Virginia celebrated its quadricentennial year in 2007, marking 400 years since the establishment of the Jamestown Colony. The observances highlighted contributions from Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans, each of which had a significant part in shaping Virginia’s history. Warfare, including among these groups, has also had an important role. Virginia was a focal point in conflicts from the French and Indian War, the American Revolution and the Civil War, to the Cold War and the War on Terrorism. Fictionalized stories about the early colony, in particular the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, first became popular in the period after the Revolutionary War, and together with other myths surrounding George Washington’s childhood and the plantation elite in the antebellum period, became touchstones of Virginian and American culture and helped shape the state’s historic politics and beliefs.
The first people are estimated to have arrived in Virginia over 12,000 years ago. By 5,000 years ago, more permanent settlements emerged, and farming began by 900 AD. By 1500, the Algonquian peoples had founded towns such as Werowocomoco in the Tidewater region, which they referred to as Tsenacommacah. The other major language groups in the area were the Siouan to the west and the Iroquoians, who included the Nottoway and Meherrin, to the north and south. After 1570, the Algonquians consolidated under Wahunsenacawh, known in English as Chief Powhatan, in response to threats from these other groups on their trade network. Powhatan controlled more than thirty smaller tribes, which shared a common Virginia Algonquian language, with more than 150 settlements that had total population of around 15,000 in 1607. Over that century however, three-fourths of the native population in Virginia would die from smallpox and other Old World diseases.
Several European expeditions, including a group of Spanish Jesuits, explored the Chesapeake Bay during the 16th century. To help counter Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean, Queen Elizabeth I of England supported Walter Raleigh’s April 1584 expedition to the Atlantic coast of North America. The name “Virginia” was used by Captain Arthur Barlowe in the expedition’s report, and may have been suggested that year by Raleigh or Elizabeth, perhaps noting her status as the “Virgin Queen” or that they viewed the land as being untouched, and may also be related to an Algonquin phrase, Wingandacoa or Windgancon, or leader’s name, Wingina, as heard by the expedition. Initially the name applied to the entire coastal region from South Carolina to Maine, plus the island of Bermuda.Raleigh’s colony failed, but in 1606, the new king James I of England issued the First Virginia Charter to the London Company, a joint stock company that financed a new expedition, which was led by Christopher Newport and sailed that December. They landed in Virginia in May 1607, and established a settlement named for the king, Jamestown.
Life in the colony was perilous, and many died during the Starving Time in 1609 and in a series of conflicts with the Powhatan Confederacy that started in 1610, and flared up again in 1622, when led by Powhatan’s brother, Opechancanough. Only 3,400 of the 6,000 early settlers had survived by 1624. However, European demand for tobacco fueled the arrival of more settlers and servants. The headright system tried to solve the labor shortage by providing colonists with land for each indentured servant they transported to Virginia. African workers were first imported to Jamestown in 1619 initially under the rules of indentured servitude. The shift to a system of African slavery in Virginia was propelled by the legal cases of John Punch, who was sentenced to lifetime slavery for attempting to escape servitude in 1640, and of John Casor, who was claimed by Anthony Johnson as his servant for life in 1655. Slavery first appears in Virginia statutes in 1661 and 1662, when a law made it hereditary based on the mother’s status.
Colonists struggled with rule from both the London Company and English monarchy, which took direct control of the colony in 1624. Starting in 1619, colonists pushed for greater local control with an elected leadership, later called the House of Burgesses, that shared power with the appointed governors. In 1635, colonists arrested a despised governor and forced him to return to England against his will. The turmoil of the English Civil War permitted Virginia even greater autonomy during the 1650s, and many supporters of the king fled to the colony, becoming known as “Virginia Cavaliers”. Tensions and the geographic differences between the working and ruling classes led to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, by which time current and former indentured servants made up as much as eighty percent of the population. The rebels, who burned Jamestown, were largely from the colony’s frontier, and opposed to the governor’s conciliatory policy towards native tribes. One result of the rebellion was the signing at Middle Plantation of the Treaty of 1677, which made the signatory tribes tributary states and was part of a pattern of appropriating tribal land by force and treaty.
