virginia

Before the arrival of Europeans in the New World, several groups of Indians related to the IROQUOIS, Algonquins, and CHEROKEES occupied the present state of Virginia. The Powhatans were the most powerful and numerous. They inhabited the eastern shore and tidewater regions and lived in settled villages. The Powhatans and other Virginia Indians maintained themselves through hunting, fishing, and growing garden crops. The Indian population of Virginia was never great, numbering perhaps 17,000 at the time of English settlement, and fell sharply after the coming of the colonists. English settlers adopted many Indian place names, such as Appomattox, Nansemond, Rappahannock, and Shenandoah.

On 24 May 1607, English colonists established their first permanent settlement on a peninsula of the James River. Operating under a charter granted by James I, the London Company organized an expedition to colonize Virginia. The company, seeking to gain profit, instructed the colonists to search for the ill-fated colony established by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1587, to seek a northwest passage, and to prospect for gold and other treasure. They realized none of these goals, and for several years, the settlement suffered through great adversity. The stockade village, called Jamestown in honor of the king, unfortunately stood in a malarial swamp. Little fresh water or tillable soil was available in the immediate area. Disease, "starving times," low morale, poor leadership, bickering, and Indian attacks combined to threaten the struggling settlement with extinction on several occasions. Having gained no profit from the venture, the London Company was bankrupt by 1624. Tired of the mismanagement and scandal attending the failure of the enterprise, James I revoked the company's charter, and thereafter the colony came under the direct administration of the crown.

After the establishment of royal administration, the colony enjoyed greater stability and growth. However, the real catalyst in the eventual prosperity of Virginia was the discovery that tobacco could be grown for a profit and that black slaves could be exploited to the advantage of the spreading tobacco agriculture. These three factors of British royal government, tobacco, and slavery produced in Virginia a distinctive culture that spread from there through much of the North American south. British institutions transformed into a system of deferential democracy, while tobacco and slavery produced an economic, social, and political organism dominated by a native oligarchy of superior farmers called the planter aristocracy.

The early settlement of Virginia generally proceeded up the main waterways that empty into Chesapeake Bay. The James, the York, and the Rappahannock rivers served first as avenues into the wilderness and then as convenient outlets for trade. Eventually, the estates of the slaveholding elite were located adjacent to the important watercourses of the tidewater region. During the early eighteenth century, the pattern of settlement shifted as German and Scotch-Irish emigrants began to enter Virginia down the Allegheny ridges from Pennsylvania. These self-sufficient people established small farms in the upper piedmont and Shenandoah Valley regions and generally manifested little interest in acquiring slaves or participating in the culture of the east. Thus the planters of the tidewater and the farmers of the west had little in common. A dichotomy of interests developed early, which periodically disturbed the social and political stability of Virginia until after the Civil War.

Civil government in provincial Virginia evolved from a modification of the British system. Under the London Company, an appointed governor and council, with, after 1619, an elected assembly called the House of Burgesses, administered the colony. After royal authority replaced the London Company, the king appointed the governor and council while the qualified citizenry elected the burgesses. During the second half of the seventeenth century, the council and the burgesses gradually developed into a two-house legislature known as the General Assembly. The General Assembly eventually enjoyed considerable power over the affairs of the province and jealously guarded its power against encroachments from the governor or the crown. Experience in the assembly raised the political leadership of the province to a high degree of maturity. A property qualification for voting and officeholding somewhat restricted the electorate, but the House of Burgesses was fairly representative of the sentiments and interests of the farmers and planters of the tidewater region.

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, considerable political and social instability plagued the colony as planters and newcomers competed for land, position, and influence. Nathaniel Bacon, a recent arrival from England, led an unsuccessful uprising of those dissatisfied with the prevailing order in 1676 (see BACON'S REBELLION). Once a home-grown elite firmly entrenched themselves in power in the tidewater, political and social affairs became stable during the first half of the eighteenth century. This elite dominated the council and burgesses, and the citizenry deferred in judgment to those considered superior in status and experience. Although all recognized a distinct social hierarchy, the gentlemen moved with ease and grace among the people, and in turn the masses respected them.

Black SLAVERY was intimately associated with the growth of provincial Virginia. The first blacks arrived in 1619 and, like many whites entering the colony at that time, became indentured to the London Company. The spreading tobacco culture encouraged the cultivation of large landholdings, and eventually the emerging aristocracy found indentured servitude unsatisfactory. Masters freed indentured servants after a short period of time. Thus, they became potential competitors for land and position. Chattel slavery, limited to blacks, became institutionalized during the second half of the seventeenth century, an occurrence that coincided with the growing unrest among poorer whites during the era of Bacon's Rebellion. After a series of preliminary measures defining the status of slaves in the 1670s and 1680s, the General Assembly issued a comprehensive slave code in 1705, which stated that all blacks should "be held, taken, and adjudged real estate." As late as 1670, blacks constituted only 4 percent of the population of the province, but by 1730, the proportion had risen to 40 percent. During the 1660s and 1670s, there were reports and rumors of unrest and conspiracy among slaves. Fear of insurrection thus contributed to the urge of the planters to fix slavery.

