This Week in Virginia History

On a spring morning in 1819, seventeen people loaded two wagons with their luggage, tools, and provisions. They left their Rockfish plantation in Nelson County and travelled over Jarman’s Gap and into the Shenandoah Valley.

Their destination? Illinois. 800 miles away.

But first they had to stop in Pennsylvania to meet up with their slaveholder Edward Coles. Yes, the traveling band of men, women, and children were slaves. And Coles planned to free them.

Picture one of your elderly neighbors or family members. Someone in their 80s. When they were a young adult, they had to pay a poll tax to vote in Virginia. Many southern states established these poll taxes at the turn of the 20th century in order to disenfranchise Black and poor white voters. The Commonwealth of Virginia even wrote the poll tax into its new 1902 constitution.

Joseph Fossett worked at his blacksmith anvil late into the evening with a lot on his mind. Earlier that day, his master Thomas Jefferson had told him that he would be freed one year after Jefferson’s death. But only him and four other enslaved men. Not Joseph’s wife Edith or their children.

While traveling from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon, George Washington sat down to write a letter. He was angry. His enslaved chef Hercules had run away from Mount Vernon, and George wanted him back. In his letter, he asked his friend to search for Hercules. But Hercules had freed himself, and he wouldn't be caught.

The Union army led by Custer -- yes, that Custer of Little Big Horn infamy – arrived in Charlottesville on March 3rd. Town and University officials met him at the bottom of Carr’s Hill with a flag of truce. The Union forces occupied Charlottesville for three days and foraged the countryside for food. And African-Americans flocked to the Union camp.

Over a thousand African-Americans followed Union troops as they left the town and headed toward Scottsville. Today, March 3rd is remembered in Charlottesville as Liberation and Emancipation Day.

Four decades before Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech… Three decades before Brown versus Board of Education... Gordon Blaine Hancock was a leading spokesman for African American equality and self-determination in the generation before the civil rights movement.

This week in 1851… Fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins was captured in Massachusetts... until a crowd of black activists broke into a Boston courtroom and freed him again.

The U.S. Census of 1860 reported that almost half a million Virginians lived in slavery. Five years later they were all free.

During the Civil War years, many enslaved people freed themselves. Legally speaking, a pro-Union, shadow state government -- the Restored Government of Virginia -- officially abolished slavery in Virginia. But it took the U.S. Army enforcing these measures after the end of the Civil War for most enslaved people to gain their freedom.

For the most part, Virginia's political leaders and business elites opposed lynching. Not out of respect for the rights of African Americans. More because the elites were trying to attract manufacturing and industry. That called for law and order, and lynchings were bad publicity. Two state senators introduced the nation's first anti-lynching law in February 1928.

People don’t much like to talk about the dark history of eugenics these days. But less than 100 years ago, Virginia lawmakers passed the “Eugenical Sterilization Act” in a drive to protect what the state called “the purity of the American race.”

After being raped by her foster nephew and committed to a mental institution, Carrie Buck became the test case for this new sterilization law.