Virginia

By: Paul Finkelman, Bradford J. Wood

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Virginia

Colonial Virginia holds a distinctive place in American history because it gave birth to one of the greatest contradictions in early American society. As the first British colonists in America, colonial Virginians played a large part in creating the first fully defined system of racial slavery on the North American mainland. Ironically, they were also among the first and most prominent to give voice to powerful and revolutionary new ideas about freedom several generations later. Although historians and other Americans have made various attempts to explain how so much slavery and so much concern about freedom could exist in the same place, it is impossible to deny that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other early Virginians lived in a world that treated slavery as normal for people of African descent.

Virginians were not the only early Americans who wrestled with ideas about slavery and freedom, of course, but the development of bondage in Virginia influenced the same process in many other places. For one thing, Virginia, as the oldest colony in British America, set a precedent for other colonies and settlements to follow. The sheer scale of slavery in Virginia, the largest and most populous of the original thirteen colonies, also made the institution seem more central to life in early American society. Finally, the so-called Virginia dynasty of political leaders in the early American Republic ensured that slave owners would have a voice in the new national government and culture. When slavery began to wane in Virginia during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the institution's movement out of the mainstream of American society began.

Defining Slavery and Freedom in a Tobacco Colony, 1607–1700

The Virginia Company founded the first permanent British colony in the Western Hemisphere at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Economic ambitions inspired Jamestown and almost all European colonies in the early modern world, but the Virginia Company lacked a practical plan for making its investment profitable. The first few years at Jamestown took an enormous toll in terms of resources, lives, and morale. Gradually, Virginians realized that they could make substantial profits by exporting tobacco to Europe. The colony's small and sickly population, however, could not come close to meeting the rigorous labor demands of supplying the market for tobacco. A few decades after the founding of Jamestown, Virginia colonists desperately sought enough labor to realize their hopes for prosperity.

At first Virginia met most of its growing labor needs with indentured servants. Lower-class laborers from the British Isles poured into the colony in large numbers. Virginians paid for their transportation, but according to the terms of their indentures, servants sold themselves into bondage for a specified number of years. Indentured servitude offered some economic opportunities for those who gained their freedom, but servants spent difficult years under the seemingly complete control of their owners. Compared with the later large-scale enslavement of Africans in Virginia, indentured servitude seems mild because it was temporary and because British servants retained access to the court system. By most other standards, indentured servitude was undeniably harsh. Still, the practice thrived, and as early as 1625 the overwhelming majority of Virginia colonists had arrived as servants.

By 1619 Africans began to arrive in Virginia, but at first they remained a small part of Virginia society, and black labor did not replace white indentured servitude. Until late in the seventeenth century the majority of laborers in the colony were indentured whites. The first blacks to arrive were also treated as indentured servants. In a world dominated by British tobacco planters and indentured servants, few Virginia colonists devoted much attention to questions about what it meant to be enslaved or African. Consequently, the first Africans in Virginia received treatment that was generally similar to that of whites and sometimes gained their freedom for completing a limited term of years of service or by converting to Christianity. The story of Anthony Johnson, an African on Virginia's Eastern Shore, provides a glimpse of the possibilities. Johnson obtained freedom for himself and his family, accumulated hundreds of acres of land, ran a tobacco plantation worked by his own slaves, used the legal system to his advantage, and earned respect in the county court. Johnson's experience and other evidence reveal that in early Virginia racial boundaries often blurred and the meaning of slavery remained vague. Similarly, in 1624 a free black sailor who had converted to Christianity was allowed to testify in a legal case involving a white. The sailor's race was apparently unimportant, but his religion mattered.

