Browse Items (17 total)
- Collection: Civil War and Reconstruction
Attendence 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, 1869
On March 4, 1869, W.H. Holden, Governor of North Carolina, sent out a circular concerning the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The Amendment required ratification from at least three quarters of the states to become federal…
E.M. Bradford Seeks a Pardon, 1865
The power of the president to pardon those for offenses against the United States, with the exception of impeachment, is enumerated in the Article Two of the US Constitution. A pardon is an executive order granting clemency for a conviction of a…
Letter Announcing Virginia’s Readmission to the United States, 1870
The American Civil War was fought from 1861 and officially ended in 1865. The war began when Virginia and ten other southern states seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln in the spring of…
President Andrew Johnson Pardons Confederate John C. Shelton, 1866
The power of the president to pardon those for offenses against the United States, with the exception of impeachment, is enumerated in the Article Two of the US Constitution. A pardon is an executive order granting clemency for a conviction of a…
Confederate Parole Slip, 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 which effectively ended the American Civil War in Virginia. On April 10, 1865 Grant and Lee met again.…
John Brown, Portrait, 1859
Artist David Hunter Strother, from Martinsburg, Virginia, created this drawing of John Brown in 1859. It was painted three years after Brown and a party of antislavery activists had killed several people in Kansas during a violent public protest…
Breckinridge/Lane Democratic Ticket, Broadside, 1860
In 1860, the Democratic party split into two factions over the issue of enslavement. The Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas on a platform which would allow each territory to decide whether to permit enslavement. Southern Democrats nominated…
“The Age of Brass: Or the Triumphs of Woman's Rights,” Lithograph, 1869
Along with the abolition of slavery, women's rights and suffrage were also topics for social reformers late in the 1860s. The first women's rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The participants called for political equality…