Author: Brendan Wolfe

former editor of Encyclopedia Virginia (2008—2019)
ENTRY

Hold, To Have and to (1900)

To Have and to Hold (1900), the second novel by the Virginia-born writer Mary Johnston, was the prolific author’s most popular work. An action-adventure story and romance set in Jamestown in 1621 and 1622, the novel uses the backdrop of colonial Virginia to tell its story, making characters of such noted figures as John Rolfe and Opechancanough, and dramatizing the latter’s attack against the colony in 1622. The hero of To Have and to Hold is Captain Ralph Percy. Percy marries a woman he believes to be a penniless Puritan but who is actually a ward of King James and betrothed to the dastardly, suggestively named Lord Carnal. A series of often-unlikely adventures follows, involving swordplay, poison, haunted woods, pirates, and a tame but ferocious panther, until Percy and his wife, at one point separated, reunite. After being serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, To Have and to Hold was published in book form in 1900 and sold more than 135,000 copies in its first week. It was the best-selling novel of the year and the most successful popular novel in the United States between the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 and Gone with the Wind in 1936. Critics praised it lavishly and found its history to be unusually reliable. It was adapted for the stage and film. Despite the attention paid to Johnston in her day, however, few scholars study her books in the twenty-first century.

ENTRY

George Thorpe (bap. 1576–1622)

George Thorpe was an investor in the Virginia Company of London and a member of the governor’s Council (1620–1622) who presented himself as an agent of Christian salvation for Virginia Indians. Born into a gentry family in Gloucestershire, he studied law at the Middle Temple and served briefly in Parliament (1614) before becoming a chief organizer of Berkeley Hundred, a society founded in 1618 and allotted land by the Crown for settlement in Virginia. A company of settlers sailed to the colony in 1619, but Thorpe and his fellow investors relieved the group’s captain of his duties. Thorpe took charge of the plantation in Virginia and, at the behest of the Virginia Company, at least 10,000 acres of land set aside for a university, including an Indian college, east of present-day Richmond. Evidence suggests that Thorpe had previously cared for a Virginia Indian and, upon his arrival in the colony in May 1620, was motivated to befriend the Indians and convert them to Christianity. The next year, Thorpe informed company officials that he had secured a visit with Opechancanough, one of the most powerful chiefs of Tsenacomoco. Although Opechancanough accepted Thorpe’s gift of a new house and led the Englishman to believe he might convert, he was actually planning a large-scale attack against English settlements on the James River. Thorpe was killed in those attacks on March 22, 1622.

ENTRY

Philip Thomas (1831–1888)

Philip Thomas was a farmer and slave trader in Pittsylvania County. Born in 1831, by late in the 1850s he had partnered with William A. J. Finney in a slave trading business. The two worked together for several years buying enslaved men, women, and children locally and then either transporting them to the slave-trading hubs of Richmond and Alexandria or sending them directly south for resale. Both earned substantial return on their efforts, aided by improvements in infrastructure and communications. A year into the American Civil War (1861–1865), Thomas joined the 5th Virginia Cavalry and stayed with the regiment through the remainder of the conflict. After the surrender at Appomattox, however, he was without land or business and so moved to Georgia, where he worked as a carpenter and died in 1888.

ENTRY

Slave Ship, The (1924)

The Slave Ship (1924) is the eighteenth novel by the Virginia-born writer Mary Johnston. Set in Scotland, Virginia, Africa, and Jamaica, the novel follows twelve years in the life of David Scott, who is captured at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and then transported to Virginia as a convict laborer. After a daring escape, Scott finds refuge on the slave ship Janet. There he works his way up from clerk to captain, making numerous voyages to the Slave Coast of West Africa and participating in the infamous Middle Passage, during which millions of enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas. Johnston’s novel reflects her own extensive research on the Atlantic slave trade and, at times, an impressive attention to detail. Nevertheless, Johnston consistently understates the horrors of the Middle Passage and especially of the captains and crews who violently oversaw their human cargoes. Reviews of The Slave Ship upon its release were generally positive. The New York Times, for instance, praised its evocative descriptions while worrying that Johnston’s theme—that master and servant are both slaves—distracted from the brutal reality of African enslavement.

