On this day 150 years ago, following Lincoln’s call for black soldiers in the Emancipation Proclamation, the War Department organized the Bureau for Colored Troops. Major Charles W. Foster was charged with issuing guidelines for black regiments, staffing the units with officers, and overseeing recruiting and enrollment. There were already a few black regiments, and [...]

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On this day in 1775, Robert Bolling published a long elegy in the Virginia Gazette mourning the deaths of Virginia militamen at the hands of Indians during Dunmore’s War (1773–1774). Bolling was a burgess and something of a hipster wine guy who was once jailed for challenging one of the more flighty of the William Byrds to a duel. [...]

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On this day in 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Except that it failed to explain how quickly and in what manner desegregation was to take place. This was no small omission. Imagine the white American South as a [...]

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On this day 150 years ago, Union general Benjamin Franklin Butler, the military governor of New Orleans, issued his notorious General Orders No. 28, or what became known as the “woman order.” It declared that any woman who treated a Union soldier disrespectfully—spitting was the preferred method that spring—would be treated by the law as if she were [...]

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On this day in 1804—it was a Monday, and it rained—the Lewis and Clark Expedition left its winter encampment at Camp Dubois near present-day Wood River, Illinois. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark recorded the event as the official beginning of the expedition, but it was Sergeant Patrick Gass who provided the fullest account of the [...]

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On this day in 1607, English colonists, newly arrived to America, situated their camp on a marshy jut of land fifty miles up the James River. They called it Jamestown. One imagines the local Indians rolling their eyes. After all, this particular patch of ground was located in an ecological zone where the exchange between fresh [...]

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On this day 150 years ago, Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson died after being wounded by friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville. After losing his left arm, he was moved to an office building at the Chandler house near Guinea Station (above). At first it seemed the general might recover, but then he died of pneumonia, [...]

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On this day in 1936, Mary Johnston died of Bright’s disease. She is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. A writer of best-selling historical novels, Johnston broke existing publishing records by selling 60,000 advance copies of To Have and to Hold (1900), her second novel, in addition to another 135,000 during its first week of publication. This proved to be the [...]

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On this day in 1781, four of six Prince William County oyer and terminer judges convicted the enslaved African American Billy of treason and sentenced him to hang. They placed his value at £27,000 current money. The two dissenting judges immediately appealed to Governor Thomas Jefferson for a reprieve. Billy had been captured aboard a British ship during the American Revolution, but denied [...]

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On this day 150 years ago, the drama at Chancellorsville continued. To bring you up to date, Union general Joseph Hooker snuck across the Rappahannock on May 1, thinking he was going to sneak around Robert E. Lee‘s right flank. Instead, he ran smack into the Army of Northern Virginia, and he did it in [...]

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On this day 150 years ago, the Union and Confederate armies continued their fight at Chancellorsville. Last we saw Lee and Jackson, they were sitting on tree stumps hatching a plan: on the morning of May 2, Jackson would march his entire corps twelve miles under the cover of the Wilderness, past an old iron [...]

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On this day 150 years ago, the Battle of Chancellorsville began. Union general Joseph Hooker, the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, had crossed to the southern side of the Rappahannock River in an attempt to sneak around Robert E. Lee‘s flank. But his cavalry was off trying to create a diversion, which [...]

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Also on this day in 1789, George Washington delivered his first Inaugural Address. A handwritten copy of page 1 can be seen above, courtesy of the National Archives. George Washington took the Presidential oath on a second floor balcony of Federal Hall. Below, an enthusiastic crowd assembled in the streets. The President and members of [...]

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On this day in 1861, the Virginia Convention, having seceded from the Union, now saw fit to establish a flag that was just perfect for a state on the go. Something in blue, I think. Be it ordained by the convention of the commonwealth of Virginia That the Flag of this commonwealth shall hereafter be made of bunting, [...]

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On this day in 1861, the First Rockbridge Artillery organized in Lexington, with VMI professor John A. McCausland as its first captain. One suspects that even as a young man, McCausland was an old cuss. He had that bald-headed, bug-eyed look about him. He retreated grudgingly, if at all, as his 1927 (!) obituary in the Washington Post suggested: “The veteran of the gray legions whose pride [...]

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On this day in 1688, the General Court found Sam, the slave of Richard Metcalfe of Westmoreland County, guilty in James City County of promoting a slave rebellion. His conviction came just six months or so after a suspected plot was discovered in Westmoreland County. His sentence required him to be “severely whipt” multiple times, after which he was to be fitted with a strong Iron collar affixed [...]

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On this day in 1609, the English minister William Symonds published Virginia: a sermon preached at Whitechapel in the presence of … Adventurers and Planters for Virginia. In it, he compares God’s call to Abraham in Genesis 12 to England’s call to settle Virginia. As in, The Lord called Abraham to goe into another Countrey. Symonds’s preaching came in the context [...]

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On this day in 1927, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in Buck v. Bell. If you’re not familiar, here are the basic facts: Emma Buck of Charlottesville was considered by authorities to be a “low grade moron.” When she gave birth out of wedlock to Carrie Buck, she was committed. Later, Carrie was raped [...]

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  On this day in 1653, Oliver Cromwell forcibly dissolved Parliament. The legal body’s replacement, a nominated assembly of religious men known as the Barebones Parliament, voted for its own dissolution in December. The above documentary goes a long way in explaining why Cromwell was so important (although I still prefer Richard Harris with my Cromwell!)—while our entries on the English Civil [...]

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On this day in 1644, Opechancanough and a force of Powhatan Indians launched a second great assault against the English colonists, initiating the Third Anglo-Powhatan War. As many as 400 colonists were killed, but rather than press the attack, the Indians retired. Why? The historian Karen Kupperman writes that “American war”—which is to say, war waged by the Indians—”was premised on the assumption that [...]

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On this day in 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the first Conscription Act, making all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five eligible to be drafted into military service. This was the first such draft in United States history. IMAGE: A poster urges young men to avoid conscription by volunteering for the Confederate army; Charleston, Tennessee, 1862 (Library of Congress)

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On this day in 1861, and after all the nastiness of Fort Sumter, Abe Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 troops. What’s worth remembering is that Virginia had not yet seceded; in fact, the Virginia Convention then in session in Richmond had voted more than once AGAINST secession. But the president of the United States asking the commonwealth to [...]

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Other stuff happened on this date, I realize—Luther Porter Jackson died, for instance, Jerry Falwell got married, and so did Annie Dillard (again)—and I also realize that we’re still two years away from the surrender’s 150th anniversary … but still. How amazing is it that on this day in 1865, at five in the morning and almost four years to [...]

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On this day, sometime between 1853 and 1857, Lewis Miller composed an ode to the Virginia spring in his notebook: the Beautiful Sugar Maple’s Tres are Growing here, and we find honey and good water, Now beams to heaven the violet’s dewy eye; the bird’s cheerey melody, Sweet April comes, where the dove in the vocal grove, [...]

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So much of it begins, really, on this day in 1606, when King James I granted the Virginia Company of London a royal charter. “Go west, young men,” he proclaimed, more or less, “and bring me back the loot!” It was a total disaster—at least in the short term. By this day in 1861, Virginia’s economy had certainly turned around, but other [...]

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