Virginia Vignettes

The continuous presence of British ships in the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic coast encouraged a number of residents from the Eastern Shore and Norfolk areas to remain steadfast loyalists throughout the war. Some were merchants who had much to gain financially by trading with Britain; others were smugglers who made handsome profits by [...]

The document that Thomas Jefferson wrote represented the journey that the American colonies and Virginia had taken since 1765. The center section of the Declaration lists eighteen major abuses and a number of minor ones by king and Parliament and is based primarily on the notion that the traditional rights of Englishmen had been violated. Americans were [...]

Virginians assumed a prominent role in the First Continental Congress, which assembled at Philadelphia in September 1774. Peyton Randolph acted as the presiding officer; and Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Richard Henry Lee all played their familiar roles. Washington worked diligently behind the scenes while Henry argued openly for the most radical stance with his usual inflammatory [...]

The war effort and its repercussions demanded much of Virginia women. Many sent husbands off to war and assumed some if not all of the duties of running their family plantation, farm, or business. Homespun clothes became a mark of patriotism, and by 1777 Virginia women and their slaves were making much of the clothing used by [...]

Virginia women, many of whom “wished they were a man,” assisted the cause of rebellion. Manpower shortages forced them to take over plantations and assume jobs as nurses, government clerks, and factory workers. Women served as spies, knit socks and sewed clothing for soldiers, made soap, and sacrificed for the war effort by limiting entertainment [...]

Blacks certainly served the Confederacy. They constituted half the labor force at Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works, which made the iron plates for the Virginia, rails for Confederate railroads, and most of the South’s cannon. They also worked the mines and railroads of the Confederacy. Most slaves remained on the plantations raising food for the armies, [...]

In their public rhetoric, delegates to Virginia’s secession convention justified their vote to secede in April, 1861 because the Lincoln Administration in Washington with its attempt to re-supply Fort Sumter and its subsequent call-up of troops was subverting constitutional authority and states’ rights and practicing tyranny. In reality, secession was a mechanism to address fears they [...]

In August 1831, Nat Turner initiated the most significant slave insurrection in American history. Turner was a slave of Joseph Travis in Southampton County. Having learned to read at a young age, he studied the Bible and became an inspirational preacher among his fellow slaves, seeing himself as an agent of God. Although not mistreated, [...]

At the conclusion of the French and Indian War a number of issues divided the colonies and the mother country–the settlement of western lands, the protection of the Native Americans, and trade regulations. But of greatest importance was the increased need to raise more revenue to help pay for a much enlarged British Empire and [...]

Although Indians had inhabited the Shenandoah Valley for centuries (the name of the river comes from an Indian word meaning “beautiful daughter of the stars”), European settlement of the Shenandoah Valley did not begin until the 1730s. The vast majority of settlers in the Valley were of German and Scotch-Irish background who had left Europe [...]