While Virginia remained a predominantly rural area for three centuries, villages and towns played an important role in its culture. Jamestown never became important, owing largely to its unfavorable location. In 1699 WILLIAMSBURG became the capital of the province; RICHMOND was laid out on land owned by William Byrd II in 1737 and became the seat of government in 1779. Williamsburg reigned as capital during the colony's golden age. Nurtured by the College of William and Mary, the General Assembly, and the town's several law offices and taverns, the Williamsburg environment spawned a generation of political leaders of unusual ability and intellect. The chief port of the province was Norfolk, which had achieved a population of 6,000 by the eve of the American Revolution. During the eighteenth century, the population of Virginia grew from an estimated 72,000 to over 807,000, with about 42 percent of that population enslaved.

Virginians played a major role in the American independence movement and the founding of the new nation. Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and James Madison were foremost revolutionary theoreticians, while George Washington pulled the dispirited continental forces into an army capable of forcing the British out of the thirteen colonies. Virginia was a major scene of battle during the latter stages of the war for independence; the final surrender of British forces took place at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Mason's Declaration of Rights for Virginia serve as no-table examples of American revolutionary ideology and theory. Madison, widely schooled in classical and modern political philosophy, was a major author of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 and The Federalist. Virginians dominated the presidency from the beginning of the new nation until 1824. Four of the first five chief executives, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and James Monroe, were natives of Virginia, giving rise to the term "Virginia Dynasty." As a consequence of the independence movement, these men gained a national reputation and experience that allowed them successfully to transcend provincial and sectional interests and to make a lasting contribution to the establishment of a truly national edifice of government in the United States.

Agriculture remained the chief occupation of a majority of Virginians after the founding of the nation. Soil exhaustion and erosion caused by decades of overplanting tobacco resulted in the abandonment of many acres of land in the tidewater and southside areas. Many planters moved to Alabama and Mississippi in order to recoup declining fortunes in the ongoing cotton boom of the Deep South. Advocates of scientific farming gradually convinced farmers of the advantages to be gained from deep plowing, the use of fertilizers, and crop diversification. Tobacco remained an important staple in the southside, but increasingly farmers planted wheat, other grains, and garden crops in the tidewater and lower piedmont. Richmond became one of the nation's important flour-milling centers. Cattle raising and orchard cultivation were important in the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge foothills. A slight decline in slavery attended the changing pattern of agriculture. Slaves composed 40 percent of the population of Virginia in 1810, but only 33 percent by 1850. Many impoverished planters sold unwanted slaves to the flourishing cotton planters of the Deep South.

By the early national period, the free white population of the tramontane region outnumbered that of eastern Virginia, but the General Assembly remained under the control of traditional tidewater and piedmont interests. As early as 1816, a convention of westerners met in Staunton to call for reapportionment, suffrage expansion, and constitutional reform. The increasing numbers of workers in the iron foundries and textile mills of Wheeling found difficulty in meeting the property qualification for voting and resented that the slaveholders in the east refused to recognize the peculiarity of western interests. In addition, western appeals for internal improvements frequently fell on deaf ears.

In 1829 a convention took place in Richmond to revise the state constitution. The western part of the state received slightly increased representation in the General Assembly, but the convention refused to allow full white manhood suffrage. Concern that uncertain democratic forces in the west would take over the state led the convention to vote to continue the control of Virginia by the slaveholding elite.

In the wake of the 1829 convention, a broad discussion of slavery occupied the attention of the General Assembly session of 1831–1832. Thomas Jefferson Randolph presented a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves in Virginia, but a vote of seventy-three to fifty-eight in the House of Delegates defeated the proposition. The recent memory of a slave uprising on 21–22 August 1831, led by NAT TURNER, no doubt influenced the decision. In addition to defeating gradual emancipation, the 1831–1832 assembly imposed a more rigid slave code as a response to the Turner insurrection. Democratic ferment in the western part of the state and black upheaval thus conspired to create an atmosphere of fear in which the entrenched elements in Virginia were able to reinforce traditional institutions. The choice associated Virginia with the South in the developing sectional controversy, and it ultimately led the western counties to form the separate state of West Virginia during the Civil War.

