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, [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1865, three days after the disaster at Sailor’s Creek, and one week to the day after the fall of Richmond, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. Well, what he did was negotiate the terms of surrender. The actual surrender didn’t happen until three days later, by which time Lee was in Richmond and Grant in Washington. [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1861, Walter Ashby Plecker was born in Augusta County. Happy birthday, Herr Plecker! A year later, militiamen from Rockingham County made themselves a burr in the side of the already irritable Stonewall Jackson, refusing to be incorporated into the regular Confederate army. A year after that, a group of women began looting shops in downtown Richmond to protest a lack of [...]

Click to continue →

You might remember how the rather querulous Winfield Scott was made brevet lieutenant general, an honorary promotion dating back to one of his great Mexican War victories. (He accepted the honor by immediately demanding back pay.) Well, today was that great victory. On this day in 1847, Mexico surrendered the city of Vera Cruz. Nicely played all [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1913, by order of Governor William Hodges Mann, Floyd Allen and his youngest son Claude were executed despite a number of public pleas to commute their sentences. The two were convicted of murder after a judge, a sheriff, a commonwealth’s attorney, a juror, and a court spectator were all killed in Carroll County [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1862, Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson delivered a famous order to his topographical engineer, Jedediah Hotchkiss: I want you to make me a map of the Valley, from Harpers Ferry to Lexington, showing all the points of offense and defence in those places. As famous orders go, it’s not exactly “Don’t fire until [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1610, on one of the islands that came to be known as Bermuda, an English infant was baptized and named Bermuda. His parents, Edward Eason an his wife, had survived the wreck of the Sea Venture, as had his godfathers—William Strachey, Captain Christopher Newport, and James Swift. The fate of the [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1916, Ota Benga committed suicide in Lynchburg. The four-foot-nine-inch Benga was a Congolese-born Pygmy whose family was killed in a raid in 1902 or 1903. He was captured, sold into slavery, and finally, in 1904, brought to the United States by a missionary who displayed him first at the Saint Louis [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1847, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts agreed to purchase Paul Jennings from Dolley Madison in order, eventually, to free him. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor explains: On Friday, 19 March 1847, Daniel Webster wrote on a flyleaf, “I have paid $120 for the freedom of Paul Jennings—he agrees to work out the same at $8 per [...]

Click to continue →

  On this day fifty years ago, U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy spoke at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, on the occasion of the Emancipation Proclamation’s centennial. As you might expect, the civil rights movement came up. Twelve years earlier, students at Robert Russa Moton school in Prince Edward County had struck for better [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1941, Sherwood Anderson died after swallowing a toothpick. True story. (Among unfortunate causes of death to be found in the encyclopedia, it ranks up there with George Tucker dying, on the eve of the Civil War, after being struck by a falling cotton bale.) Exactly 286 years earlier, a man named Anthony Johnson won a court [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1855, Winfield Scott was promoted to brevet lieutenant general, a rank not held by anyone since George Washington. The term “brevet” designated an honorary rank, usually given to mark some success. In Scott’s case, that was his victory in the Mexican War. To make the point, Congress made the promotion retroactive to 1847, and [...]

Click to continue →

Fifty years ago today the great country singer and Winchester native Patsy Cline died in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee, at the age of twenty-nine thirty. She was flying home to Nashville after a benefit concert in Kansas City in a plane piloted by her manager. Also on board were the country music luminaries [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1820, John Wood, a mathematics professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, put together a list of about 250 words in the Nottoway language. He learned them while visiting the tribe’s Southampton County reservation (pop. 27) earlier in the year and talking with sixty-year-old Edie Turner, a native speaker. [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1842, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Upholding the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the justices determined that slaveowners had a constitutional right to attempt to reclaim their own escaped slaves, even when those slaves crossed state lines into free territory. This helped pave the [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1862, on day nine of the First Confederate Congress’s session, lawmakers authorized Jefferson Davis to suspend the writ of habeas corpus “in such cities, town and military districts as shall, in his judgment, be in such danger of attack by the enemy as to require the declaration of martial law for [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1601, Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex‘s “head was taken off by the executioner’s axe when his frustrated ambitions had boiled over into a sorry attempt at rebellion on the streets of London. Feeling that he had never received the full recognition he deserved from the queen, at thirty-five the brightest [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1838, two University of Virginia students, Franklin English and Madison McAfee, were attempting to disperse a group of free blacks when they were approached by Fielding, a slave owned by the English-born mathematics professor Charles Bonnycastle. What happened next was the subject of some dispute. On March 2, all the relevant [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1790, Thomas Jefferson‘s eldest daughter, Martha Jefferson, married Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. Our entry notes that “the Randolphs were a difficult and troubled family.” How so? Well, apparently one of Tom’s sisters, Judith Randolph, was married to Richard Randolph (they must have been cousins). Richard allegedly impregnated another Randolph sister, Nancy, [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1732, George Washington was born at Popes Creek farm in Westmoreland County, the son of Augustine Washington and his second wife, Mary Ball Washington. It’s a little confusing, because by Washington’s calendar, he was actually born on February 11, 1731. That’s because at the time England (and therefore Virginia) used the Julian, or Old [...]

Click to continue →

The other day we poked a little at Mississippi for just getting around to making official their ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery. So it behooves us to take note that on this day in 1952, Virginia finally got around to ratifying the Nineteenth Amendment, allowing women to vote. Just as slavery had [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1851, the fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins, a native of Norfolk, quietly crossed into Canada and became a free man. As you might imagine, it had been a long road. First, he had escaped to Boston, where he got a job waiting tables at an upscale coffee house. But passage of the Fugitive Slave [...]

Click to continue →

On this day in 1955, the Saturday Evening Post published an article titled “Southerners Will Like Integration,” [pdf] by Sarah Patton Boyle, the wife of a faculty member at the University of Virginia. Boyle recounts how, five years before, when U.Va. accepted its first black student, Gregory Swanson, everyone expected trouble, but that trouble never came. In fact, she [...]

Click to continue →

Happy Presidents Day! The holiday—officially called Washington’s Birthday and established by Congress in 1971 as the third Monday in February—is meant to honor United States presidents. Eight of the forty-four, or 18 percent, were born in Virginia: George Washington Thomas Jefferson James Madison James Monroe William Henry Harrison John Tyler Zachary Taylor Woodrow Wilson There [...]

Click to continue →