United States Virgin Islands

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Virgin Islands sit about 40 miles east of Puerto Rico, a Caribbean territory that is simultaneously American soil and a place unlike anywhere else in the United States. The territory is the only U.S. jurisdiction that drives on the left side of the road. Its capital, Charlotte Amalie, carries a Danish queen's name on streets called by Danish royal titles. Its people are U.S. citizens who cannot vote for president.

  These three main islands, Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix, passed through Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Danish hands before the United States bought them for $25 million in gold coin in 1917. Before they were American, they were enslaved-labor sugar colonies. Before that, they were home to Arawakan-speaking peoples going back perhaps as far as 1000 BC.

  What does it mean to be a territory and not a state? What shaped the islands' layered culture, their precarious economy, and their recurring encounters with catastrophic storms? And why did Denmark almost sell them in 1902, only to have the deal collapse because opponents carried a 97-year-old man into the chamber to cast the deciding vote?

• 2. Centuries Before the Purchase

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  Christopher Columbus arrived at the islands in 1493 on his second voyage and named them Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Virgenes, after the legend of Saint Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. Spanish settlers followed in 1555, and English and French colonists reached Saint Croix by 1625. For the next century, Spain, France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands each claimed pieces of the archipelago, producing a complicated history of shifting control.

  Denmark-Norway planted its flag when the Danish West India Company settled Saint Thomas in 1672 and Saint John in 1694. The company bought Saint Croix from France in 1733, and the islands became formal royal Danish colonies in 1754 under the name De dansk-vestindiske oer. Sugar, grown by enslaved Africans, powered the economy through the 18th century and into the 19th. Cotton and indigo were also cultivated, and a sizable Jewish community settled on the islands during those same centuries.

  Resistance was persistent and sometimes dramatic. In 1733, enslaved Akan-Akwamu people from the Gold Coast, what is now Ghana, seized Saint John and held it for six months, one of the earliest significant slave rebellions in the New World. The Danish eventually suppressed the uprising with French military help from Martinique. Rather than be recaptured, more than a dozen of the rebellion's leaders killed themselves. By 1775, enslaved people outnumbered Danish settlers by a ratio of 8 to 1.

  Slavery on the islands ended not through metropolitan decree but through the act of Governor Peter von Scholten, who abolished it on the 3rd of July 1848 following another uprising on Saint Croix. That date is now observed as Emancipation Day. The years after emancipation brought strict labor laws that produced the 1878 Saint Croix labor riot, and the sugar economy's slow collapse drove Danish colonists to abandon their estates, draining both population and revenue.

• 3. The Long Road to the Sale

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  As sugar revenues dried up after emancipation, Denmark found the islands increasingly expensive to maintain, requiring significant transfers from the Danish state budget to keep the island authorities functioning. The United States began to look at the islands as a strategic asset, and in 1867 the two countries agreed on a treaty to sell Saint Thomas and Saint John, but the deal was never carried out. A further treaty was negotiated in 1902, only to fail in the upper chamber of the Danish parliament on a tie vote. The opposition had secured that tie by physically transporting a 97-year-old life member into the chamber.

  World War I changed the calculation. As submarine warfare intensified, the United States grew alarmed that Germany might seize the islands and use them as a submarine base. Washington again approached Copenhagen. After a few months of negotiation, both sides agreed on a price of $25 million in U.S. gold coin. Denmark also received a U.S. acknowledgment of Danish political and economic interest in Greenland as part of the arrangement.

  The Treaty of the Danish West Indies was signed on the 4th of August 1916. Danish voters approved the sale in a referendum held in December 1916. The deal became official on the 17th of January 1917, when the two nations exchanged treaty ratifications. The United States took formal possession on the 31st of March 1917, a date now commemorated every year as Transfer Day. Rear Admiral James H. Oliver became the first American governor. The $25 million purchase price was equivalent to roughly $614 million in 2024 dollars.