In the 1630s and 1640s some African Americans in the colony were treated as slaves for life, but given the colony's high mortality rate for all people, this treatment affected very few people. Records from the 1640s and 1650s show a few references to slaves, but most blacks were still being treated as indentured servants. From 1660 to 1661 the Virginia legislature began to pass laws explicitly recognizing slavery. However the status of blacks remained in flux for another few decades. In 1672, for example, the colony's general court ruled that “Edward Mozingo a Negro man had been and was an apprentice by Indenture … and that by Computation his terme of Servitude for Twenty Eight yeares is now Expired … It is Ajudged by this Court that the said Edw: Mozingo be and Remayne free to all Intents and purposes by order of This Court.” Two acts of the legislature in the 1660s helped create slavery as an institution and set the pattern of racial discrimination that would dominate Virginia for the next three hundred years. An act of 1662 noted “some doubts have arrisen whether children got by Englishmen upon negro women should be slave or free.” Thus the new statute declared that “all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” The same law imposed double fines for whites convicted of non-marital sex (fornication) with blacks. In 1667 the colonial legislature declared that baptism would not lead to the emancipation of any African held as a slave. In the next two decades the colony regulated African Americans in a variety of ways, provided for the suppression of “Negro insurrections,” and limited the punishments for whites who killed blacks through normal punishment or if they were in rebellion. By the end of the century Virginia had rushed headlong into becoming a slave culture, and most of the 10,000 or so blacks in the colony were being treated as slaves.

The growth of slavery in Virginia depended on a variety of factors. Attitudes toward race and gender made it easier for planters to rationalize the enslavement of Africans. British settlers drew on a long and welldeveloped tradition that considered African peoples inferior because of the color of their skin. Developing ideas about race in early Virginia owed a great deal to older ideas about status and dependence. Indentured servitude also presented greater difficulties by the late seventeenth century. In 1676 an ambitious young member of the Virginia elite named Nathaniel Bacon mobilized a diverse group of Virginians, including many desperate former servants, in an attempt to overthrow the colony's government. Bacon's Rebellion disrupted Virginia more than any other event in the second half of the seventeenth century and raised doubts about the future stability of the colony as more and more increasingly restless servants gained their freedom. Even if Virginians continued to prefer indentured servants to slaves after Bacon's Rebellion, it was becoming a moot point, because the supply of servants had already begun to diminish. Population changes in Great Britain rapidly made it impossible for Virginians to get as many indentured servants as they wanted.

By the end of the seventeenth century Virginians had fully committed to slavery. In 1680 about three thousand blacks made up 7 percent of the population of Virginia, but twenty years later the number of blacks in the colony had increased more than fivefold and amounted to over one-fifth of the total population. These numbers would continue to grow, and in 1750 over 100,000 slaves constituted almost half of Virginia's population. As slaves became more numerous, planters recognized the importance of defining their status. From the 1660s into the early 1700s Virginia lawmakers responded to the influx of slaves by defining both slavery and race. First and foremost, slavery became a hereditary and permanent status reserved for people of African descent. A host of other laws regulated or punished interracial interaction in an attempt to draw a sharp contrast between free, “white” people of European descent and enslaved, “black” people of African descent. Strict legal codes not only regulated the behavior of slaves but also attempted to dehumanize all people of African descent. The free black population of Virginia became less visible and largely excluded from white society.

Life in a Slave Society, 1700–1775

By the early eighteenth century Virginia had experienced a profound transformation. Slavery had become both the basis of the tobacco economy and the most important institution in Virginia society. Racial divisions increasingly served as an organizing principle for the social order. Even more strikingly, a relatively homogenous English colony had experienced an influx of thousands of individuals from a diverse range of African cultural backgrounds. To a large degree Virginia had been Africanized, and even in bondage slaves would find ways to assert their African identities.

The transfer of African cultures to Virginia presented a daunting set of challenges. Any surviving aspects of African cultures had to be adapted to the extremely trying circumstances of New World slavery. Virginia offered fewer opportunities for African cultural communities than did colonies in the West Indies or Lower South, but some African cultural groups did remain relatively unified in eighteenth-century Virginia. Two of the Virginia naval districts receiving slaves from Africa, the Lower James and South Potomac, disembarked a clear majority from Senegambia. Slaves from Senegambia also outnumbered those from any other part of Africa in the Rappahannock district, where the trade was more mixed and no single place provided a majority of the slaves. In the busiest sites for the slave trade, the York and Upper James naval districts, most slaves arrived from either the Bight of Biafra or from West Central Africa. In most of these areas of Virginia, many Africans could have had contact with other slaves sharing similar cultural backgrounds.

