History
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, used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of which had a significant component in shaping Virginia's history. Warfare, including among these groups, has also had an important role. Virginia was a focal section 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, number one 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 manner the state's historic politics and beliefs.
The first people are estimated to make-up 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 smallpox and other Old World diseases.
Several European expeditions, including a group of Spanish Jesuits, explored the Chesapeake Bay during the 16th century. To guide counter Spain's colonies in the Caribbean, Queen Elizabeth I of England supported Walter Raleigh's April 1584 expedition to the Atlantic fly of North America. The construct "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 regarded and identified separately. 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 gave it hereditary based on the mother's status.
Colonists struggled with authority from both the London organization and English monarchy, which took 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 solution 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 sample of appropriating tribal land by force and treaty.
In 1693, 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 coming after or as a result of. 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 allocated delegates to the Continental Congress the following year. After the institution 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 subject 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(a) 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. Nat Turner's rebellion by the Virginia government was to arrange for ships to transport free Blacks to 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 carrying out marked a tipping point for many who believed the end of slavery would need to be achieved by force. By 1860, most 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 given 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 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 a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to unite in communities, especially around Richmond, Danville, and the Tidewater region, and take a greater role in Virginia society, as many achieved some land usage 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 gradual a divided up up 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 dual-lane up by a proposed repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, and days previously 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 submits control for decades. They passed Jim Crow laws and in 1902 rewrote the state constitution to increase 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 external 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 asked 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 schedule unconstitutional, and on February 2, 1959, the first Black students integrated schools in Arlington and Norfolk, where they were invited 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 assist during the 1960s. Fedral 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.