— Ch. 1 · Indigenous Foundations And Colonial Origins —
Virginia.
~6 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
In 1607, the London Company established Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in North America. This event marked a turning point for the Powhatan Confederacy, which controlled over 150 settlements with a population of around 15,000 people at that time. Chief Powhatan, known to history as Wahunsenacawh, led this alliance of thirty or so Algonquian-speaking tribes during the 1570s. The native population in the current boundaries of Virginia reached approximately 50,000 in the 1500s before European contact. Three-fourths of the native population died from smallpox and other Old World diseases during the seventeenth century. This devastation disrupted oral traditions and complicated research into earlier periods of their history. John Smith secured food for the colonists from nearby tribes while he served as president of the colony. After he left in 1609, trade stopped and ambush-style killings began between colonists and natives under Chief Powhatan and his brother. Mass starvation struck the colony that winter. By the end of the colony's first fourteen years, over eighty percent of the roughly eight thousand settlers transported there had died. Enslaved Africans were first sold in Virginia in 1619. Laws passed in Jamestown defined slavery as race-based in 1661 and inherited maternally in 1662.
Revolutionary Leadership And Civil War Division
On the 15th of May 1776, the Convention declared Virginia's independence and adopted George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights. Thomas Jefferson drew upon Mason's work to draft the national Declaration of Independence later that year. The capital moved to Richmond in April 1780 at the urging of Governor Thomas Jefferson who feared Williamsburg's coastal location would make it vulnerable to British attack. British forces under Benedict Arnold took Portsmouth in December 1780 and raided Richmond the following month. General Charles Cornwallis and his superiors were indecisive about how to proceed with their seven thousand soldiers and twenty-five warships stationed in Virginia. Maneuvers by three thousand soldiers under Marquis de Lafayette and twenty-nine allied French warships confined the British to a swampy area of the Virginia Peninsula in September. Around sixteen thousand soldiers under George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau converged there and defeated Cornwallis in the siege of Yorktown. His surrender on the 19th of October 1781, led to peace negotiations in Paris and secured the independence of the colonies. During the American Civil War, the state government in Richmond joined the Confederacy while many northwestern counties remained loyal to the Union. The Virginia Secession Convention voted on April 17 to secede on condition it was approved in a referendum the next month. Representatives from 27 northwestern counties began the Wheeling Convention which organized a government loyal to the Union. This process led to the separation of West Virginia as a new state in 1863.