The size of plantations often played a crucial role in shaping opportunities for participation in slave communities. Throughout the eighteenth century most slaves in Virginia lived on plantations with fewer than twenty slaves, and a large portion lived in holdings of fewer than ten slaves. These slaveholdings were relatively small compared with those in the Lower South and the West Indies and placed clear limits on the size of slave communities. Many slaves on small farms would have experienced a greater sense of cultural separation and isolation from other Africans. Plantation size also had important consequences for slave family life. Small slaveholdings usually had more male than female slaves and offered few options for slaves who hoped to start families. At the start of the seventeenth century more slaves died than were born in Virginia, and health conditions were dismal. The situation improved gradually, and births exceeded deaths by the 1720s. At the middle of the eighteenth century the vast majority of Virginia slaves had been born in America. If the health of slaves improved, slavery continued to devastate slave families in various ways, and most Virginia slave families had only one resident parent throughout the eighteenth century. Slave families and communities emerged and survived, but they did so by overcoming tremendous adversity.

The experience of slavery varied considerably from place to place, from owner to owner, and from slave to slave. Tobacco plantations dominated slavery and economic life in Virginia, but not all slaves labored in tobacco field gangs. Virginia's wealthiest planters grew tobacco, and their large-scale plantations resembled those in the Lower South and the West Indies. For slaves on these plantations, life and work revolved around the tobacco crop. Bigger plantations usually offered a larger and more autonomous slave community, but they also tended to require a more brutal work regime. Slaves on small farms often worked at routines less arduous than tobacco cultivation, but they also confronted more supervision from whites and less interaction with other slaves. Small-scale farms and frontier working conditions also became more common as slavery moved westward into the Virginia Piedmont region starting in the 1720s. As the eighteenth century went on, more and more slaves worked in Richmond, Norfolk, and other towns. Urban slavery in early Virginia often involved more autonomy, especially for skilled slaves who received special privileges as an incentive for their work. Because of the small size of towns in eighteenth-century Virginia, however, urban slavery remained a far more unusual experience in Virginia than it did in some parts of early America.

Slavery in Revolutionary and Early National Virginia, 1776–1830

In November 1775 Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, sent a tremor of panic through the Virginia aristocracy by offering to free and arm slaves who were willing to join the British army and fight against Revolutionary forces. Virginia had close to 200,000 slaves in 1775, and Revolutionary leaders dreaded the potential consequences of Dunmore's proclamation. Yet in the summer of 1776 Thomas Jefferson, one of Virginia's most prominent Revolutionary leaders, wrote the Declaration of Independence, with its famous assertion that “all men are created equal.” Virginia's slave owners would not have seen any serious contradiction in their attitudes toward slavery and revolution, but they had difficulty ignoring the depredations of war or the new ideas and rhetoric that gained force during the American Revolution.

Dunmore's proclamation provided little assistance to British troops, but it successfully disrupted the Virginia slaveholders' regime. Most slaves correctly perceived that Dunmore cared little for their freedom. Many of them also recognized that the chaos of war had provided them with a rare opportunity. Almost all of the wealthiest planters in Virginia lost some of their slaves, and thousands of former slaves either freed themselves or left Virginia altogether during the war.

Changing attitudes and ideas did far more to weaken slavery in Virginia than either Lord Dunmore or the British army, however. The American Revolution coincided with new ideas about rights, freedom, and political participation. Virginia's Revolutionary leaders may not have wanted to extend these ideas to their slaves, but external pressures from people less attached to slave labor made Virginians question slavery as never before. New laws enabled slave owners to manumit their slaves, and many elite Virginians exercised this option. George Washington, James Madison, and George Mason, American founding fathers who were also Virginia slaveholders, all arranged for some of their slaves to be freed. By the late eighteenth century Virginia had a substantial and growing population of free people of African descent.

The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings underscores the complicated nature of slavery in late-eighteenth-century Virginia. Jefferson articulated the ideas behind the American Revolution as fully and powerfully as anyone, and in his Notes on the State of Virginia during the 1780s he argued for an end to slavery and asserted that slave ownership made whites depraved. Much of Jefferson's discussion of slavery expressed a racist perspective and condemned racial mixture. At the same time, almost none of Jefferson's voluminous writings makes any reference to Hemings, even though she gave birth to at least one child who was almost certainly Jefferson's. Because of Jefferson's silence, it is impossible to say anything else very specific about his relationship with Sally Hemings, but the situation makes it clear that late-eighteenth-century Virginia planters could be ambivalent about and complicit in slavery on a variety of levels.

