On July 4, Americans celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This holiday is a celebration of a particular kind of origin, a moment when representatives declared the creation of a new political entity, independent of their former ruler, the King of England, and responsible for governing themselves. The achievement of this independence would take several more years of war, foreign assistance, and treaty negotiations. Thus the declaration made on July 4, 1776 was a statement of aspirations rather than accomplishments. Each year, Americans celebrate July 4 as the origin point for this aspiration to a system of democratic representative government affirming and ensuring equality for all. Jamestown, located along Route 76 in coastal Virginia, represents two alternative origin stories for the United States. First, the establishment of the Jamestown colony in 1607 would lead to the creation of the first representative legislative government in the new world, thus beginning the steps toward democratic self-government that would eventually lead to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Second, just about thirty miles from Jamestown, at Point Comfort, the first African slaves were brought to the English colony in 1619, thus beginning the process that would lead to forced enslavement of millions, a national economy built on plantation slavery, the American Civil War, and subsequent decades of Jim Crow segregation. This episode explores these two points of origin, close to each other both geographically and chronologically, as a way to consider the parallel development of representative government and forced enslavement in American history.
Welcome to episode 2 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to Jamestown, about 20 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and 530 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte.
In 1619, two events occurred in the Jamestown colony which would shape American history for the next four centuries. A General Assembly was convened in July 1619, including the governor, a council appointed by the Virginia Company, and elected representatives from the eleven settlements. In 1643, the General Assembly was divided into two houses, the General Assembly and the House of Burgesses. In addition to the authority to enact laws, the bicameral legislative body also acted as a supreme court reviewing judicial decisions.
The assembly continued to meet in Jamestown for the next eighty years, until it moved to Williamsburg in 1700. This moment thus began the practice of representative government which would culminate in the establishment of a represenative government following the final ratification of the constitution in 1789.
The general assembly was representative, but it only represented sections of the population. Only white men could vote for representatives throughout the duration of the Virginia colony. Women, indentured servants, slaves, and Native Americans were denied the right to select representatives to this legislative assembly.
Just one month later, in August 1619, the first Africans arrived in the Virginia colony at Point Comfort, located thirty miles down the river from Jamestown. About twenty Africans on an English ship, the White Lion, were sold to the colonists for food. Several of the Africans were transported to Jamestown, where they were sold again. A few days later, another English ship, the Treasurer, brought more Africans to shore and several were sold into slavery. The number of Africans declined slowly during the next decade, due probably to the costs of disease and war, but in 1628, a shipload of nearly 100 Africans was sold, thus establishing slavery more firmly in the colony.
Slavery was established incrementally and legislatively in Virginia over the course of more than a century after the first enslaved Africans arrived in the Jamestown colony. In 1661, the Virginia legislature passed a law enabling any free person to own slaves. In 1662, the legislature passed a law ensuring that any children born to an enslaved mother were themselves owned as slaves. White fathers of enslaved children had ownership rights over their children. In 1667, a law removed the provision from English common law that exempted Christians from the status of slaves; under the new Virginia law, baptized Africans were still slaves.
In 1669, the General Assembly passed a law that if an owner killed a slave while administering corrective measures, the death would not be criminally prosecuted. In 1680, an act for preventing slave insurrections warned against meetings of slaves, the potential threat of slaves lurking in obscure places, and prohibited slaves from taking up any kind of weapons. Further legislation prohibited more than four slaves from gathering together at plantations not owned by their masters.
In 1691, the legislature empowered sheriffs, deputies, and other lawful authorities the right to kill slaves who resisted, ran away, or refused to surrender when ordered to do so. If slaves were killed under the terms of this act, the owner had the right to compensation from the colonial government. The same law made it illegal for white people to marry non-White people.
By 1700, an estimated 16,000 enslaved Africans were residing in the Virginia colony. By 1775, on the verge of American independence, the number of enslaved African American had increased to more than 200,000. As the population of enslaved people increased, the legislative acts to control and punish these populations became increasingly extensive and severe.
In the eighteenth century, even as white Virginians developed a system of representative self-government within the English colony, further restrictions were enacted that separated the races. In 1705, the General Assembly expanded the category of non-white populations to include anyone who was the child, grandchild, or great-grandchild of an African American or Native Americans.
