VAVirginia History

In the summer of 1619, two things happened at Jamestown about five weeks apart. On July 30 the first representative assembly in English America met inside the wooden church, twenty-two burgesses elected from eleven settlements and plantations. In late August an English privateer called the White Lion put into Point Comfort and traded roughly twenty captive Africans, seized from a Portuguese slave ship in the Gulf of Mexico, for food and supplies. Elected government and hereditary bondage arrived in Virginia in the same season, and the argument between them runs through the next four centuries of the state's story.

Tsenacommacah, the country before the fort

When Christopher Newport's three ships worked their way up the river in April 1607, the tidewater belonged to Wahunsenacawh, the paramount chief the English called Powhatan. His territory, Tsenacommacah, bound together roughly thirty Algonquian-speaking groups through tribute and marriage. Above the fall line lived the Siouan-speaking Monacan and Mannahoac; south of the James were the Iroquoian Nottoway and Meherrin. The newcomers named their river and their fort for James I and starved anyway. The winter of 1609 to 1610, remembered as the Starving Time, reduced the settlement from several hundred people to about sixty. What rescued the colony was not the gold the investors wanted but John Rolfe's 1612 experiment with Caribbean tobacco seed, which took to the soil and turned Virginia into a plantation economy within a decade.

Opechancanough, Wahunsenacawh's successor, answered the land grab on March 22, 1622, killing roughly a quarter of the colonists in one coordinated morning. The reprisal was a war of attrition that ran for a decade. A second assault in 1644 ended with Opechancanough, by then very old and carried on a litter, captured and shot by a guard at Jamestown. The Crown had already dissolved the bankrupt Virginia Company in 1624 and taken the colony directly. Six of the descendant nations, among them the Chickahominy, Rappahannock, Monacan and Nansemond, waited until an act of Congress in January 2018 for federal recognition.

Tobacco, Bacon's Rebellion, and the hardening of the law

Tobacco needed labour and land, and Virginia's planters took both. In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon, a well-connected newcomer, gathered frontier settlers who wanted Native land and had no patience for Governor William Berkeley's trade arrangements. They attacked friendly Doeg and Occaneechi communities, marched on the capital, and burned Jamestown in September. Bacon died of dysentery in October and Berkeley hanged twenty-three of his followers. Historians keep returning to the rebellion because English indentured servants and enslaved Africans fought in it side by side. Over the following thirty years the assembly wrote a wall between them, statute by statute, until the comprehensive slave code of 1705 fixed status by ancestry. The capital moved to Williamsburg in 1699 after the Jamestown statehouse burned yet again.

From Patrick Henry's resolves to a narrow ratification

Patrick Henry pushed his Stamp Act resolutions through the House of Burgesses in May 1765, and the colony's committees of correspondence kept the other assemblies in step. On June 12, 1776, the Virginia Convention adopted George Mason's Declaration of Rights, three weeks before the national declaration that borrowed its cadence. The war's decisive act came on October 19, 1781, when Cornwallis surrendered his army at Yorktown to Washington and Rochambeau. The capital had already moved inland to Richmond in 1780 for safety. Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom became law in January 1786. Ratification of the federal Constitution was close: the Richmond convention voted 89 to 79 on June 25, 1788, with Henry arguing against and James Madison for, making Virginia the tenth state to ratify. Virginia then surrendered its colonial charter claims, which on paper ran to the Pacific, and the cession became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

1861 to 1865, a war fought in the front yard

Virginia's convention voted down secession in early April 1861 and reversed itself on April 17, after Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for volunteers, with voters confirming the ordinance on May 23. Moving the Confederate capital to Richmond that same month guaranteed that the eastern campaigns would be fought across Virginia farmland. More engagements took place here than in any other state: First and Second Manassas, the Peninsula, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and the ten-month siege of Petersburg. The counties beyond the Alleghenies refused to follow, met at Wheeling, and entered the Union as West Virginia on June 20, 1863. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, four days after retreating Confederates set fire to Richmond's warehouse district.

Readjusters, the Byrd machine, and Massive Resistance

The most interesting political experiment of the century after the war was the Readjuster Party, which held the state from 1879 to 1883 under William Mahone. Its biracial coalition repudiated part of the antebellum debt, funded public schools for Black and white children, and abolished the whipping post before it fractured. The 1902 constitution reversed all of it with a poll tax and an understanding clause that cut the electorate by the tens of thousands. Harry F. Byrd's organization then ran Virginia for four decades on that small franchise. After Brown v. Board, the legislature adopted Massive Resistance in 1956, and in September 1958 the governor closed schools in Warren County, Charlottesville and Norfolk rather than admit Black students. Prince Edward County went further and shut its entire public system from 1959 to 1964. The Supreme Court struck down Virginia's ban on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia on June 12, 1967. In November 1989 Douglas Wilder, a grandson of enslaved Virginians, won the governorship, the first Black American elected to that office in any state.

The federal century

Two decisions in the 1940s reshaped the modern economy. The Pentagon went up in sixteen months and opened in January 1943, anchoring a defence establishment that runs from Arlington down to the shipyards and naval station at Hampton Roads. At NASA's Langley research centre in Hampton, the segregated West Computing unit produced trajectory work for the Mercury flights. Later, federal contracting and the early internet exchange points seeded the Dulles corridor, and Loudoun County now carries an outsized share of the world's data centre capacity. Growth has concentrated in the northern suburbs while population has drained from the southwest coalfields, leaving a state whose two halves vote and earn very differently.

Neighbouring states' history

More about Virginia