Evangelical Protestantism also contributed to antislavery sentiment by the second half of the eighteenth century. Virginia's established Anglican Church supported the interests of the plantation elite and never seriously challenged slavery, but Baptists, Methodists, and other dissenting evangelical groups denounced the institution. These groups not only encouraged bondpeople to worship with them but also sometimes allowed African Americans to preach before congregations. As the evangelicals grew in number, they moved to the mainstream of Virginia society and reconsidered their more radical views about race and slavery. The rise of evangelical groups helped persuade planters to make an effort to convert their slaves to Christianity, however. By the early nineteenth century white preachers encouraged slaves to accept a version of Christianity that encouraged their obedience and pacifism. Instead of completely rejecting this message, slaves adapted Christianity to their own purposes and developed a form of Afro-Christianity that helped them endure their bondage and suffering.

A variety of factors began to make freedom seem possible for Africans and African Americans in Virginia. In addition to the turmoil of war, attempts at gradual manumission, and efforts at religious conversion, challenges to slavery began to spread throughout the Atlantic world. The presence of larger numbers of free blacks in places like Virginia encouraged hopeful slaves. The Haitian Revolution and the related Haitian slave revolts of the 1790s became an inspiration to enslaved people of African descent in Virginia and many other places.

Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith near Richmond, Virginia, put various strains of antislavery rhetoric and ideas to use in 1800. Making reference to political rights, Christianity, and the Haitian Revolution, Gabriel allegedly planned a wide-ranging conspiracy against slavery in and around Virginia's capital city. When a hard rainstorm postponed the revolt, one slave revealed the plot to whites. Gabriel and about a dozen of his followers received death sentences, but the purported threat caused enormous concern to slave owners. In the months and years after this incident, Virginians would discover more real or imagined slave conspiracies.

By the time of the Gabriel conspiracy, as it came to be known, slavery in Virginia had already been weakened. Manumissions and other changes had been made possible by a decline in tobacco profits. After almost a century and a half of tobacco cultivation, Virginians discovered that markets no longer offered the profits they once had. Tobacco planters looked for ways to adapt and maintain their income. Many found diversifying to include other crops, especially wheat, to be a successful alternative. Wheat cultivation did not depend on the plantation system as much as tobacco, but it provided a profitable way to use slave labor. Slaves who had labored in tobacco fields adjusted to the needs of wheat crops. Meanwhile, in Campbell County, David Ross employed more than two hundred slaves in one of early America's largest ironworks and most impressive industrial operations.

Some planters continued to grow tobacco profitably by participating in the movement into Virginia's Piedmont and beyond. Tobacco depleted soil, and uncultivated lands farther west offered greater fertility. Of course, this meant that planters forced large numbers of Virginia slaves to move westward with them, leaving families, communities, and places they might have considered their homes. Ultimately, Virginia slave owners adapted to the decline of tobacco more readily than did tobacco planters in Maryland.

After 1800 it became abundantly clear that slavery would continue to be a key part of life in Virginia. Slave owners responded to the challenges of the late eighteenth century and consolidated their interests. Manumissions ended, religious dissenters yielded to the concerns of slave owners, and anxious slave patrols watched with vigilance for the next Gabriel. Slavery became weaker in Virginia, but it was not in any danger.

A growing slave trade within the United States also gave slavery in Virginia a new lease on life. Planters realized that if slaves became less profitable, they could be sold away for large sums of money instead of manumitted. The end of the slave trade with Africa in 1808 combined with the rapid growth of the Cotton Belt farther south to guarantee Virginians a large and promising market for their slaves. Virginians became the leading sellers in a trade that forcibly sent over a million slaves away from Virginia and into the Deep South. The consequences of this trade are evident—by one estimate, one in three slave families were separated by sale—but the institution of slavery remained secure in Virginia as it entered the middle of the nineteenth century.

The Antebellum Period

At the time of the founding of the United States, Virginia had the largest population in the nation, with around 692,000 people. The second largest state, Pennsylvania, had only 432,000 people. But nearly all of Pennsylvania's population was free, while 287,000 Virginians (about 40 percent of the entire population) were slaves. There was also a growing population of free African Americans. In 1782 the Virginia legislature allowed masters to voluntarily free their slaves and allowed these newly manumitted African Americans to live in the state. The result was a surge in manumissions. There were about 2,000 free blacks in the state in 1782. By 1790 there were over 12,000 free blacks in the state. In 1800 this population had grown to 19,000 and reached 30,000 by 1810. In 1806 the legislature no longer allowed emancipated African Americans to remain in the state unless they received permission from the county court. After that the free African American population grew more slowly, but nevertheless reached 46,000 by 1830 and 55,000 by 1860. Despite the massive exporting of slaves to the rest of the South, Virginia's slave population continued to grow as well. It reached 450,000 by 1830 and about 472,000 in 1860. As such Virginia always had the largest slave (and African American) population in the South.

