When is a letter revolutionary? That’s the question at the heart of our new entry on the Virginia Committee of Correspondence, the first in EV’s new section on the American Revolution in Virginia.
It was 250 years ago this week, on March 12, 1773, that the House of Burgesses created a permanent committee to correspond with other colonial legislatures about perceived threats to their rights from the British government. Read more about: Revolutionary Letters
In October of 2022, with support from a Virginia Humanities grant, descendants of Bethany Veney, an enslaved woman who lived in the Shenandoah Valley prior to the Civil War, gathered in Luray to record themselves reading from her autobiography The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman.
Like many enslaved people, Veney labored for several different enslavers. Read more about: “Aunt Betty’s Story, the Narrative of a Slave Woman”
Barbara Johns is one step closer to Washington, D.C. A sculptor has been selected for the statue destined for the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall portraying Barbara Rose Johns Powell as the teenage Barbara Johns, when she rallied the students at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School to walk out in protest of their substandard learning conditions. Read more about: Ms. Johns Goes to Washington
You don’t have to be a fan of NASCAR to appreciate our new entry on the legendary Danville-born driver Wendell Oliver Scott. Scott was already locally famous as a taxi driver-turned-moonshine runner when he drove a souped-up Ford in his first race at Danville Fairgrounds Speedway in 1952. Despite financial obstacles and continued instances of racism, Scott shattered barriers in stock car racing, generally considered the exclusive domain of white southern men. Read more about: Start Your Engines for Wendell Oliver Scott
Encyclopedia Virginia is pleased to present our new entry about the Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia, the first in a series of new entries about the history and culture of the eleven officially recognized Virginia Indian tribes—past and present.
“EV knew we needed to do a better job of representing the history and culture of Virginia’s tribal communities,” Read more about: Telling Their Story: The Nottoway Indian Tribe of Virginia
How should Virginia commemorate the American Revolution? Whose stories will be told and how as we approach the semiquincentennial in 2026? Why is expanding and complicating the narrative of the Revolution important?
These are questions we are asking ourselves at Encyclopedia Virginia as we embark on our new American Revolution project “By the People: The Inclusive Story of Revolution in Virginia, 1763–1800.”
They were also tackled recently at a discussion at Colonial Williamsburg hosted by the historic site, William & Read more about: How Should We Remember the Revolution?
It’s a wrap on Encyclopedia Virginia‘s first giving campaign, and we would like to thank everyone who made it a success.
Whether you gave a gift, attended our EntryPoint event, told us why EV was meaningful to you, or simply visited the site, we are so grateful for your support and your role in our community. Read more about: Thanks from EV!
We’re trying something new at Encyclopedia Virginia and invite you to participate. EV’s mission is to provide a free, reliable multimedia resource that tells the full story of Virginia for those who seek to understand how the past informs the present and future.
While we’ve been fortunate and grateful to receive financial support from a variety of sources throughout our history, projects like ours thrive with reader support. Read more about: Support Encyclopedia Virginia
Our new entry on the Virginia History and Textbook Commission explores another facet of the Commonwealth’s mid-twentieth century effort to hold back the hands of time in a country that was moving toward desegregation. Like the Massive Resistance campaign that shut down public schools in some Virginia communities rather than comply with the Brown v. Read more about: Who Controls the Past: The Virginia History and Textbook Commission
With a number of high-profile Supreme Court cases in the news, we take a look at the groundbreaking Virginia-based cases that have made their way to the nation’s highest court. Many of these cases dealt with issues of race and segregation in the Commonwealth, as well as with issues of reproductive coercion and freedom to marry. Read more about: Supreme Opinion
In this report, dated May 1864, the Committee on Colored Refugees, who were representatives of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends, gives its assessment of the needs of the formerly enslaved people escaping behind Union lines and how Quaker charity efforts were meeting them in contraband camps across Virginia, including Alexandria. One of their agents, Harriet Jacobs, wrote her own letter documenting what she saw in Alexandria and Washington, D.C. For Quakers, the abolition of slavery was a moral and religious imperative.
In this letter, dated July 5, 1884, Sarah Stewart, an enslaved domestic at Montpelier, writes to her enslaver, Dolley Madison, reporting that the Orange County sheriff had seized many of the people enslaved by the Madisons to pay their debts. Stewart implores Madison to ask her neighbors to purchase those enslaved people who had been seized to prevent their being permanently separated from their families by slave traders taking part in the domestic slave trade. Ultimately, the enslaved community at Montpelier was largely broken up because of Madison’s financial difficulty.
This article, published in the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator on December 21, 1855, gives an account of the New York state militia mistaking Thomas Downing for a white man of the same name who was trying to escape militia duty, which was required of male citizens between the ages of 18 and 45. At this time, Downing was famous across New York City for his restaurant, community organizing, and activism. The story originally appeared in the New York Evening Post.
This is a published version of the speech that Governor Mills Edwin Godwin Jr. gave in January 1968 proposing that the General Assembly revise the state’s constitution and submit a new document to the voters for ratification. Rather than summoning a constitutional convention, he argued that the legislators should authorize him to appoint a Commission on Constitutional Revision, who would revise the constitution. In November 1970, voters ratified the new constitution.
In this article, published December 7, 1963, in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, Evelyn Butts states her reasons for filing suit against Governor Albertis S. Harrison Jr. and three Norfolk city employees: the unconstitutionality of the poll tax. Her case was combined with another case under the name Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, and on March 24, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the poll tax was unconstitutional. In 1962, as Congress debated the Twenty-Fourth Amendment banning poll taxes in federal elections, Governor Harrison reaffirmed his support for the poll tax in Virginia’s state and local elections.
