penn Van, New York, on a hay rigging as a black man received a mock whipping. Miller gave this relic to the Sloan Post of the Grand Army of the Republic, a union veterans organization, which in turn gave it to the Yates County Historical Society, which generously donated it to the Virginia Historical Society.
132. VHSSTO_101222_1497.JPG: Membership certificate in the American Colonization Society. In all, about 15,000 African Americans settled in Liberia, the largest organized migration out of the United States in its history. Liberia: The colonization movement aimed to send free African Americans to colonize Africa, particular a part of West Africa since known as Liberia. To some whites, this way was a way to be rid of free blacks; to others it fulfilled a moral duty to return these people to their ancestral homelands, while sending Christians who could spread the faith. To some blacks, it offered an escape from racism and the possibility of re-enslavement. About 15,000 blacks went to Liberia, many of them from Virginia. Colonization, however, was too expensive to be a solution to Virginia's race problem. The free blacks who founded Liberia ironically patterned their society after the American South, even introducing slavery and the slave trade. Their flag was red, white, and blue, with one star and twelve stripes. Their elite lived in white-columned mansions and danced Virginia reels. West African natives called them "white men" and called the capital of Monrovia "the American place." The Liberian experiment reminds us that not all slavery was based on race.
133. VHSSTO_101222_1506.JPG: Freedom papers of Henry Kilgor of Scott County, 1856
134. VHSSTO_101222_1513.JPG: Leather flogging strap used at the whipping post at Gloucester Court House.
135. VHSSTO_101222_1516.JPG: Powhatan County Smokehouse: This smokehouse, c 1820, is from a farm or plantation at Belona, Powhatan County. According to tradition, it was sometimes used as a slave jail. The massive construction, lack of windows, and door lock (the smaller door is not original and was added later) all suggest that it could have been used as a temporary jail until the accused were taken in custody to county officials. Of course, the main purpose of a smokehouse was to smoke hams. Smoked hams remain one of the foods most associated with Virginia.
136. VHSSTO_101222_1528.JPG: [6] The Story of Virginia: An American Experience: A Long-term Exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society http://www.vahistorical.org/sva2003/confederates.htm Becoming Confederates Virginians were optimistic through most of the 1850s. Turnpikes, canals, and railroads linked eastern and western Virginia in new ways, and a constitutional convention in 1850–51 eased the state’s longstanding east-west antagonisms. The economy grew vigorously from its depressed condition in the 1830s. But the issue of slavery would not go away. Prelude to War: The Compromise of 1850 brought trouble rather than peace to Virginia. Its call for the return of fugitive slaves inflamed sectional feelings and involved Virginia because of its proximity to free states, to which slaves might escape. The lawsuit of a Virginia-born slave, Dred Scott—who claimed freedom because his master had taken him to free soil—produced a storm of controversy. In 1857, the Supreme Court denied that such movement made Scott free. It ruled that he was neither a citizen nor had any right to sue, and it held that Congress had no right to ban slavery in the nation’s western territories. Many white Virginians were reassured, believing that the tide was turning their way. They would soon be disillusioned. In October 1859 John Brown, an abolitionist, seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia in order to arm a vast slave rebellion. He reasoned that slaves throughout the South would rise up once they were assured of having weapons. Nothing of the kind happened. Federal troops killed some of Brown’s associates, and Brown himself was captured and hanged. What angered the South was the North’s reaction. Many northerners considered Brown a martyr. Some wished he had succeeded. White Virginians began to wonder if they were safe within the Union. Declension and Secession: There was only one remaining national institution that had not broken up on North-South lines—the Democratic Party. But in 1860, its northern faction, which nominated Stephen Douglas of Illinois for president, split from its southern faction, which nominated John G. Breckinridge of Kentucky. For the first time, Virginia did not vote Democratic, favoring instead John G. Bell of the new Constitutional Union Party. The Democrats’ split ensured the election of the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, who carried only northern states. In Virginia he won votes only in counties that soon would become West Virginia. Following Lincoln’s election, seven southern states seceded, fearful for the future of slavery. Virginia was not among them. During the “secession winter” of 1860–61, white Virginians struggled with their competing allegiances. They were proud to be Americans but for decades had also thought of themselves as southerners. Most decided that they would stay with the Union if it did not attack the seceded states. But, if war came, rather than fight fellow southerners, Virginia would leave the Union too. The convention that met in Richmond in early 1861 to consider Virginia’s role within the nation was overwhelmingly unionist. But it was a highly conditional unionism, and within days of the fighting at Fort Sumter, the convention voted to