• 4. Becoming American, Piece by Piece

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  Possession did not bring immediate full citizenship. U.S. citizenship was extended to many island residents in 1927 and again in 1932. The Danish West Indian daler, the local currency, was replaced by the U.S. dollar in 1934. From 1935 to 1939 the islands were folded into the U.S. customs area, and new organic acts in 1936 and 1954 established the structure of local government.

  Tourism emerged as a major force after World War II. The Virgin Islands National Park opened on Saint John in 1956. By 1959, after the United States imposed its embargo on travel to Cuba, the islands became a popular destination for American tourists who could no longer visit Havana. Virgin Islanders elected their first territorial governor, Melvin H. Evans, in 1970, ending a long era of presidential appointment. Work on a territorial constitution began in 1976 after President Gerald Ford signed authorizing legislation on the 21st of October of that year.

  Small adjustments to the territory's boundaries came much later. Water Island, a small island south of Saint Thomas, was administered directly by the federal government and did not formally join the territory until 1996, when 50 acres were transferred to the territorial government. The remaining 200 acres were acquired from the U.S. Department of the Interior in May 2005 for $10, officially completing the change in jurisdiction.

  The question of a local constitution remained unresolved for decades. A fifth constitutional convention adopted a proposed constitution on the 26th of May 2009, but Governor John de Jongh Jr. rejected it in June 2009, saying it would violate federal law and disregard basic civil rights. After legal battles that ultimately forced the governor to transmit the document to Washington, President Obama forwarded the proposal to Congress in May 2010 alongside Department of Justice concerns. Congress disapproved the draft by resolution, signed into law on the 30th of June 2010. A subsequent effort in October 2012 failed to meet its deadline. In November 2020, nearly 72% of voters approved holding a sixth convention.

• 5. Oil, Tourism, and Economic Fault Lines

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  Hess Oil began building an oil refinery on Saint Croix in 1966, and the facility, later known as Hovensa, grew into one of the largest petroleum refineries in the world. At its peak it refined 494,000 barrels per day and contributed roughly 20% of the territory's GDP. In the fiscal year 2011, the value of exported petroleum products reached $12.7 billion. That enterprise collapsed when Hovensa ceased operations in early 2012. Manufacturing employment dropped by 50% in May of that year. GDP fell by 13%, driven largely by an 80% drop in exports.

  By mid-February 2017, the territory faced a debt load of $2 billion and a structural budget deficit of $110 million. The per capita debt of $19,000 exceeded that of Puerto Rico, which was itself undergoing a severe financial crisis at the same time. The government had been locked out of the bond market since January 2017. In March 2017, new taxes were introduced on rum, beer, tobacco, sugary drinks, internet purchases, and timeshare units.

  Tourism filled part of the gap left by the refinery closure. The sector accounts for roughly 60% of GDP, with 2.5 to 3 million visitors arriving each year. Most come on cruise ships and spend an average of $146.70 per person, contributing $339.8 million collectively in 2012 according to available figures. Euromonitor data indicates more than half of the workforce is employed in some tourism-related capacity.

  Electricity costs on the islands run four to five times higher than on the U.S. mainland because nearly all energy is generated from imported oil. The same authority that manages power also operates desalination facilities to produce fresh water. In 2007, the Virgin Islands ranked as the highest oil consumers per capita in the world.

• 6. Storm and Survival

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  Hurricane Hugo struck in 1989, causing catastrophic damage on Saint Croix in particular. Hurricane Marilyn followed in 1995, killing eight people and causing more than $2 billion in damage across the territory. Four more named storms, Bertha, Georges, Lenny, and Omar, struck in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2008 respectively, though with less severe consequences.

  September 2017 delivered back-to-back catastrophes. Category 5 Hurricane Irma struck first, inflicting catastrophic damage especially on Saint John and Saint Thomas. Two weeks later, Category 5 Hurricane Maria swept through all three islands. At the Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge on Saint Croix, sustained winds reached 99 to 104 miles per hour and gusted to 137. A gust of 86 mph was recorded at Saint Thomas. Rain totals measured at Saint Croix weather stations reached 5 and 10 inches from Maria, with somewhat lower estimates for Saint John and Saint Thomas.