Walter Plecker, Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics, compiled this list of the surnames of families he believed were Black and misidentifying themselves as white or Indian to distribute to public health personnel. This was part of Plecker and the state’s attempts to eliminate documentary records of Virginia Indians’ existence. These actions are known as the Paper Genocide and affected tribal communities’ efforts for federal recognition into the twenty-first century.
Between 1791 and 1804, the Haitian Revolution transformed Saint-Domingue from a slaveholding French colony into the free Black nation of Haiti. The Haitian Revolution sent shockwaves across the world and had a profound impact on people and politics in Virginia. Thousands of people, free and enslaved, arrived in Virginia from revolutionary Saint-Domingue. For free and enslaved Black Virginians, the revolution served as a model of a revolution that was predicated on Black liberation. Most white Virginians viewed the Haitian Revolution with horror, sympathizing with French enslavers and expressing fear that the revolution might inspire similar uprisings in Virginia. Over the next decade, conspiracies including the Secret Keeper Plot and Gabriel’s Conspiracy were alleged to have either been inspired by the Haitian Revolution or to have had direct French and Haitian involvement. These fears influenced not only white Virginian attitudes toward people from revolutionary Saint-Domingue but also affected national and foreign policy. Decades after the revolution, its memory continued to shape how Virginians understood slave revolt and abolition.
The American Revolution was an important but inconclusive moment in American educational history. Revolutionary republicanism provided an initial impulse for tax-supported, widespread public education, including in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson proposed a plan for public education. Countervailing ideological trends, and a limited embrace of universal human equality, kept republican ideas about education from coming to fruition in the early republic, especially in the South. Still, gains were made toward universal public education. New England made primary education accessible to most children, and private academies increasingly served the needs of middling students, including girls and young women. In the North, institutions such as the New York African Free School expanded educational opportunities for free African Americans, while in Virginia, education for Black people was slowly criminalized. Jefferson realized his plan to create a free institution of higher education in the University of Virginia, but a system of widespread public education would have to wait until after the American Civil War (1861–1865).
At the outset of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the thirteen colonies faced Great Britain without an army or a navy. While a Continental Army was soon created, the question of building and outfitting a navy plagued the Continental Congress. Finally, a Continental fleet was given the green light and American naval ships slowly took to the seas. During the course of the war, the Continental Navy outfitted about sixty-five vessels. This small fighting force faced the greatest sea power of the eighteenth century, in addition to the challenges of weather, scarcity of supplies, dearth of manpower, and enemy privateers. Engagements between the Continental Navy and His Majesty’s Royal Navy along the shores and waters of Virginia were few. Yet the Continental Navy fought the enemy in the waters of Europe and the Caribbean, harassing the British and drawing their attention away from colonial ports. The size of the American fleet never came close to the might of the Royal Navy, however, and the hopes held at the time of its creation faded as the war raged on. By the time the final shots of the Revolution rang out, the Continental Navy was on its last legs, numbering only five ships, and would soon disappear completely.
Robert Mush (sometimes Mursh) was a member of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe who fought as a Patriot in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Mush was born around 1758 and attended the Brafferton Indian School at the College of William and Mary beginning in 1769. He enlisted in the Continental Army in 1776 and fought at the Battle of Brandywine (September 11, 1777) and the Battle of Germantown (October 4, 1777). In 1778, he marched south to Charleston, South Carolina, for the siege of that city, where he was captured by the British and spent time as a prisoner of war before being exchanged. He remained in the army and served under General Anthony Wayne in Georgia until the war ended in 1783. Mush subsequently returned to the Pamunkey Indian Reservation in King William County, where he married a woman named Elizabeth and served as a tribal leader. Mush became involved with the Baptist Church, and by 1800 he had moved his family to South Carolina, where he served as a minister among the Catawba Indian Tribe and later at the Flint Hill Baptist Church until his death on December 7, 1837. Following his death, Elizabeth Mush petitioned to receive the pension afforded to the widows of Revolutionary War veterans, and her claim file provides a rare glimpse into the life of an Indigenous Revolutionary War veteran.
William Fitzhugh of Chatham was a wealthy Virginia planter, politician, and civic leader, descended from one of the colony’s earliest and most prominent families. He was born on September 4, 1741, in King George County, the only son of Henry Fitzhugh and Lucy Carter Fitzhugh, daughter of Robert “King” Carter. His father died when he was an infant, and a childhood accident left him blind in one eye. Educated at home under tutors, Fitzhugh inherited vast estates—including Eagle’s Nest, Somerset, and extensive lands in Fairfax County—making him one of the richest men in Virginia. In 1763 he married Ann Randolph, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson. The couple later built the grand Georgian mansion Chatham, overlooking Fredericksburg, which became famous for its hospitality. More than 100 enslaved people worked the plantation, cultivating crops and practicing skilled trades. Fitzhugh was also a noted horse breeder and racer, corresponding with both Jefferson and George Washington about horses. A supporter of the Patriot cause, Fitzhugh represented King George County in the House of Burgesses (1772–75), attended the Virginia Conventions of 1775 and 1776, and held numerous posts during and after the Revolution—including delegate to the Continental Congress (1779), member of the House of Delegates (1776–1777, 1780–1781, 1787–1788), and state senator (1780–85). After the war, Fitzhugh continued in public life, serving as a presidential elector in 1789. The financial burden of entertaining guests at Chatham eventually led him to relocate to Fairfax County and Alexandria. In 1805, an uprising by enslaved men at Chatham ended violently, reflecting widespread white fears following Gabriel’s Rebellion. Fitzhugh sold Chatham the following year. During his later years, Fitzhugh remained active in civic affairs. Fitzhugh died on December 19, 1809, and was buried at Ravensworth.
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