Virginians and Their Histories

Brent Tarter

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813943930
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Histories of Virginia have traditionally traced the same significant but narrow lines, overlooking whole swathes of human experience crucial to an understanding of the commonwealth. With Virginians and Their Histories, Brent Tarter presents a fresh, new interpretive narrative that incorporates the experiences of all residents of Virginia from the earliest times to the first decades of the twenty-first century, affording readers the most comprehensive and wide-ranging account of Virginia's story.

Tarter draws on primary resources for every decade of the Old Dominion's English-language history, as well as a wealth of recent scholarship that illuminates in new ways how demographic changes, economic growth, social and cultural changes, and religious sensibilities and gender relationships have affected the manner in which Virginians have lived. Virginians and Their Histories interweaves the experiences of Virginians of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and classes, representing a variety of eras and regions, to understand what they separately and jointly created, and how they responded to economic, political, and social changes on a national and even global level. That large context is essential for properly understanding the influences of Virginians on, and the responses of Virginians to, the constantly changing world in which they have lived.

This groundbreaking work of scholarship—generously illustrated and engagingly written—will become the definitive account for general readers and all students of Virginia's diverse and vibrant history.

1

THE VIEW FROM CUMBERLAND GAP

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER made an influential address to members of the American Historical Association in 1892. He invited them to imagine themselves standing at Cumberland Gap at the western tip of Virginia and watching American history march by. Turner said that they would first see deer and other wild animals wandering trails, then Indians pursuing their hunts through the woods, and after them the first European explorers and prospectors, then land speculators and settlers, and finally farmers and planters and entrepreneurs. Turner explained that as those people moved west through the eastern woodlands and across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast they created successive waves of frontier experiences that shaped the essence of American democratic culture.

The history of what became the United States and of what is now Virginia is not that simple, and it did not begin at Cumberland Gap or even at Jamestown in 1607 or at Plymouth Rock in 1620, where many of Turner’s contemporary historians looked for the origins and meaning of American history. The narrative of rising democratic institutions and practices against a background of regional differences that shaped Turner’s historical writing relegated American Indians to peripheral roles as victims of or obstacles to the triumphal progress of democratic civilization. It neglected women except as occasional agents of moral reform. It also marginalized the experiences and contributions to the nation’s culture and economy of Africans and their descendants, some of whom first entered what became the United States even before the first immigrants landed at Plymouth Rock.

That master narrative was popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provided readers of American history and of Virginia’s history a story of progress and achievement that was largely white and male. It was also largely political and military. It underestimated the importance of events in the historical experience that did not easily fit into themes of progress and democratic development. Progress and change—which were not always the same—came with pains and with losses, and at times the democratic narrative retreated rather than advanced.

Turner asked his audience to stand at Cumberland Gap and look west as American civilization and institutions moved from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. If members of his audience had imagined themselves looking east from Cumberland Gap the view would have been different. They would have seen a relentless movement of people from another world who overspread the land where people had resided for countless generations. Newly arrived people pushed aside or killed people who were already there and largely replaced their culture and institutions with a radically different way of life for a radically different civilization. Seeing the events of the early years of the seventeenth century, what some scholars call the contact period, from the west allows you to see things differently than if viewing them from Jamestown or London. It is the same with all aspects of Virginia’s history. Viewing them from different perspectives and in the light of insights not available to earlier writers requires us to interpret most parts of Virginia’s colonial and commonwealth history differently from the way we used to understand them.

Writing the History of Virginians

The 1970s began what might be described as the golden age of historical scholarship on Virginia. Scores of original books and hundreds of articles in scholarly journals have explored aspects of the colony’s and state’s history that earlier writers had misunderstood, ignored, or dismissed as unimportant. Archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, demographers, ethnographers, archivists, librarians, teachers, and smart people without formal academic credentials in any of those disciplines but with unsatisfied curiosities have enriched our understandings of many aspects of the history of Virginia and its peoples. Drawing on that scholarship permits us to reevaluate many events in Virginia history in the light of those new understandings and also to fill in some old and yawning gaps. That literature also requires us to reconsider what we thought we once knew about race relations, religious culture, economic changes, gender relations, and the lives of women and children that differed from the lives of the political and military leaders pre-1970s historical literature tended to emphasize. We can now understand more about Virginia’s history and all of its peoples and construct a new narrative of how those people lived in the place now called Virginia.