In 1693, the College of William & Mary was founded in Middle Plantation, which was renamed Williamsburg in 1699, when it became the new capital of the growing colony. Colonists in the 1700s were likewise moving inland, and in 1747, a group of Virginian speculators formed the Ohio Company, with the backing of the British crown, to start English settlement and trade in the Ohio Country west of the Appalachian Mountains. The Kingdom of France, which claimed this area as part of their colony of New France, viewed this as a threat, and the ensuing French and Indian War became part of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). A militia from several British colonies, called the Virginia Regiment, was led by then-Lieutenant Colonel George Washington.
The British Parliament’s efforts to levy new taxes following the French and Indian War were deeply unpopular in the colonies. In the House of Burgesses, opposition to taxation without representation was led by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, among others. Virginians began to coordinate their actions with other colonies in 1773, and sent delegates to the Continental Congress the following year. After the House of Burgesses was dissolved by the British governor in 1774, Virginia’s revolutionary leaders continued to govern via the Virginia Conventions. On May 15, 1776, the Convention declared Virginia’s independence from the British Empire and adopted George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was then included in a new constitution. Another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, drew upon Mason’s work in drafting the national Declaration of Independence.
When the American Revolutionary War began in 1776, George Washington was selected to head the Continental Army, and many Virginians joined the army and other revolutionary militias. Virginia was the first colony to ratify the Articles of Confederation in December 1777. In April 1780, the capital was moved to Richmond at the urging of Governor Thomas Jefferson, who feared that Williamsburg’s coastal location would make it vulnerable to British attack. British forces indeed landed around Portsmouth in October 1780, and soldiers under Benedict Arnold managed to raid Richmond in January 1781. Though a larger force, British indecision and maneuvers by Continental Army regiments under the Marquis de Lafayette and the French navy together trapped the British army on the Virginia Peninsula in September 1781, where troops under George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau converged and defeated British General Cornwallis in the siege of Yorktown. His surrender on October 19, 1781, led to peace negotiations in Paris and secured the independence of the colonies.
Virginians were instrumental in the new country’s early years and in writing the United States Constitution. James Madison drafted the Virginia Plan in 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1789.Virginia ratified the Constitution on June 25, 1788. The three-fifths compromise ensured that Virginia, with its large number of slaves, initially had the largest bloc in the House of Representatives. Together with the Virginia dynasty of presidents, this gave the Commonwealth national importance. In 1790, both Virginia and Maryland ceded territory to form the new District of Columbia, though the Virginian area was retroceded in 1846. Virginia is called the “Mother of States” because of its role in being carved into states such as Kentucky, which became the fifteenth state in 1792, and for the numbers of American pioneers born in Virginia.
In addition to agriculture, slave labor was increasingly used in mining, shipbuilding and other industries.Soil exhausted by years of tobacco farming also pushed the plantation economy to expand westward. The failed slave uprisings of Gabriel Prosser in 1800 and Nat Turner in 1831 however marked the growing resistance to the system of slavery. One response to Nat Turner’s rebellion by the Virginia government was to arrange for ships to transport free Blacks to Liberia. On October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on an armory in Harpers Ferry in an attempt to start a slave revolt across the southern states. The polarized national response to his raid and execution marked a tipping point for many who believed the end of slavery would need to be achieved by force. By 1860, almost half a million people, roughly 31% of the total population of Virginia, were enslaved.
Open warfare started on April 12, 1861, at the Battle of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the first state to secede from the United States. The next week President Lincoln called for armed volunteers while in Virginia, a special convention called by the General Assembly voted to secede on the condition it was approved in a referendum the next month. The convention then voted on April 24 to join the Confederate States of America, which named Richmond as its capital on May 20. During the referendum, armed pro-Confederate groups prevented the casting and counting of votes from many northwestern counties that opposed secession. Representatives from 27 of these counties instead attended the Wheeling Convention, which organized a government loyal to the Union and led to the separation of West Virginia as a new state.
Union forces reached the outskirts of Richmond by June 1862, but Virginian general Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, and repelled the Union army, led invasions into Union territory, and was named General in Chief of Confederate armies in February 1865. During the war, more battles were fought in Virginia than anywhere else, including the Battles of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and the concluding Battle of Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. After the capture of Richmond that month, the state capital was briefly moved to Lynchburg, while the Confederate leadership fled to Danville. 32,751 Virginians died in the Civil War. Virginia was formally restored to the United States in 1870, due to the work of the Committee of Nine.