secede. Taking Sides: On April 17, General Winfield Scott, Virginia-born hero of the War of 1812 and captor of Mexico City in the Mexican War, offered command of the U.S. Army to Robert E. Lee. Lee declined on the grounds that he could not participate in what he called “an invasion of the southern states.” Scott said that if Lee could not command U.S. troops he should resign his commission. He did, explaining, “If Virginia stands by the old Union, so will I. But, if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as a constitutional right, or that there is sufficient cause for revolution), then I will still follow my native State with my sword, and if need be with my life.” Lee believed he was defending Virginia, not slavery. But slavery lay behind Virginia’s action. The commonwealth voted to leave the Union because Virginians refused to use force against the other southern states that had already seceded. And those states had seceded because they feared they could no longer trust the federal government to safeguard states’ rights and southern institutions, especially slavery. Some Confederates said they were defending their way of life, but it was slavery that was the most distinctive thing about southern society. Others said they were defending their liberties, but these principally included the liberty to maintain slavery. Most Confederate soldiers owned no slaves and believed they were repelling aggression against the freely expressed will of the white people of Virginia. In 1776, Virginians had maintained that the consent of the governed lay in Williamsburg, not London. Now they argued it lay in Richmond, not Washington. One Virginia private, when asked by a Union soldier why he was fighting, answered “Because you’re down here.” To many today, however, it evades the fact that without slavery, none of the rest would have happened. Capital of the Confederacy: Once Virginia seceded, the Confederates moved their capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond. This reflected both the material importance of Virginia to the war effort—it still was the most populous southern state and had the most industry—and the psychological symbolism of Virginia’s association with the earlier war of independence. Both sides claimed to be heirs of the American Revolution. The Confederacy identified with the colonies in 1776 and emphasized liberty, local self-determination, and independence. The United States, by contrast, stressed not the causes of the Revolution but its results—a legacy of nationhood and founding ideals of equality. The fateful decision to make Richmond the Confederate capital determined that much of the war would be fought in Virginia. Some Confederates and later historians believed that moving the capital was a mistake because it placed undue emphasis on defending Richmond to the neglect of the West, where the war was really lost. The first effort by a Union army to capture Richmond met defeat near Manassas on July 21, 1861. But the resources of both sides were great enough to survive a single defeat. The Union occupied Arlington and Alexandria for the duration of the conflict. It also wrested control of fifty Unionist counties in western Virginia, which then seceded from Virginia to form West Virginia. The second Union effort to capture Richmond—the Peninsula campaign—aimed at attacking Richmond from the southeast. Its commander, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, slowly reached the outskirts of the city. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson (who had earned his nickname at Manassas) defeated three Union armies in five battles in the Shenandoah Valley and then was able to join Robert E. Lee in attacking McClellan, who fell back and ultimately quit the Peninsula. The Confederacy Weakens: After victory at Second Manassas at the end of August 1862, the Confederate army advanced on Maryland but was stalemated at the battle of Antietam on September 17th. This gave President Lincoln an occasion to change Union war goals with the Emancipation Proclamation. The Union army advanced into Virginia but foolishly attacked entrenched Confederates overlooking Fredericksburg and was repulsed with huge losses on December 13, 1862. In May 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee won his greatest victory at Chancellorsville, but it cost him the invaluable "Stonewall" Jackson who was mortally wounded during the battle. Emboldened, Lee invaded Pennsylvania, but was defeated after three days of fighting (July 1–3) at Gettysburg. It was the last Confederate offensive. During 1863 the southern economy deteriorated. A food riot in Richmond by angry, hungry women shocked southern opinion. The Union blockade obstructed the export of cotton, which prevented the Confederacy from obtaining loans and caused its currency to become inflated and eventually worthless. Necessities were acquired, if at all, through barter. Moreover, 38,000 Virginia slaves escaped to Union armies in 1863, further dislocating the economy. African American Perspectives: Booker T. Washington, who was a young Virginia slave during the war, recalled that "Even the most ignorant members of my race on the remote plantations felt in their hearts that the freedom of the slaves would be the one great result of the War if the northern armies conquered." A slave preparing dinner while the battle of First Manassas raged, shouted "Ride on, Massa Jesus" each time the cannons fired. Slaves did not rise up in rebellion as many whites feared, but neither did they simply await emancipation. When opportunity presented