Regional variety and cultural diversity are important themes in Virginia’s history, as are interactions and conflicts—sometimes violent, sometimes not—between people of differing cultures. One of the most important of the many themes that appear and reappear through the centuries of Virginia’s history is the relations between different races. From the early years of the seventeenth century Indians and descendants of Africans and Europeans have lived together and apart and interacted with one another in ways that fundamentally shaped how they all lived. Later immigrations from Scotland and Ireland, from Germany, from elsewhere in Europe, and still later from elsewhere in the United States, the Americas, and Asia changed the lives of the people who already lived in Virginia. Living in Virginia changed the lives of immigrants, too, although not always in the same way. It is necessary when contemplating any one of those encounters or populations to regard each in the contexts of what they shared and also of what they did not share with the others. Hence the title of this book, Virginians and Their Histories.

Virginia’s history is all of their stories. To write about Virginians as a homogenous group, as some historians formerly did, excludes large portions of the population from consideration. Different groups of Virginians experienced their shared history in different ways. To state that Virginians believed something or experienced an event in a certain way is almost certainly to generalize inaccurately from one group to the whole. It is extremely difficult and almost always misleading to refer to Virginians as an undifferentiated population without regard to race, gender, or differences in wealth, social status, and geographic location.

English and later British imperial policies and commercial concerns shaped the context in which all the people in the colony of Virginia lived and regulated their political and economic lives. Some of those policies promoted and some inhibited the pace of European settlement. In many subtle ways the various peoples who lived in the colony produced a distinctive Virginia variant on English culture and government that in turn profoundly influenced how Indian, European, and African residents of Virginia and their descendants lived. Those dynamics changed when Virginia joined with the other colonies at the time of the American Revolution and after that with ratification of Constitution of the United States. The momentous events of the American Civil War upended virtually everything about how all Virginians lived. During the civil rights and women’s movements of the twentieth century actions of Congress and federal courts forced important changes in Virginians’ ways of life. National political events and national and international economic changes also influenced how Virginians lived. Few or none of the changes were within the power of any or all the people in Virginia to control or prevent.

The First People

Frederick Jackson Turner asked members of his audience to imagine themselves at a specific place, at Cumberland Gap, and also imagine themselves at a specific time. Cumberland Gap became important in the 1770s when explorers and families from mid-Atlantic colonies first began crossing the mountains at that place to enter Kentucky. By then, though, many generations of people to the east had created complex cultural relationships on the landscape between the mountains and the sea. If we image ourselves at Cumberland Gap and looking east across the landscape of Virginia and much further back in time we can begin to understand Virginia’s long history afresh and look at all of it anew.

An imaginary observer standing at Cumberland Gap twenty thousand years ago and able to see around the curvature of the Earth could have watched the beginnings of an important human drama. Forested mountains and valleys stretched away from Cumberland Gap in every direction. To the south were the Great Smoky Mountains. To the west and northwest was the land later called Kentucky. Its mountains and deep valleys relaxed into rolling hills near the Ohio River, a broad avenue of transportation Indians used long before white explorers from England and France first viewed it in the seventeenth century. That land was western Virginia until 1792. To the north of Cumberland Gap was the land that in 1863 split off from Virginia and became West Virginia. It was also a large expanse of rugged mountains and valleys that stretched far north toward the headwaters of the Ohio River.

To the east and northeast of Cumberland Gap the imaginary viewer would see the landscape of what became the state of Virginia. It reached more than 400 miles east across high mountains and narrow valleys, across lower and gentler hills, across broad rivers and narrow streams, through forests and swamps, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Mountains stretched away northeast from Cumberland Gap in parallel rows with narrow valleys between them. Between the easternmost mountain ranges, the Allegheny and the Blue Ridge, was a broader valley later known as the Great Valley or the Valley of Virginia, a region so distinctive that Virginians gave its name capital letters. In the north of it the Shenandoah River and the South Branch of the Potomac River flowed northeastward. In the southwestern portion the upper tributaries of the Clinch and Holston Rivers flowed south and southwest into the Tennessee River Valley. The New River cut across the southwest-to-northeast ranges of mountains and valleys as it flowed north out of North Carolina and turned west and crossed the Valley of Virginia to become the Great Kanawha River along its way to the Ohio.

Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia (4th state, London 1755), clearly shows the mountains and valleys northeast of Cumberland Gap, which is west of the edge of the map.

The imaginary observer might see some of the first human figures moving through the valleys of the mountains or might see distant smoke from the campfires of nomadic hunters and gatherers who stopped to sleep, hunt, or fish on the banks of eastern rivers or Chesapeake Bay. When and where those first people entered what is now Virginia is not known. Archaeological investigations at the Cactus Hill site in Sussex County in southeastern Virginia revealed that people were in Virginia between 20,000 and 15,000 BC.

