On this day in 1843 Sallie Anne Corbell was born in Nansemond County, the eldest of nine children and the only one of them to grow up and marry George E. Pickett. It was marriage number two for George, who out West had hooked up with a Haida Indian and even produced a son. But Sallie stole his [...]

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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 [...]

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On this day in 1861, J. E. B. Stuart resigned from the United States Army, and whoever accepted it—Winfield Scott, maybe—most likely clenched his teeth and muttered, “All the best.” No so with Samuel Barron, a Hampton native who was a U.S. Navy midshipman at two years old (that’s not a typo), who reported for [...]

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On this day 150 years ago, the Confederates intentionally destroyed their famed ironclad, the CSS Virginia. Better blown up than captured, they figured. One year to the day after Stonewall Jackson died, J. E. B. Stuart charged his men at the Battle of Yellow Tavern and was mortally wounded. For the record, it was raining [...]

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On this day in 1863, 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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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On this day 150 years ago, Union general George B. McClellan attacked the Confederate rearguard at the Battle of Williamsburg. Having laid siege to Yorktown for weeks, he only took the fort when the Confederates disappeared in the middle of the night. Then, when McClellan finally caught up with them at Williamsburg, neither side gained [...]

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On this day in 1706 William Byrd II married young Lucy Parke, daughter of the notorious Daniel Parke II. (Why notorious? He once brought a mistress home from England, called her Cousin Brown, promptly got her pregnant, and named the child Julius Caesar, only to abandon the whole family for England again. He then had the chutzpah to insist [...]

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On this day in 1747, on the recommendation of Carolus Linnaeus, John Clayton was elected to membership in the Swedish Royal Academy of Science. The clerk of Gloucester County, Clayton was also a tobacco farmer and a botanist who collected plant specimens from around Virginia and sent them to friends like Linnaeus, who named a species [...]

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On this day in 1929, Rye Cove Cyclone struck the Rye Cove School in the Appalachian highlands of Scott County, killing twelve students and one teacher and injuring fifty-four. As a result, the school’s 1929–1930 term was canceled. Later that year, the singing trio the Carter Family recorded “The Cyclone of Rye Cove” for RCA Victor. [...]

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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 1937, John Garland Pollard died. He was a former governor and one of the founders of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the first state art museum in the country. Handpicked by Harry F. Byrd Sr. to be his gubernatorial successor, Pollard had the misfortune of taking office on the eve of the Great Depression. [...]

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On this day one hundred and fifty-one years ago, the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 33rd Virginia infantry regiments, along with an artillery battery, all combined into Virginia’s First Brigade and were placed under the command of Brigadier General Thomas J. Jackson. The brigade would come to be known as the Stonewall Brigade, one of the most [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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On this day in 1947, Willa Cather died of a cerebral hemorrhage. She is buried in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. Just seven years earlier, her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, had been published and the research for it took her back to her birthplace in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The complicated story of [...]

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On this day in 1897, John Singleton Mosby lost his left eye and fractured his skull in a carriage accident in Charlottesville. Not to be gruesome, but the injury is noticeable in the above picture of Mosby and his former lieutenant, John S. Russell. In 1853, Thomas Nelson Page (author of Marse Chan: A Tale of Old [...]

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This comes from our friends at the Library of Virginia, who note that on this day in 1943: Second Lieutenant R. C. Irons of the Motor Transport Office demonstrated a quarter-ton 4×4 truck, driving it through the bay at Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation. When photographed, the truck had a record of staying under water [...]

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On this day in 1956, the eminent critic Edmund Wilson published a favorable consideration of James Branch Cabell‘s work in a New Yorker article titled “The James Branch Cabell Case Reopened.” Cabell, you’ll recall, was the Richmond-born troublemaker (what a face!) whose novel Jurgen (1919) provoked an obscenity trial in New York. Sadly, Wilson’s call for a serious reappraisal did not [...]

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On this day in 1670, Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley and the governor’s Council issued “The order about Jayle birds,” prohibiting the importation of certain English convicts as servants. Their concern in part stemmed from the Gloucester County Conspiracy of 1663, in which a group of servants that included convicts allegedly plotted an insurrection. Two hundred and twenty years later, the [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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On this day in 1946, Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, published an essay in the Saturday Review of Literature titled “Is the South That Bad?” It is—as you might imagine it to be—a rather defensive reaction to criticism of the South stemming from political and social fights over segregation and civil rights. “And before the whole [...]

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