ENTRY

Bacon Tait (1796–1871)

Bacon Tait was one of the most successful Richmond slave traders and jail operators in the years leading up to the American Civil War (1861–1865). Born near Lynchburg, he served briefly during the War of 1812 and spent time working in Richmond before relocating there permanently by 1828. In that year he made his first significant transaction in slaves, selling thirty-seven in New Orleans and entering into a year-long, unsuccessful partnership with two other men. About the same time Tait began what would be a longstanding business relationship with Thomas Boudar that included the buying and selling of slaves and the operation of a so-called jail for the confinement of enslaved men, women, and children awaiting sale. Tait probably first built the facility that came to be known as Lumpkin’s Jail before constructing an even bigger one on the corner of Fifteenth and Cary streets. Although his business was not widely considered to be a respectable one, Tait served four terms on the Richmond City Council (1847–1851). Between 1843 and 1848 he fathered four children, including twins, with Courtney Fountain, a free black woman, and in 1851 Tait and Fountain moved to Salem, Massachusetts. He lived in Richmond during the Civil War and his wealth survived the war intact. He died in 1871.

ENTRY

Sir Thomas Smythe (ca. 1558–1625)

Sir Thomas Smythe was an English merchant who served as the first of three treasurers of the Virginia Company of London. Although his surname is sometimes rendered Smith, he always spelled it Smythe. Like his father, he was a successful haberdasher and investor in trading companies, including the East India Company. He was briefly imprisoned after a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I, but was knighted by King James I in 1603 and appointed royal ambassador to Russia. In 1609, in conjunction with the company’s second charter, he became treasurer (essentially chairperson) of the Virginia Company of London, a joint-stock company that funded the English colony at Jamestown. Smythe’s administration was tumultuous and ended with the election of his rival Sir Edwin Sandys as treasurer in 1619. Four years later the Crown opened an investigation into the company for mismanagement and in 1624 revoked its charter. Smythe died in Kent in 1625.

ENTRY

Shoes at Gettysburg

One of the most persistent legends surrounding the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), which took place during the American Civil War (1861–1865), is that it was fought over shoes. Ten weeks after the battle, Confederate general Henry Heth, a Virginian whose troops were the first to engage on July 1, filed a now-famous report in which he explained why he had sent a portion of his division into the small Pennsylvania town. “On the morning of June 30,” Heth wrote, “I ordered Brigadier General [Johnston] Pettigrew to take his brigade to Gettysburg, search the town for army supplies (shoes especially), and return the same day.” That parenthetical phrase “shoes especially” has taken on a life of its own over the years. A 1997 newsletter of the American Podiatric Medical Association is typical—it claimed, perhaps due to its interest in foot health, that footwear was the battle’s causa belli, adding, “There was a warehouse full of boots and shoes in the town.”

ENTRY

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940)

Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) is the last novel by Willa Cather and the Virginia-born writer’s only book set entirely in the state. Based on an incident in Cather’s own family, in which her maternal grandmother helped a slave escape in 1856, the novel details the complicated marriage of Henry and Sapphira Colbert, who operate a mill and small farm in Back Creek outside Winchester in the years before the American Civil War. Sapphira wrongly suspects that one of her slaves, Nancy, is in an intimate relationship with her husband, and manipulates those around her to exact revenge. Henry and the couple’s daughter, Rachel, intervene by helping Nancy flee to Canada. At the time of its release, Sapphira and the Slave Girl was praised by the New York Times for examining “the question of slavery without any portentous fanfare,” but in the years since, the book has not been widely read. Most critics have charged Sapphira with being racist and overly nostalgic, while a few have defended it as a brilliant inversion of old stereotypes and a coded exploration of sexual desire.

