Browse Items (30 total)

A joint Congressional committee was appointed in 1865 to determine whether the former Confederate states were entitled to have representation in Congress. More than one hundred witnesses testified early in 1866 about the situations in the four…

For several months after the end of the war, the army stationed soldiers, including African Americans, throughout Virginia to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and protect the freedpeople. White Lunenburg County residents petitioned Governor…

Before the Civil War, churches often had black and white members, although they were segregated within the congregation. African American churches were required by Virginia law to have white ministers, and after the Civil War, many African Americans…

In November 1865, the Norfolk County Court petitioned the officer of the Freedmen's Bureau in Norfolk to take away the firearms belonging to African Americans. Local white residents had complained complained about African Americans "in the habit of…

During the spring of 1868, some white Virginians established local branches of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been organized in Tennessee about two years earlier. It lasted only a few months in the state, but not before members committed acts of…

P. C. Morgan's contract identifies the people he hired as he would have identified them back in slavery times, as belonging to his neighbors ("Irby's Henry, Hudson's Albert, Thomas's Ned, Peggie and Eley"). It also indicates that the hired people…

While the convention called to rewrite Virginia's constitution was meeting, a large gathering of white men organized the Conservative Party on December 11

In December 1865 Pollard Gaines, an African American, contracted with Royall H. Eubank to work his Nelson County farm, tend to all the livestock, repair buildings and fences, cut and haul firewood, fill the ice house, and cultivate the garden "for…

In June 1865 Hanover County farmer Slaughter B. Bullock contracted with his former enslaved laborers to work for him for stated wages and a place to board on his farm. The agreement was unusual (and unusually fair) in that it allowed either party "to…

Virginia's General Assembly passed an act to create the state's first public school system on July 11, 1870. Section 47 of the act required that "white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school, but in separate schools, under the…