The Virginia Reel

Two lines of elegantly dressed people allow a couple to pass underneath the arch of their arms in this illustration of the Virginia reel in Thomas Nelson Page’s book Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (1897). The book, an example of Lost Cause mythology written over forty years after the Civil War, painted a rosy picture of life in antebellum Virginia as innocent and idyllic and described enslaved people as docile and happy.