ENTRY

Robert Carter III’s Deed of Gift

Robert Carter III‘s Deed of Gift was a legal document, signed on August 1, 1791, and presented in Northumberland District Court on September 5, that set out provisions to free 452 enslaved men and woman. By the time those provisions were fulfilled, more than three decades later, between 500 and 600 were freed, probably the largest emancipation by an individual in the United States before 1860. Carter was a member of one of the wealthiest families in Virginia and inherited hundreds of enslaved people. Perhaps because of a religious conversion, he turned against slavery during and after the American Revolution (1775–1783). His plan to free his own enslaved population was carefully designed to conform to state law and to be gradual. Adults would be freed in small groups each year based on their age, children would be freed when they became adults, and the elderly would be allowed to independently farm on Carter’s Nomony Hall estate for the remainder of their lives. In 1793, Carter moved to Baltimore, leaving the process in the hands of the Baptist minister Benjamin Dawson. He later sold his remaining enslaved people to Dawson. After Carter’s death in 1804, Carter’s heirs sued the minister to stop the manumissions but lost an 1808 ruling by the Virginia Court of Appeals. The scholar Andrew Levy has noted that Carter’s Deed of Gift has not simply been forgotten but actively ignored. Perhaps in response to his complaint, a roadside marker dedicated to the deed was erected in Northumberland County in 2016.

ENTRY

Roanoke Colonies, The

The Roanoke Colonies were an ambitious attempt by England’s Sir Walter Raleigh to establish a permanent North American settlement with the purpose of harassing Spanish shipping, mining for gold and silver, discovering a passage to the Pacific Ocean, and Christianizing the Indians. After three voyages the enterprise ended in the mysterious disappearance of the “Lost Colony.” The first voyage, a reconnaissance venture led by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, landed in 1584 on the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina and made mostly friendly contact there with the Algonquian-speaking Indians, even returning to England with two of them: Manteo and Wanchese. Boosted by Barlowe’s positive report and Queen Elizabeth‘s grant to settle “Virginia,” the second voyage, in 1585, established a fortified camp on Roanoke Island. John White and Thomas Hariot accompanied explorations of the mainland and the Chesapeake Bay, creating maps, paintings, and descriptions of native culture. But after less than a year in America and shortly after beheading the Indian chief Pemisapan (Wingina), the English abandoned the colony. They returned the next year, this time under White’s leadership and intending to settle in the Chesapeake; instead, they reoccupied Roanoke. After White sailed to England to update Raleigh and obtain additional supplies, he was delayed by the Spanish Armada. By the time he returned in 1590, the colonists, including his granddaughter, Virginia Dare, had disappeared.

ENTRY

Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616)

Richard Hakluyt, better known as Richard Hakluyt (the younger) or Richard Hakluyt (the minister) to distinguish him from his elder cousin of the same name, was an editor, geographer, and Anglican minister. With his cousin, he acted as one of the chief propagandists of English colonization in North America. In 1582, he published Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America, and the Ilands Adjacent, probably in support of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s plan to settle North America. And when Gilbert’s half brother Walter Raleigh inherited Gilbert’s patent for colonization, Hakluyt wrote and presented to Queen Elizabeth a Discourse on Western Planting (1584), forcefully arguing for colonization predicated on Protestant proselytizing and economic expansion, both of which, he insisted, would help undermine Spain. Five years later he published Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, a remarkable collection of documents whose final section focused on English activities in the Americas. Hakluyt also played a key role in producing a book that brought England’s first American colony to the attention of a wide and lasting audience: the first volume of Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry‘s multilingual America series, an edition of Thomas Hariot‘s narrative with John White‘s images and maps of the settlement at Roanoke Island. In later years, Hakluyt advised the East India Company; his was one of eight names on the original charter of the Virginia Company of London and he was listed as an investor in the second charter. An official for many years at Westminster Abbey, he died in 1616.

ENTRY

Morgan v. Virginia (1946)

In Morgan v. Virginia, decided on June 3, 1946, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Virginia law requiring racial segregation on commercial interstate buses as a violation of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. The appellant, Irene Morgan, was riding a Greyhound bus from Hayes Store, in Gloucester County, to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1944 when she was arrested and convicted in Saluda for refusing to give up her seat to a white person. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed appeals on her behalf, and after the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled against Morgan in 1945, the U.S. Supreme Court heard her arguments. The case came near the end of a string of decisions, dating back to 1878, in which various courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, had found that the commerce clause did not support state laws that regulated commercial interstate passenger travel. Morgan v. Virginia was not a typical civil rights case in that it did not comment on a state’s right to segregate white people from Black people. Still, Morgan’s refusal to give up her seat foreshadowed Rosa Parks’s more famous action a decade later and marked an early and important victory in the civil rights movement.