Slaves in antebellum Virginia worked in a variety of contexts. The overwhelming majority were agricultural workers, growing cotton in the southeastern part of the state and tobacco almost everywhere except the mountains. Small farmers used slaves to grow wheat and corn. In the cities slaves were domestic servants, stevedores, and laborers in all sorts of businesses. Virginia also led the South in the industrial use of slaves. The Tredegar iron works in Richmond owned scores of slaves and rented others. By the time of the Civil War its workforce was mostly black and mostly slave. The president of the company, which after 1861 was called the “ironmaker to the Confederacy,” had white workers train slaves, and then fired many of the white workers. Slaves, he found, were cheaper and unlike whites, could not go on strike. Virginians used slaves to build and maintain railroad tracks and canals. In the state's coal mines black slaves worked side-by-side with whites.

On 22 August 1831 Nat Turner, a slave preacher in Southampton County, led the bloodiest slave rebellion in the history of the antebellum South. Starting with five followers, Turner killed his master before moving on to other farms and plantations; eventually his small “army” had as many as eighty slaves in it. By the time the rebellion was suppressed at least fifty-seven and possibly as many as sixty-five whites were dead, along with scores of slaves, some of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion. Turner eluded capture until the end of October. He was tried on 5 November and hanged on the 11th. The revolt led to hysteria among Virginia's whites, who could not understand how a literate, mildly treated slave, who was allowed to preach to blacks and whites, would suddenly turn on his master and other whites in the area. The Virginia legislature debated a proposal to end slavery. The proponents of abolition lost; it would be the last legislative attempt to end slavery in any southern state until the Civil War. After the debate there was a hardening of attitudes toward slaves, free African Americans, and antislavery sentiment in Virginia.

After the Turner rebellion, Virginia made in-state manumission more difficult and free blacks felt greater pressures. Illustrative of this was the miniscule growth of the free black population. Between 1830 and 1840 the number of free African Americans grew by fewer than 2,000, from 46,729 to 48,671, which was probably less than the birthrate. In the next decade the free black population barely grew at all, reaching only 51,251 by 1850. In 1851 the new state constitution banned all in-state manumission. The state prohibited any African Americans from getting an education, and in 1850 only sixty-four free black children out of more than 20,000 attended school. In 1860 this figure had dropped to forty-one out of more than 22,000 children. In 1853 authorities in Norfolk jailed Margaret Douglass, a white native southerner who opened a school to teach reading to free black children who were members of a Sunday school class. She spent a month in jail before being released. It was also illegal to educate slaves, although some masters did so anyway and some slaves learned to read on their own. Despite these pressures, some free African Americans acquired property and a small amount of wealth. In 1860 there were twenty-nine African Americans in Petersburg who had assets worth more than $1,000, while more than sixty free blacks in that town owned property worth between $500 and $1,000. Across the state about 170 blacks owned at least one hundred acres of land. Most of these free blacks acquired their land through hard work and careful savings. Like their white neighbors, these African American landowners grew tobacco and other cash crops. Black landowners, however, were rare. Most free blacks in the state owned little more than a few personal possessions and struggled to find work to sustain their families.

Virginia's legal system was singularly unsympathetic to free blacks, fugitive slaves, and northern blacks. After 1806 it became increasingly difficult for masters to free their slaves within the state. Before 1840 the state's courts often enforced provisions of wills by masters who wanted to free their slaves, either within the state, or by sending them to Liberia. But in Bailey v. Poindexter (1858) the state's highest court overturned a will that directed the executor of Poindexter's estate to ask his slaves which ones wanted freedom in Liberia and which ones wanted to remain in Virginia as slaves. The court held that the mere direction to ask the slaves violated the law. When the free children of Peyton Polly were kidnapped in Ohio and taken to Virginia the state courts refused to intervene to help them regain their freedom. The courts did not deny they were free, but allowed obscure technicalities to prevent them from being released from their illegal bondage. In Souther v. Commonwealth (1851) the state's highest court upheld a five-year sentence for a master who savagely tortured his slave to death. The court noted that the records of the state “do not contain a case of more atrocious and wicked cruelty,” but upheld the charge of the judge that such cruel treatment was not first-degree murder. This result dramatically contrasted with a similar case in North Carolina, State v. Hoover (1839), in which the highest court of that state upheld a death penalty imposed by the jury.