After Virginia cast its lot with the South and joined the Confederacy, the state became the scene of almost continuous warfare between 1861 and 1865. About 170,000 Virginians served in the Confederate Army. A native son, Robert E. Lee, led the ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA against the Union and became the major Confederate hero. The contest largely destroyed extensive areas of the state, including Petersburg and Richmond. The war came to a practical end when Lee surrendered his forces to Ulysses S. Grant at APPOMATTOX Courthouse on 9 April 1865. Earlier, on 20 June 1863, the fifty western counties of the Old Dominion joined the Union as the state of West Virginia. The state thus lost nearly 35 percent of its land area and about 25 percent of its population.

As a result of the Civil War, nearly 500,000 Virginia slaves gained their freedom, and the state had to accept the provisions of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 in order to regain statehood in the Union. In October 1867, a convention met in Richmond. The resulting constitution contained all the required measures, and on 6 July 1869, the new electorate approved it. In January 1870, Virginia returned to the Union. Not surprisingly, the Constitution of 1869, frequently referred to as the Underwood Constitution, was never popular among the large numbers of Virginians who cherished antebellum institutions.

The post-Reconstruction period witnessed many changes in Virginia. The present-day city of Roanoke had a population of 669 in 1880; it had grown to the size of 16,159 by 1890. In the 1880s, a political insurgency called the READJUSTER MOVEMENT disturbed the state. At issue was the state's burdensome debt, which maintained taxes at a high level and almost destroyed the new public school system. Movement leader Gen. William Mahone raised the specter of class antagonism by appealing to poor whites and blacks to unite in a movement of self-interest and reform. He spent a term in the U.S. Senate as a Republican, but a rejuvenated Democratic party defeated his party and principles in 1883. The Democrats successfully exploited the baiting and intimidation of blacks in their effort to drive the Readjuster-Republicans out of office.

Conservatism and white supremacy became the talisman of Virginia's Democratic party. The first political objective of the organization was the replacement of the 1869 Underwood Constitution and the establishment of white control over the electorate. In 1902 Democrats accomplished this with the promulgation of a new frame of government, which set forth a literacy test and a poll tax as requisites for voting, which halved the electorate and denied nearly all blacks the right to vote. Two early-twentieth-century governors, Andrew J. Montague and Claude A. Swanson, led the state in the adoption of many progressive reforms, such as a revitalized public school system, penal reform, the passage of a pure food and drug statute, and the establishment of a state corporation commission that other states widely copied. The organization was able to survive over the years by adopting and exploiting potentially popular issues, such as prohibition, and opposing unpopular federal programs that appeared to encroach on state sovereignty. After the adoption of the constitution of 1902, the Republican party ceased to be an important force in state politics until revived in the 1960s.

The issue of school integration brought profound changes to the political and social system of Virginia. In 1956 the Democratic party under Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd announced a firm intention to preserve segregation. A campaign of massive resistance opposed implementation of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in BROWNV. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA. Rather than comply with court-ordered integration, Gov. J. Linsey Almond Jr. closed public schools in Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Warren County. In 1959 the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals condemned such action, but the controversy continued when in the same year, the supervisors of Prince Edward County decided to abandon public schools altogether. White students attended hastily prepared private academies while black children were without schools for five years. At length the impetus behind massive resistance died down, as adverse publicity drove prospective investors from the state and parents tired of the uncertainty in the schools. The Democratic party became divided over massive resistance and related issues, eventually splitting into warring conservative and liberal camps. Many organization supporters defected to the Republican party in the 1960 national elections. The Democratic party began to disintegrate rapidly after the death of Byrd in 1966.

Political changes dating from the 1960s continued over the ensuing decades. In 1964 the Twenty-fourth Amendment ended the poll tax as a condition of voting in federal elections, and in a 1966 case that arose in Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the tax in state elections as well. The Supreme Court rendered decisions that forced reapportionment in elections to Congress and to the Virginia state legislature. These changes led to the defeat of long-term incumbents, such as U.S. Senator A. Willis Robertson and U.S. Representative Howard W. Smith. The newly reapportioned legislature enacted a sales tax in 1966, and in 1969 a Republican, A. Linwood Holton, won the governorship, which broke the stranglehold of rural white Democrats on Virginia politics and delivered the final blow to the Virginia Democratic party. The Republican party controlled the governorship during the 1970s, but the Democrats took over in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the later 1990s, Virginia again had Republican governors, but in the most recent election, Mark R. Warner, a conservative Democrat, won the office. In legislative races, Republicans and Democrats faced each other as equals in the l990s. As late as 1975, the hundred-member Virginia House of Delegates included only seventeen Republicans, but by 1994 the number was forty-seven. By 2000, the Republicans enjoyed a sixty-four to thirty-six majority in the House of Delegates. Meanwhile, Virginia became a Republican state in presidential elections. As early as 1948, although President Harry S. Truman took the state that year, Virginia Democrats had begun to abandon their party in presidential elections. Black Virginians abandoned the Republican party and embraced the Democrats but were swamped by the stream of white voters heading in the other direction, who together with many new residents voted Republican. From 1952 through 2000, the Democratic presidential candidates won Virginia's electoral votes only in 1964.