ENTRY

The Known World (2003)

The Known World (2003) is a novel by Edward P. Jones that centers on Henry Townsend, a free black slaveholder living in antebellum Virginia. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2004, the novel was lavishly praised by critics, with Kirkus Reviews calling it “a harrowing tale that scarcely ever raises its voice.” The New York Times noted how racial lines in the book “are intriguingly tangled and not easily drawn.” In addition, The Known World has been compared favorably with classic American novels about slavery such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), William Faulkner‘s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Jones’s book is distinctive, however, for its focus on the historical reality of black slaveholders before the American Civil War (1861–1865). Although the author, who received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1981, has downplayed the role of his research, the reality of Henry Townsend adheres to the historical record. According to scholarship done in the 1920s by Carter G. Woodson, 12 percent of all free black heads of families in Virginia in 1830 owned slaves.

ENTRY

Mary Johnston (1870–1936)

Mary Johnston was a novelist, suffragist, and social advocate, as well as the first woman to top best-seller lists in the twentieth century. Born in Botetourt County to a businessman and Confederate veteran, she was largely self-educated. After the death of her mother and during a financial downturn, she began writing in order to help support her family. It worked. Johnston’s second and most famous novel, To Have and to Hold (1900), broke existing publishing records by selling 60,000 copies in advance and more than 135,000 copies during its first week of publication. A romantic tale of colonial Virginia, the book proved to be the biggest popular success between the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 and Gone with the Wind in 1936. Two novels of the American Civil War (1861–1865) ran her afoul of some prominent southerners, including Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson‘s widow, while her increased interest in mysticism puzzled readers and led to a critical and popular decline. Still, Johnston’s social activism may be of more lasting importance than her literary output. She was an early member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, using her reputation as a “southern lady” to the movement’s full advantage. And in 1923, she wrote the influential short story “Nemesis,” depicting the horrors of lynching. Johnston, who never married, died at her home in Bath County in 1936.

ENTRY

Pickett’s Charge

Pickett’s Charge was the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), and one of the most famous infantry attacks of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Lasting about an hour on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, it pitted 12,000 Confederates—including three brigades of Virginians under George E. Pickett—against half that number of Union troops. On July 2, Robert E. Lee had unsuccessfully attacked the Union flanks; in what even some of his own men perceived as a desperate gambit, he now attacked the center, asking his troops to cross an open field nearly three-quarters of a mile long. They were bloodily repulsed, losing half their number. Controversy resulted, as Confederate veterans struggled to lay claim to honor and glory, pitting Virginians against North Carolinians in efforts to explain why the attack had failed. Many Southerners came to believe the charge represented the “High Water Mark” of Confederate hopes for independence, a view cultivated by proponents of the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. Meanwhile, twentieth-century popular culture transformed Pickett into a soldier as “gallant and graceful as a knight of chivalry riding to a tournament,” in the words of his wife, LaSalle Corbell Pickett. And films like Gettysburg (1993) glorified the attack even while historians continued to debate Lee’s decision, sometimes comparing it to Union general Ulysses S. Grant‘s equally futile attacks at Cold Harbor in Hanover County in 1864.

ENTRY

James Lindsay Almond Jr. (1898–1986)

J. Lindsay Almond Jr. was a governor of Virginia (1958–1962) whose name became synonymous with Massive Resistance, the legislative effort used to prevent school desegregation in light of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Supreme Court of the United States ruling in 1954. A Democrat and member of the Byrd Organization, Almond is famous for closing public schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Front Royal in 1958 rather than integrating them. When the state and federal courts declared his actions illegal, Almond submitted, thus effectively ending the era of Massive Resistance to desegregation in Virginia.

Sponsors