Throughout its history, Virginia's slaves sought freedom—escaping to cities like Richmond, or if possible to the North. Attempts by Virginians to recover slaves in the North led to a number of well-known incidents and controversies. In 1842 George Latimer escaped from Norfolk to Boston, and his master was unable to bring him back to Virginia when Massachusetts authorities refused to allow the master to use local jail facilities. In 1854 the owner of Anthony Burns was able to bring his slave back to Virginia, but only after hundreds of federal troops occupied Boston and guarded the fugitive slave. From 1839 to 1841 Virginia governors sparred with Governor William H. Seward of New York in a futile attempt to recover three New York sailors who had helped a slave escape to the Empire State. Once of the most famous antebellum fugitives was Henry “Box” Brown, whose white friend shipped him to Philadelphia by train in a wooden box. Brown's friend was later arrested when he tried to repeat this form of rescuing men from slavery, but Brown remained free and went on to Britain. The most dramatic antislavery event in the state's history occurred in October 1859, when the abolitionist John Brown seized a federal armory at Harpers Ferry (now in West Virginia) and attempted to start a slave rebellion. Brown was captured a day later, and eventually tried and hanged. The crisis created by Brown helped set the stage for secession and civil war, although it had little immediate impact on the lives of most slaves and free blacks in the state. Ironically, the first person to die in the raid was a free African American railroad worker who refused to halt when Brown's men demanded that he do so.

The Civil War and Postwar Years

The Civil War disrupted slavery in much of the state and ultimately destroyed the institution. Most of Virginia was under Confederate control for much of the war, but parts were controlled by the United States almost as soon as the war began. Thus some Virginia slaves were able to gain their freedom very early in the war while thousands of others remained in bondage until late in the war, and some until the very end. The war had hardly begun when the status of Virginia's slaves became a political issue for the Lincoln administration. In May 1861 a Virginia master came to General Benjamin F. Butler's camp at Fortress Monroe to ask for the return of three slaves who had escaped into Butler's camp. The Lincoln administration had not yet called for an end to slavery—this was not yet politically possible. At the same time many in the administration, including the president, had a deep hatred of slavery. Butler's response to the Virginian altered the nature of the war and led to substantial numbers of slaves gaining their liberty. Butler, a lawyer before the war, declared that slaves of Virginia masters were “contrabands of war” because they could be used by the Confederates for their war effort. Within months hundreds of slaves in northern Virginia had made their way to U.S. army lines, where they were freed and then employed by the army in various non-combat roles. Thus, years before the administration began to enlist blacks, thousands of former slaves from Virginia were working for the army, helping to defeat their former masters.

Despite the huge slave population in the state, Virginia produced few black troops during the war. This was because most slaves were living in Confederate territory until the war was almost over. In June 1863 the Second U.S. Colored Infantry was organized in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that had been under United States control from the beginning of the war. Oddly these former Virginia slaves were not sent into battle against their former masters, but were shipped to Florida where they served until January 1866. Twenty-seven (including three officers) of these soldiers died in combat while another 146 died of disease. In November 1863 the Tenth U.S. Colored was formed in Virginia and fought entirely in that state, in part under General Butler's command. A month later the First and Second U.S. Colored Cavalry were organized, the First at Camp Hamilton and the Second at Fort Monroe. Both regiments fought in Virginia for the rest of the war and were then sent to Texas where they served during Reconstruction until February 1866. The final Virginia regiment, the Thirty-eighth U.S. Colored Infantry, was formed in January 1864, fought in the Virginia campaign, and had the honor of occupying Richmond on 3 April 1865. The regiment was then sent to Texas, where it served until January 1867. In addition to these units, Virginia produced the highest-ranking black officer in the Army, Major Martin Delany, a free African American who grew up in Charles Town (now in West Virginia).

