Virginia Vignettes

Brafferton was the College of William and Mary’s school for American Indians, after Harvard likely the second oldest in British North America. The College’s 1693 charter provided that the new “place of universal study” educate not only English but also American Indian youth. College founder James Blair arranged financing using income from Brafferton Manor in [...]

The Morrill Land-Grant Act transformed American education, establishing what became a network of state-run colleges and universities combining practical and academic teaching. Two Virginia universities owe their beginnings to it, and a third benefited as well.
Proposed by Rep. Justin Morrill (Vermont), it passed Congress in 1859 but President Buchanan vetoed it. Enacted in 1862 under [...]

Virginia Indians played a variety of roles during the Civil War. What about tribes in other states? Statistics show that not quite 3,600 Native Americans served in the Union Army during the war. Perhaps the best known of their number was Brigadier General Ely Parker (Seneca), who served as an aide to Union general-in-chief Ulysses [...]

The response of Virginia Indians to the American Civil War varied from tribe to tribe. Several Pamunkey men served the Union Army as gunboat pilots, not fighting directly as soldiers. These men were thrown off the rolls of the local Colosse Baptist Church for aiding the “enemy.” The Pamunkey chose to serve the North because [...]

Virginia holds two claims to a day of thanksgiving predating the widely popularized “first Thanksgiving” at Plymouth in 1621. Upon arrival of much-needed supplies from England in the spring 1610, following the Jamestown settlement’s “starving time” – the winter famine in 1609-the settlers greeted Lord De la Warr on the James River with a service [...]

During the 1980s eight Virginia Indian tribes obtained formal recognition from the Commonwealth, although the Pamunkey and Mattaponi had retained their reservations and had been observing their treaty relationship all along. The other tribes are Chickahominy, Chickahominy Eastern Division, Monacan, Nansemond, Rappahannock, and Upper Mattaponi.
In recent decades, the tribes have worked hard to reclaim [...]

Opechancanough, a leading chief or werowance of the Pamunkey nation, was a maternal relative of Powhatan. Identified as one of Powhatan’s successors to the paramount chiefdom, he also acted as war chief or military leader for Powhatan. Opechancanough was leading the party of Indians who captured John Smith when Smith went on an [...]

Pocahontas, a daughter of the paramount chief Powhatan, was about 10 years old in 1607, when the captive John Smith was brought to her father’s headquarters at Werowocomoco. Opinions differ as to whether the famous “rescue of John Smith” actually happened, but if it did, it was most likely a ritual enactment misunderstood by [...]

When the English arrived in Virginia in 1607, Powhatan, whose informal name was Wahunsunacock, was the acknowledged paramount chief, or mamanatowick, of at least 32 Algonquian-speaking tribes with more than 150 towns. These tribes ranged from the Potomac River in the north to just south of the James River, and from the fall line [...]

Louisa county native John Mercer Langston, the son of an enslaved African-American and American Indian mother and White planter father, became one of the earliest African-American elected officials on his way to a career of dazzling range and accomplishment. Born in 1829, he was orphaned at age 5 and went to Oberlin, Ohio to live [...]