In the early nineteenth century, the system of slavery in effect denied legal rights to the majority of Virginia’s population of African Americans. Even in this context, however, the legal system continued to impose, sustain, and enforce restrictions based on race. In 1849, the legislature renewed and strengthened the ban on marriage between White people and those deemed “non-white” by the legal system. Starting in 1853, all births and marriages in Virginia had to include race in the recorded documents, thus providing a system for enforcing the racial purity legislation. The administrators of the state system of vital statistics were white supremacists who believed that these steps would secure the unquestioned position of Virginia’s white population.
After the Civil War led to the emancipation of enslaved people, the Virginia legislature used the legal system to impose other restrictions on African Americans in public as well as private life. Although the constitutional amendments passed after the civil war promised equal rights to emancipated slaves, state legislatures across the south, including in Virginia, took measures to recreate, sustain, and expand the system of racial inequality. In 1867, under direct pressure from the federal government, Virginia adopted a new constitution that encouraged African American men to register to vote and cast ballots for the first time. A proposal to exclude men who joined the confederacy was defeated in the preparation of the new constitution.
In the decades that followed, the white establishment took a series of measures to restrict African American political participation at all levels. In 1876, amendments passed by the legislature and approved by voters imposed two major changes designed to restrict African American voting: everyone had to pay a poll tax in order to cast a vote and anyone convicted of even minor crimes, such as theft, were prohibited from voting. These measures were deliberately intended to discourage participation by the poorest sectors of society, which included many African Americans.
Despite these restrictions, however, African American men continued to run for office, win elections, and participate in the government. The legislature took additional actions to place control of voting in the hands of officials loyal to the white establishment, which further discouraged voting by the African American minority. The number of elected African Americans declined with each passing year as these restrictive measures went into effect. The federal government did not take any effective measures to enforce the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment in the states of the former Confederacy, including Virginia.
In 1901, an all white constitutional convention took steps that almost completely eliminated opportunities for African Americans to participate in Virginia’s political system. All of the measures to increase representation and facilitate voting implemented after the Civil War were reversed. As a result of these constitutional changes, more than 90% of African Americans were disenfranchised. The constitutional changes also deprived many poor whites of the right to vote, but these changes firmly established white power in the state. For most of the early twentieth century, the Democractic Party, which firmly opposed rights for African Americans, controlled both houses of the legislature, the governor’s office, most local governments, and all representatives in the US Congress.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, legislative acts became even more restrictive in the enforcement racial distinctions. In 1924, the Racial Integrity Act prohibited interracial marriage between a white person and anyone deemed to be non-white. The same act also defined a white person as someone who has no trace of blood “other than Caucasian.” Four years later, another act defined a Black person as someone who had even a trace of African American ancestry, thus enforcing what became known as the one drop rule.
The enforcement of the Racial Integrity Act in subsequent decades penalized African American as well as Native American people in Virginia. The legislative and executive branches colluded in forcing Native Americans into the binary category of “Colored,” thus eradicating any separate identity as American Indians.
These measures remained in place in Virginia until the Civil Rights movement, the US Supreme Court, and acts of Congress gradually, and only partially, reversed the terms of segregation. The legacy of these acts continue even as Virginia’s elected government has gradually become more representative of the population.
At the center of this history is the tension between representative government and restrictive legislation. For more than three centuries, Virginia’s elected legislature, exclusively and then primarily representing the white majority, deliberately decided to pass laws that restricted the rights of racial minorities in the commonwealth.
Museums, exhibits, and historical markers at Jamestown commemorate the founding of America’s first elected representative legislature. These sites seek to make a direct connection between this institution and the steps that led to the American revolution in 1776 and the United States Constitution in 1782. These connections are important, because the establishment of representative government is one of the most important achievements of American history. Yet a representative government can also create, enforce, and sustain a system of systematic inequality and repression. The history of Virginia’s laws on racial difference, which originated within decades of the founding of Jamestown, is an important reminder that history can involve parallel trajectories, some leading to equality and emancipation, others reproducing and enforcing inequality and oppression.
You have been listening to episode 2 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to Jamestown, about 20 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and 530 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte. To learn more about the stories in this episode, visit our website or follow us on social media, all accessible from the homepage for this podcast.