Reconstruction brought freedom and hopes of a new world for Virginia's African American population. More than eighty blacks served in some capacity in reconstructing the state. African Americans served on the Richmond city council, in the state legislature and in the state constitutional convention. No blacks were elected to Congress from Virginia during Reconstruction, but in 1888 Virginian voters sent John Mercer Langston to serve in Congress. Langston, a native of the state, had lived in Ohio before the war, where he had become an attorney and held local public office. During Reconstruction African Americans in Virginia fared less well than in other parts of the South. Opposition to freedom and political equality for blacks was strong and unrelenting. The Freedmen's Bureau reported scores of incidents in which black churches were burned, schools teaching blacks were burned, and former slaves were beaten and killed. In February 1866 a U.S. Army colonel told the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that it was impossible for an African American to “obtain justice before a Virginia jury.” Such testimony, along with stories of African Americans being beaten and killed, filled the Report of the Joint Committee. Violence kept Virginia's blacks away from the polls and limited their economic opportunity, especially in the countryside. Disfranchisement of almost all blacks in the state did not come until the late 1890s and thus blacks held some political power until then. There were blacks on Richmond's city council, for example, from 1871 until 1896.

Virginia created state-supported schools for African Americans starting in 1870. These were segregated and never equal to the schools that whites attended. In 1865 Virginia Union University opened in Richmond under Baptist sponsorship. In September 1861 the American Missionary Association (AMA) hired a free African American woman, Mary Peake, to teach in a school for escaped slaves at Hampton, Virginia. This may have been the first school for former slaves in the South. Peake died during the war, but in 1868 the AMA reconstituted her school as Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institution. The driving force behind the school was General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, whose parents had been missionaries. Among its early graduates was the Virginia native Booker T. Washington, who would become the greatest black educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His successor at Tuskegee, Robert Russa Moton, also graduated from Hampton. In 1882 the state opened a teacher's college for blacks at Petersburg, the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. Later renamed Virginia State University, this was the first fully state-supported, four-year college for African Americans in the nation. The first president of the college was John Mercer Langston, who had been dean of Howard Law School and later served in Congress. In 1884 Hartshorn Memorial College, probably the first college solely for black women in the country, opened in Richmond. It would merge with Virginia Union in the 1930s. In 1888 Saint Paul Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville (now Saint Paul's College) opened with the support of the Episcopal Church. These institutions provided educational opportunities for African Americans who would serve as doctors, clergymen, nurses, and teachers within the community for the rest of the century.

By the end of the 1800s African Americans in Virginia were segregated and disfranchised. They had little political power and not much more economic power. The African American population had been around 527,000, slave and free, in 1860. By 1870 there were only 512,000 African Americans in the state. This was due to outmigration, the separation of West Virginia from Virginia, and the dislocations of the war. There may also have been an undercount of the population that year, because a decade later the census counted 631,000 African Americans. But for the rest of the century it stagnated, reaching only 660,000 by 1900. More blacks were leaving the state than were being born or moving into the state. Prospects for African Americans in Virginia were not great in 1900 and out-migration, to the north, the west, or even just as far as Washington, D.C., made sense to those African Americans with some education and the means to escape the poverty and segregation that Virginia subjected to its African American citizens.

See also Abolitionism; Africanisms; American Revolution; Baptists and African Americans; Black Codes and Slave Codes, Colonial; Black Family; Black Loyalists; Caribbean; Civil Rights; Civil War; Crime and Punishment; Declaration of Independence; Emancipation; Episcopalians (Anglicans) and African Americans; Free African Americans to 1828; Free African Americans before the Civil War (South); Fugitive Slaves; Gabriel; Gabriel Conspiracy; Gender; Haitian Revolution; Harpers Ferry; Health and Medicine; Hemings, Sally; Indentured Servitude; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Langston, John Mercer; Laws and Legislation; Lynching and Mob Violence; Madison, James, and African Americans; Methodist Church and African Americans; Murray, John (Lord Dunmore); Nat Turner Rebellion; Race, Theories of; Reconstruction; Riots and Rebellions; Skin Color; Slave Trade; Slavery: Lower South; Slavery: Upper South; Violence against African Americans; Voting Rights; Washington, Booker T.; Washington, George, and African Americans; and Work.

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