itself—generally the proximity of Union troops—they acted. On the very day Virginia seceded, several escaped slaves were allowed into Union-held Fort Monroe. As word spread, the trickle of refugees became a flood, forcing northern officials to apply the term contraband—captured enemy property—to people who were not yet formally free but clearly would not again be slaves. The tens of thousands of Virginia slaves or contrabands who escaped to Union lines had no means of support and became wards of the federal government. The men became teamsters or ditch or grave diggers for the U.S. Army, while the women served as nurses, laundresses, scouts, or even spies. In 1863, the U.S. Army began recruiting African Americans. Nine United States Colored Troop (USCT) regiments were formed during 1863–64 in parts of occupied Virginia. The 1st Cavalry fought at Bermuda Hundred and Petersburg and the 2nd Cavalry at Drewry’s Bluff and Chaffin’s Farm. The 36th and 38th infantry regiments saw action at the Wilderness and in the siege of Petersburg, producing six Medal of Honor recipients. Other African Virginians served in units organized in the North, such as the 55th Massachusetts, which was 11 percent Virginian. Marie Lewis, a black woman, even disguised herself as a man to serve in the 8th New York Cavalry. Despite the earlier record of service by black Virginians in 1776 and 1812, Confederates made little effort to enlist them in the cause, probably because slavery was at the heart of the matter. A few served nonetheless. Many Confederate officers had body servants, some of whom enlisted in the army or navy, although usually they were unarmed. Of nearly 29,000 Confederates who surrendered at Appomattox, only 30 were black. By contrast, 5,723 black Virginians were recruited in the state as Union soldiers, and many others enlisted in northern states. Women and the Home Front: "The women were, by all odds, far worse rebels than the men," wrote an observer during the Peninsula campaign. Many sewed uniforms, flags, tents, and bandages. Others became nurses. A few were hospital matrons like the revered Annie E. Johns of Danville. Belle Boyd from the Shenandoah Valley was known as the Rebel Spy. Nancy Hart was a scout for Stonewall Jackson. Elizabeth Van Lew spied for the Union and placed a female servant, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, at the White House of the Confederacy. Women assumed control of farms and plantations in the absence of men. In white families without slaves, women ran farms with just the help of children and the aged. Those with slaves often saw them run away as the Union army approached. The home front and the war front were one. Fear of marauding soldiers compounded conditions of real hunger. Cities grew in size because of the attraction of jobs and, later, food. Richmond increased from about 40,000 in 1860 to perhaps 100,000 in 1863. Women became government clerks or factory workers for the first time. Forty of them died in an explosion at a Richmond ammunition factory. Fall of Richmond: In March 1864, Lincoln gave command of Army of the Potomac to Ulysses S. Grant, who had won western victories at Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. He decided that the southern army, not Richmond, was the target. He determined to remain almost perpetually engaged in combat with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which Grant knew could not replace its losses. Lee parried Grant’s assaults at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania and inflicted a heavy defeat on him at Cold Harbor. But the northern army advanced and laid siege to Richmond and Petersburg. In the meantime, Confederate General Jubal Early was defeated in the Shenandoah Valley by Philip Sheridan, who then devastated the Valley so that it could never again feed the armies defending Richmond. The Confederates defending Petersburg and Richmond grew weaker as provisions dwindled and desertions increased. Union forces were continually strengthened from their supply base at City Point, briefly one of the world’s busiest ports. The Union army kept moving westward, trying to stretch Lee’s defenses to the breaking point. The break occurred at Five Forks in Dinwiddie County on April 1, 1865. General Lee sent word to President Jefferson Davis that the army must forsake Petersburg and Richmond to avoid entrapment. Union forces entered burning Richmond on April 3. Surrender at Appomattox: After evacuating his siege lines, Lee hoped to join with a Confederate army under Virginian Joseph Johnston moving up from North Carolina. But, as Lee’s men stopped to forage for food, Union general Philip Sheridan slipped around them and blocked their path westward. Almost surrounded by an overwhelming force, Lee surrendered at Appomattox on Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865. The troops who surrendered were the lucky ones. Some 20,000 to 30,000 Virginia soldiers lost their lives during the war. More than half a million people on both sides had been killed, wounded, or captured in Virginia. Property in slaves was swept away without compensation. Virginians were impoverished, and not for 120 years would personal income equal the national average. In that highly religious age, despair compounded defeat with the realization that southerners either had never had God’s favor, or had lost it and were being chastened for some as yet unknown purpose.
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Description of Subject Matter: From http://www.vahistorical.org/what-you-can-see/story-virginia/explore-story-virginia