During the post-war Reconstruction era, African Americans were able to unite in communities, particularly around Richmond, Danville, and the Tidewater region, and take a greater role in Virginia society, as many achieved some land ownership during the 1870s. Virginia adopted a constitution in 1868 which guaranteed political, civil, and voting rights, and provided for free public schools. However, with much of the railroads and other infrastructure investments destroyed during the Civil War, the Commonwealth was deeply in debt, and in the late 1870s redirected money from public schools to pay bondholders. The Readjuster Party formed in 1877 and won legislative power in 1879 by uniting Black and white Virginians behind a shared opposition to debt payments and the perceived plantation elites.
The Readjusters focused on building up schools, like Virginia Tech and Virginia State, and successfully forced West Virginia to share in the pre-war debt. But in 1883, they were divided by a proposed repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, and days before that year’s election, a riot in Danville involving armed policemen left four Black men and one white man dead. These events motivated a push by white supremacists to seize political power, and segregationists in the Democratic Party won the legislature that year and maintained control for decades. They passed Jim Crow laws and in 1902 rewrote the state constitution to include a poll tax and other voter registration measures that effectively disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites.
New economic forces would meanwhile industrialize the Commonwealth. Virginian James Albert Bonsack invented the tobacco cigarette rolling machine in 1880 leading to new large-scale production centered around Richmond. In 1886, railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington founded Newport News Shipbuilding, which was responsible for building six World War I-era dreadnoughts, seven battleships, and 25 destroyers for the U.S. Navy from 1907 to 1923. During the war, German submarines like U-151 attacked ships outside the port. A homecoming parade to honor African-American veterans returning from the war was attacked in July 1919 as part of a renewed white-supremacy movement that was known as Red Summer. During World War II, the shipyard quadrupled its labor force to 70,000 by 1943, while the Radford Arsenal outside Blacksburg had 22,000 workers making explosives.
Protests against segregated schools started by Barbara Rose Johns in 1951 in Farmville led to the lawsuit Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. This case, filed by Richmond natives Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, was decided in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal”. But, in 1956, under the policy of “massive resistance” led by the influential segregationist Senator Harry F. Byrd and his Byrd Organization, the Commonwealth prohibited desegregated local schools from receiving state or private funding as part of the Stanley Plan. After schools in many districts began closing in September 1958, state and district courts ruled the plan unconstitutional, and on February 2, 1959, the first Black students integrated schools in Arlington and Norfolk, where they were known as the Norfolk 17.Prince Edward County still refused to integrate, and closed their county school system in June 1959. The Supreme Court ordered the county’s public schools to be, like others in the state, open and integrated in May 1964, which they finally did that September.
The civil rights movement gained national support during the 1960s. Federal passage of the Civil Rights Act in June 1964 and Voting Rights Act in August 1965, and their later enforcement, helped end racial segregation in Virginia and overturn Jim Crow era state laws. In June 1967, the Supreme Court also struck down the state’s ban on interracial marriage with Loving v. Virginia. In 1968, Governor Mills Godwin called a commission to rewrite the state constitution. The new constitution, which banned discrimination and removed articles which now violated federal law, passed in a referendum with 71.8% support and went into effect in June 1971. In 1977, Black members became the majority of Richmond’s city council; in 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African American elected as governor in the United States; and in 1992, Bobby Scott became the first Black congressman from Virginia since 1888.
The expansion of federal government offices into Northern Virginia’s suburbs during the Cold War boosted the region’s population and economy. The Central Intelligence Agency outgrew their offices in Foggy Bottom during the Korean War, and moved to Langley, Virginia in 1961, in part due to a decision by the National Security Council that the agency relocate outside Washington, D.C.’s city limits. The agency was involved in various Cold War events, and its headquarters was a target of Soviet espionage activities. The Pentagon, built during World War II as the headquarters of the Department of Defense, was one of the targets of the September 11, 2001 attacks; 189 people died at the site when a jet passenger plane was flown into the building. Mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and in Virginia Beach in 2019 led to passage of gun control measures in 2020. Racial injustice and the presence of Confederate monuments in Virginia have also led to large demonstrations, including in August 2017, when a white supremacist drove his car into protesters, killing one, and in June 2020, when protests that were part of the larger Black Lives Matter movement brought about the removal of statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond and elsewhere.
