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Virginians were among the leaders of the American Revolution and of the events leading to it, including the convening of the First Continental Congress, a body of delegates to speak on behalf of the colonies, in 1774. It was at a convention in Virginia in 1775 that the legislator Patrick Henry uttered his famous words, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, while George Washington assumed command of the armies. It was at Yorktown that the British armies were forced to surrender to combined American and French forces on Oct. 19, 1781, which led to acknowledgement of the colonies’ independence in the Treaty of Paris (part of the Peace of Paris collection of treaties) in 1783. In 1788 Virginia became the 10th state to ratify the Constitution.
The state continued its national leadership in the following decades, furnishing four of the first five presidents of the United States, including Jefferson (1801–09) and James Madison (1809–17). Another Virginian, John Marshall, served as chief justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835 and was largely responsible for establishing an independent federal judiciary in the early republic.
The state had abolished the African slave trade in 1778, and many of the revolutionary generation, including Washington, freed their enslaved people; Jefferson was highly critical of the institution of slavery in his writing but freed only some of his enslaved people. Nevertheless, the institution of slavery thrived in Virginia in the early 1800s, especially as enslaved people were sold to new plantation areas in the southeast. In 1831 Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, encouraged a slave rebellion in Southampton county that resulted in many deaths and spread fear across the slaveholding South.
Charles Loreaux Quittmeyer Robert J. NorrellCivil War and Reconstruction
Controversy over the movement to abolish slavery intensified in the mid-19th century, particularly after the election of Abraham Lincoln, an advocate of emancipation, to the presidency. The Southern states perceived an increasing threat to their agricultural livelihood, which was based on the institution of slavery; in 1861 Virginia followed 10 other Southern states in seceding from the Union to become the Confederate States of America, or the Confederacy. Richmond became the capital of the Confederacy, and Virginia was the chief battleground during the ensuing war—the American Civil War—between the United States of the North and the Confederate States of the South.
The Confederacy’s Army of Virginia and the United States’s Army of the Potomac engaged each other throughout the war. The most noteworthy encounters in Virginia included the battles of Bull Run near Manassas in 1861 and 1862; the Seven Days’ Battles near Richmond and the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862; the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863; and the Battle of the Wilderness and the Petersburg Campaign in 1864–65. In April 1865 the Confederate commander Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union commander Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in southern Virginia to end the war. During the war the state lost one-third of its territory, the 50 counties west of the Allegheny Mountains, to the formation of a new antislavery state, West Virginia (1863).
In 1867 Congress placed the South under military rule, and the Republican Party became the dominant political influence for a brief period. Under Republican Reconstruction in Virginia, African American men were granted the right to vote, education was improved, and a commitment was made to supporting and rebuilding the railroads. Virginia was readmitted as a state of the Union in 1870.
Strife over the state debt, much of which had been accrued through the construction of railroads during the prewar period, was a prominent feature of Virginia’s political life during the 1870s and ’80s. When former Confederates in the Democratic Party regained control of the government, they provided for payment of the entire debt. The bankrupt state could not, however, meet its obligations to its citizens and pay interest to its creditors, and the new system of public schools, organized in 1870, suffered. Then in 1882 a group known as the Readjusters, claiming that the debt and interest needed pruning, seized control of the government (with the aid of the Republicans) and “readjusted” the debt downward.
Virginia’s economy recovered slowly from the devastation of war. Agriculture remained the largest sector of the economy and tobacco the main crop, though it offered little latitude for development. The rebuilding and expansion of the railroad network created some new opportunities, as did the emergence in southwestern Virginia of timber and coal industries. The state’s growing manufacturing sector, centred on textiles and cigarettes, also opened new avenues for growth.