Browse Items (19 total)
- Collection: Expansion and Reform
Jerry Armstrong, Registration of Free Status, 1840
Before the end of slavery, free Black Virginians found their liberty in constant jeopardy because they were not considered citizens. After Gabriel's attempted slave rebellion in 1800, the General Assembly passed an act in 1801 requiring county…
Petition of King William County Freeholders, 1843
On January 20, 1843, a petition from residents of King William County was presented to the House of Delegates. The men who signed it asked the General Assembly to sell the lands that the royal government had set aside for the Pamunkey Indians by…
Pamunkey Indian Tribe, Counter Petition, 1843
After a public notice appeared in a Richmond newspaper in October 1842 that a petition would be presented to the Virginia General Assembly to sell King William County property known as "Indian town lands," members of the Pamunkey tribe took action.…
"The Bottle," Illustrated Panels, George Cruikshank, 1848
The temperance movement, or the movement to make alcohol consumption illegal, became widespread in nineteenth-century America. Since the European settlement of North America, alcohol consumption had been common. By the 1830s, Americans consumed an…
Lucy Jarvis Pearman Scott, Freedom Paper, 1848
In 1801, following Gabriel's failed slave rebellion, the Virginia General Assembly decreed that county commissioners of the revenue were to return a complete list of all free Black men and women in their districts on an annual basis. The list was to…
Clara Robinson, Petition to Remain in Virginia, 1848
In 1806, Virginia's General Assembly passed a law that required enslaved people who had been freed after that date to leave the state within one year's time. Those who remained in the Commonwealth more than a year could be re-enslaved and sold.…
Union Burial Ground Society Constitution, 1848
Beginning in the 18th century, cemeteries in Richmond were racially segregated. Deceased residents of African descent were interred in the Burial Ground for Negroes (also known as the African Burial Ground) alongside the city’s Shockoe Creek. The…
Madison Mining and Trading Company, Petition, 1849
In 1848, Spain ceded a vast western territory to the United States as part of the Treaty of Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War. This included California, home to about 6,500 Californios of Mexican descent, 700 Americans, and 150,000…
Virginia Springs - Summer Arrangement, Broadside, 1855
Western Virginia's mineral-spring resorts were extremely popular in the 19th century. Travelers from throughout the United States, especially from the southern region, visited the resorts. There people would drink or bathe in the spring water, which…