Early human residents had many sources of animal and plant food available to them. Hunting, fishing, and foraging people moved and settled in families and dwelled at temporary campsites near streams at many locations within the present boundaries of Virginia. In the east they feasted on the rich supply of fish and shellfish from the waters near the bay. Moose, elk, deer, and bear were then common in much of the region. Fossil remains of mastodon and mammoth have been found in the valley of the North Fork of the Holston River near the modern town of Saltville in southwestern Virginia, and remains of a mastodon have been found near Yorktown in southeastern Virginia. By about 9500 BC people had established base camps in several places. Archaeologists have identified early camp or settlement sites at Flint Run, or Thunderbird, in Warren County in the northern part of Virginia, and at what is known as the Williamson Site in Dinwiddie County in the east-central part of Virginia. Indians quarried jasper (a quartz) at Flint Run and chert in Dinwiddie for making tools and weapons. By 5,000 BC they were making axes using quartzite and basalt.

Artifacts from Werowocomoco

Late in the first millennium AD the people adopted the bow and arrow to replace the atlatl, or spear thrower, as their primary hunting weapon. When hunting deer and other large animals they surrounded an area and advanced toward the center to concentrate the animals. They sometimes set fire to the woods to force the game toward a place where the animals could more easily be killed. Early residents of what became Virginia also created elaborate pottery and ornaments of bone and shell that had artistic as well as utilitarian value. Surviving pieces of pottery and other goods indicate that considerable cultural variety existed in different places and at different times. People also engaged in long-distance trading along forest paths and rivers and developed trade routes that extended up and down the Atlantic coast and far inland to the northwest and southwest. Tribes in the Appalachian Mountains supplied sheet mica to the Hopewell Burial Mound people of the Ohio River Valley, and Indians in eastern Virginia acquired copper from people in the Great Lakes region.

It is not certain when people in the various regions of what became Virginia first adopted agriculture. About 2,500 BC they obtained squash and gourds from tribes to the southwest, and they later acquired corn and by about AD 1000 beans, as well. In order to raise crops in the forest Indians cut deep rings around tree trunks to sever the sapwood that carried water from the roots to the branches. The trees died, which allowed sunlight to reach the forest floor where the Indians planted their seeds and tended their crops. They also burned the underbrush to clear the land. Ash from the fires fertilized the soil. Land in such clearings could be cultivated for several years, after which people killed trees elsewhere and moved their fields. New forests then reclaimed abandoned fields. It was an efficient method of farming that modified the natural environment in ways different from how European methods of agriculture later altered the landscape.

People lived differently depending on where they lived and when they lived there. The geological regions within Virginia have always influenced how people have lived in its different parts. In the westernmost portion of what became Virginia is the high Appalachian Plateau, part of the Appalachian Mountain chain that extends southwest from the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec to Alabama. Much of southern and eastern West Virginia as well as eastern Kentucky are part of the plateau. Within the present boundaries of Virginia the plateau includes Buchanan and Dickenson Counties, most of Wise County, the western portions of Russell, Scott, and Tazewell Counties, and the northwestern portion of Lee County.

The Allegheny Mountains along most of the current Virginia–West Virginia border are part of the Appalachian system. The Allegheny Mountains are a high and rugged mountain region with narrow and steep stream-eroded valleys that surmount horizontal or gently tilted sandstone and shale formations and coal beds. The coal underneath the mountains became the state’s most important mineral resource late in the nineteenth century. During the early centuries of human habitation the mountains were probably the least densely populated region. The steep mountains and narrow valleys covered with mixed hardwood and conifer forests may have enticed hunter-gatherer people, but relatively few places appeared suitable for agriculture or long-term settlement. Cumberland Gap offered a relatively easy east–west crossing place.

In the valleys east of the Appalachian Mountains solution-weathering of limestone and dolomite formations in the area is responsible for the region’s fertile soil and karst landscape of sinkholes, springs, and caves. Human habitation can be traced back to very early dates. The valleys provided natural routes for trade, migration, and invasion throughout human history, even though Indians may have used the region more as a pathway and as a shared seasonal hunting ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The View from Cumberland Gap
• 2 The English Invasion of Tsenacomoco
• 3 Royal Colony
• 4 Life in the Seventeenth Century
• 5 Tobacco and Slavery
• 6 Life in the Eighteenth Century
• 7 Mid-Century Challenges
• 8 Independence and Revolution
• 9 Virginians and the New Nation
• 10 Life in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
• 11 Slave State
• 12 Divided State in a Divided Nation
• 13 Civil War and Emancipation
• 14 Constructing a New Virginia
• 15 Three Lost Causes
• 16 Jim Crow Virginia
• 17 Progressive Virginians
• 18 Two World Wars and the Great Depression
• 19 Civil Rights
• 20 Suburban State
• 21 Cosmopolitan State
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Illustration Credits
• Index