In terms of race and gender, Virginia politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries differed greatly from the l960s. In the late 1960s, for the first time since the 1880s, black candidates won election to the state legislature, and the number of women, most of them white, increased slowly as well. By the 2001 session, fifteen of the legislature's 140 members were black and twenty-two were women. Meanwhile, after the 1985 elections, Mary Sue Terry began the first of two four-year terms as state attorney general. L. Douglas Wilder, after sixteen years in the state senate, became lieutenant governor in 1985 and in 1989 became the first African American elected governor of any state. The declining significance of race in Virginia politics is obvious in that while a majority of white voters pulled the Republican lever, Wilder's victory depended on the support of far more whites than blacks. After the 1992 elections, Virginia's congressional delegation, like the state legislature, was no longer all white and all male. Robert C. Scott became only the second African American to win a seat from the Old Dominion, 104 years after John Mercer Langston's election in 1888, and Leslie L. Byrne became the first woman ever elected to Congress from Virginia, although Byrne lost her bid for reelection in 1994. In 2002, while neither of Virginia's senators was female or black, one woman and one African American did serve in the House of Representatives as part of the state's eleven-person delegation.

Major changes also occurred in higher education in Virginia in the last decades of the twentieth century. Such changes involved finance, numbers of students, the racial desegregation that came to Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, and expansion of opportunities for women. The 1966 legislature inaugurated a statewide system of community colleges. By the 1990s, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, George Mason University, and Northern Virginia Community College each enrolled more than 20,000 students. The UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA was not far behind. Before the 1950s, only one public institution of higher education in Virginia, now known as Virginia State University, admitted black students. By the 1990s, blacks attended every school although the numbers were still well below the African American percentage of Virginia residents. The University of Virginia only first admitted women as undergraduates in 1970, but by the 1990s, men and women were attending in almost equal numbers. Although women had begun attending law school there in 1920, they comprised 10 percent of the total number of law students only after congressional enactment of Title IX in 1972. By the 1990s, women comprised one-third of each graduating class. In the 1990s, the state reversed a quarter-century-long trend and trimmed its spending on higher education. Those budget cuts drove up tuition costs.

Virginia's economic prosperity in the twentieth century depended more on industry and government than on traditional agriculture. Until the 1990s, government was the second largest source of employment in Virginia, but the reduction of the United States military in that decade has meant the loss of thousands of military-related jobs. Tourism had developed into a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise by 1970 and remains an important industry. In the sphere of Virginia agriculture, which continues to decline in relative importance, the most significant changes came in the development of increasing numbers of dairy farms in the northern part of the state and of truck farms on the eastern shore. Peanut growing and processing centered around Suffolk, and the production of Smithfield hams replaced tobacco as the standard staple among a large number of southside farms. The significance of manufacturing also has fallen recently in Virginia's economy, with jobs in trade and service increasing to replace it. Nonetheless, the per capita income of Virginians remains almost 10 percent above the national average.

The population of Virginia more than tripled between 1900 and 2000, growing from 1,854,000 to nearly 7,079,000. Net immigration accounted for fully half the growth during the last forty years, which illustrates significant changes in Virginia's recent history, as the state had been a large exporter of people throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. During the same period, the population of the state also became highly urbanized, with nearly a 70 percent urban concentration in 1990 compared to only 18 percent in 1900. Thus northern and southeastern Virginia have become part of the "urban corridor" that stretches from Boston down the Atlantic seaboard, and the formerly rural counties of Henrico and Loudoun have found themselves absorbed into metropolitan Washington, D.C. From 1900 to 1970, the proportion of black people residing in the state steadily declined from over 35 percent to 18 percent, as many thousands of black Virginians decided to join the general tide of migration out of the south. Between 1970 and 2000, however, the black population began to stabilize at around 19 percent. Meanwhile, residents of Asian ancestry increased from a negligible number at the time of the 1965 Immigration Act to a figure approaching 4 percent in 2000. Hispanics make up about 3 percent of Virginia's population.

Bibliography

Blair, William A. Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Dailey, Jane Elizabeth. Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Faggins, Barbara A. Africans and Indians: An Afrocentric Analysis of Relations between Africans and Indians in Colonial Virginia. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Lassiter, Matthew D., and Andrew B. Lewis, eds. The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Lewis, Charlene M. Boyer. Ladies and Gentlemen on Display: Planter Society at the Virginia Springs, 1790–1860. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987.

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