  Maria killed three people on the islands: one person drowned, another was trapped by a mudslide, and a third suffered a fatal heart attack during the storm. The office of congressional delegate Stacey Plaskett reported that 90% of buildings in the territory were damaged or destroyed, with 13,000 losing their roofs. The Luis Hospital suffered roof damage and flooding but remained operational throughout.

  The 34-million-barrel tank farm at the former Hovensa site now operates as a crude oil and petrochemical storage facility. After ArcLight Capital Partners acquired the 1,500-acre complex in 2016, a new venture, Limetree Bay Ventures, began planning to refurbish the refinery with a processing capacity of up to 200,000 barrels per day.

• 7. Identity, Language, and Belonging

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  The 2020 census counted 87,146 people in the territory, a decline of 18,989 from 2010, a drop of 18.1%. The population is majority Afro-Caribbean, with 71.4% identifying as Black or Afro-Caribbean in 2020. Hispanic or Latino residents make up 17.4%, including 8.9% who identify as Puerto Rican and 6.2% as Dominican. About 28.7% of families lived below the poverty line according to the 2020 census.

  English is the dominant language, though the islands' linguistic history is layered. During Danish rule, Danish was the official language but was spoken only by administrators. Dutch was actually more common than Danish for portions of the colonial period on Saint Thomas and Saint John. On Saint Croix, English dominated even under Danish ownership: by 1741, English settlers outnumbered Danes by five to one on that island.

  Negerhollands, a Dutch-based creole, was once spoken on all three main islands. It emerged on plantations in the late 17th or early 18th century and declined through the 19th century as English and Virgin Islands Creole English grew. The last speaker of Negerhollands died in 1987, and the language is now extinct.

  Virginia Islands Creole English, known locally as "dialect", remains in everyday use. The Saint Croix variety, called Crucian, differs from the form spoken on Saint Thomas and Saint John. Puerto Rican migration to Saint Croix during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s brought many Spanish speakers, some displaced further by the U.S. Navy's acquisition of two-thirds of the nearby island of Vieques during World War II. Many Puerto Ricans on Saint Croix have now lived there for more than a generation, producing a Spanglish-like blend of Puerto Rican Spanish and Crucian creole in informal speech.

  Saint Thomas is home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere, with Sephardi Jews settling there in the 18th century as traders. The St. Thomas Synagogue in Charlotte Amalie is the second-oldest synagogue on American soil and the oldest in continuous use. Its records are part of the archive that librarian Enid M. Baa helped preserve, records that contain the family histories of figures including artist Camille Pissarro and U.S. senator Judah P. Benjamin.

• 8. Citizenship Without a Vote

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  People born in the U.S. Virgin Islands are U.S. citizens, but their citizenship comes from congressional statute rather than the Constitution. Residents of the territory cannot vote for president. Both major parties allow Virgin Islands citizens to vote in presidential primaries for convention delegates, but the territory sends no senators to Washington and its House delegate, currently Stacey Plaskett, can vote in committee but not on the floor.

  At the territorial level, fifteen senators serve in the unicameral Virgin Islands legislature, seven each from the Saint Croix district and the Saint Thomas-Saint John district, plus one senator at large who must reside on Saint John. Terms run two years with no limit on the number of terms. The territory has elected its governor every four years since 1970.

  The United Nations classifies the U.S. Virgin Islands as a non-self-governing territory. In 2016, the UN's Special Committee on Decolonization called on the General Assembly to pursue a public awareness campaign to assist Virgin Islanders in understanding their options for self-determination. A 1993 status referendum drew only 31.4% turnout and was declared void. A March 2023 poll by Suffolk University found 63% of USVI residents supported statehood while 58% rejected independence.

  In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the Virgin Islands over what it characterized as unconstitutional practices related to gun rights, the latest instance of the ongoing tension between territorial governance and federal authority that has defined life on these islands since the 31st of March 1917.