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Traveling
through VIRGINIA, the oldest,
largest and wealthiest of the American
colonies and the single most powerful
influence on the early United States, is a
nonstop history lesson. Pretty and rural
it may be, but the past predominates:
wherever you go you’re pointed towards
this or that painstakingly restored
two-hundred-year-old building, where
something or other happened a long time
ago. The more you know about it all, the
more rewarding Virginia is to visit, but
the historical plaques get a bit
ridiculous after a while, marking every
spot where George Washington slept, Thomas
Jefferson thought or Robert E Lee tied his
horse to a tree. You can see why Disney
chose northern Virginia as the site of its
proposed theme park of American history a
few years back; and you’ll also soon
realize that Virginia takes itself a bit
too seriously to allow such a project to
get off the ground.
Virginia’s recorded history began at
Jamestown, just off the Chesapeake
Bay, with the establishment in 1607 of the
first successful British colony in North
America. Though the first colonists hoped
to find gold, it was tobacco that
made their fortunes. The native strain –
used for hundreds of years by Virginia’s
indigenous population, of whom almost no
trace remains – was too strongly flavored
for European tastes. When a smoother, more
palatable variety was introduced in 1615
by John Rolfe – the same man whose
shipwreck on Bermuda inspired
Shakespeare’s The Tempest – tobacco
quickly became the colony’s major cash
crop. Before long, vast plantations, owned
by a very few aristocratic families,
sprang up along the many broad rivers that
flow into the Chesapeake Bay. To grow and
harvest tobacco required both an immense
amount of land – so the Native Americans
had to go – and intensive labor – so the
plantation owners brought in slaves
from Africa. By the end of the seventeenth
century, enslaved African-Americans
accounted for nearly half of the colony’s
75,000 people; a hundred years later, they
numbered over 300,000.
Virginians had an enormous impact on the
foundation of the nascent United States:
George Mason, Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison wrote the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution, and
four of the first five US presidents were
from Virginia. However, by the mid-1800s
the state was in decline, its once fertile
fields depleted by overuse and its
agrarian economy increasingly eclipsed by
the urban and industrialized North.
As the
confrontation between North and South over
slavery and related economic and political
issues grew more divisive, Virginia was
caught in the middle. Though this
slaveholding state initially voted against
secession from the Union, it joined the
Confederacy when the Civil War
broke out, providing its military leader,
Robert E Lee, and its capital, Richmond.
Four long years later, Virginia was
ravaged, its towns and cities wrecked, its
farmlands ruined and most of its youth
dead. It has never regained its early
prosperity, nor its prominence in national
affairs.
Richmond itself
was largely destroyed in the war; today
it’s a small city, with some good museums,
and is the best starting point for seeing
Virginia. The bulk of the colonial
sites are concentrated just to the east,
in what’s known as the Historic
Triangle. Here the remains of
Jamestown, the original colony,
Williamsburg, the restored colonial
capital, and Yorktown, site of the
final battle of the Revolutionary War, lie
within half an hour’s drive of each other.
Another
historic center, Thomas Jefferson’s
Charlottesville, sits at the foot of
the gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains,
an hour west of Richmond. An attractive
small college town in its own right, it’s
also within easy reach of the natural
splendors of Shenandoah National Park
and the small towns of the western
valleys. Northern Virginia, often
visited as a day out from Washington DC,
holds a number of restored homes and
several preserved Civil War
battlefields.
Click here to go to Virginia
State web site. |