This award-winning exhibition interprets 16,000 years of Virginia history—from the earliest Native American artifacts to life in the state at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Visitors can learn about the cultural and historical transformations of the commonwealth as they travel from one gallery to another. Enjoy exploring the Story of Virginia.

16,000 BCE to 1622 CE

At the time of the great northern glaciers, Native Americans followed the game they hunted to Virginia. Ten thousand years later, as the cold of the Ice Age gave way to a warmer, drier climate, they relied also on foraging and farming. After about 900 CE they settled into villages that united into chiefdoms. In 1607, in pursuit of opportunity in a new world, English settlers intruded into an eastern Virginia chiefdom of thirty-two tribes (15,000 to 20,000 people). Its leader then was Wahunsenacawh, whom the new settlers called by his title, Powhatan.

1622 to 1763

The colony prospered. Tobacco—grown by indentured servants and enslaved Africans—sustained the economy. The first popularly elected legislative body in the New World was established. Following the failed Indian uprising in 1622 and on orders from London, the native peoples were “removed” and reduced in number to 3,000 by a “War of Extermination.” During the next hundred years, the remainder of Virginia’s population expanded a hundred fold. Social inequalities, however, and frontier conflicts with the French and with Indians made this distant dominion increasingly difficult to govern from London.

1763 to 1825

British taxation—introduced to pay for a British military presence in America—was unexpected by the Virginia gentry and resented. Those Americans began to view British policy as a plot against their liberty. They played leading roles in the Continental Congresses that debated independence, in the fighting of the American Rev ...More...
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- 2021_VA_VHS_Story: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Historical Society and Museum -- Exhibit: Story of Virginia (17 photos from 2021)
- 2016_VA_VHS_Story: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Historical Society and Museum -- Exhibit: Story of Virginia (676 photos from 2016)
- 2015_VA_VHS_Story: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Historical Society and Museum -- Exhibit: Story of Virginia (being redone) (6 photos from 2015)
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2010 photos: Equipment this year: I mostly used the Fuji S100fs until the third one broke and I started sending them back for repairs. Then I used either the Fuji S200EHX or the Nikon D90 until I got the S100fs ones repaired. At the end of the year I bought a Nikon D5000 but I returned it pretty quickly. Trips this year: Civil War Trust conferences (Lexington, KY and Nashville, TN), and my 5th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con trip (including Los Angeles). My office at the main Commerce Department building closed in October and I was shifted out to the Bureau of the Census in Suitland Maryland. It's good to have a job of course but that killed being able to see basically any cultural events during the day. There's basically nothing of interest that you can see around the Census building. Number of photos taken this year: about 395,000..
Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].