Browse Items (16 total)
- Collection: Civil War and Reconstruction
Attendance Records of the state Constitutional Convention, 1867–1868
Black men in Virginia voted for the first time in October 1867, when they participated in the election on whether to hold a convention to rewrite the state's constitution as required by Congress after the Civil War. They also voted for delegates to…
The Age of Iron, Broadside Satirizing Women's Suffrage Movement, 1869
“The Age of Iron” was published by the New York printing firm of Currier and Ives in 1869. It satirized the woman suffrage movement that was gaining widespread support in America during that time.The woman suffrage movement took root in 1848 at the…
Copy of the Fifteenth Amendment Sent to North Carolina Legislature, 1869
After the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished in 1865, Radical Republicans in Congress became frustrated with the opposition that many white southerners exhibited to extending full rights of citizenship to African Americans. Congress proposed…
Edmund Bradford Seeks a Pardon, 1865
The power of the president to pardon those who commit offenses against the United States is enumerated in the Article Two of the U. S. Constitution. A presidential pardon is an executive order granting clemency for a conviction of a crime, with the…
Letter Notifying the Governor that Virginia Representatives were Readmitted to Congress, 1870
The American Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865. The war began after eleven southern states, including Virginia, seceded from the United States in the months after Abraham Lincoln was elected president in November 1860. After four years of…
President Andrew Johnson Pardons Confederate John C. Shelton, 1866
The power of the president to pardon those who commit offenses against the United States is enumerated in the Article Two of the U. S. Constitution. A presidential pardon is an executive order granting clemency for a conviction of a crime, with the…
Confederate Parole Pass, 1865
On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. The surrender effectively ended the American Civil War in Virginia, although fighting continued in…
John Brown, Portrait, 1859
In October 1859, abolitionist John Brown and a small group of white and Black men slipped across the border between Maryland and Virginia (now West Virginia) with a plan to occupy the federal arsenal, armory, and rifle factory at Harper's Ferry.…
“The Age of Brass: Or the Triumphs of Woman's Rights,” Lithograph, 1869
As women participated in the movement to abolish slavery during the first half of the 19th century, some of them also began to advocate for women's rights. In July 1848, a group of women and men held a convention in Seneca Falls, New York. They…
The First Vote, Engraving published in Harper's Weekly, 1867
With the end of the Civil War came the end of slavery in the American South. When the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on December 9, 1865, slavery was officially outlawed. Racial hostilities towards formerly…