James Monroe was a Founding Father of the United States, and served as the fifth president of the United States from 1817 to 1825. He was the last Founding Father to serve as president as well as the last president of the Virginia dynasty. He was a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, and his presidency coincided with the Era of Good Feelings, concluding the First Party System era of American politics. He issued the Monroe Doctrine, a policy of limiting European colonialism in the Americas. Monroe previously served as governor of Virginia, a member of the United States Senate, U.S. ambassador to France and Britain, the seventh secretary of state, and the eighth secretary of war.
A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by slaves, as a way of fighting for their freedom. Rebellions of slaves have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have practiced slavery in the past. A desire for freedom and the dream of successful rebellion is often the greatest object of song, art, and culture amongst the enslaved population. These events, however, are often violently opposed and suppressed by slaveholders.
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the repatriation of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa. It was modeled on an earlier British Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor's colonization in Africa, which had sought to resettle London's "black poor". Until the organization's dissolution in 1964, the society was headquartered in Room 516 of the Colorado Building in Washington, D.C.
Denmark Vesey was a free Black man and community leader in Charleston, South Carolina, who was accused and convicted of planning a major slave revolt in 1822. Although the alleged plot was discovered before it could be realized, its potential scale stoked the fears of the antebellum planter class that led to increased restrictions on both enslaved and free African Americans.
The history of Richmond, Virginia, as a modern city, dates to the early 17th century, and is crucial to the development of the colony of Virginia, the American Revolutionary War, and the Civil War. After Reconstruction, Richmond's location at the falls of the James River helped it develop a diversified economy and become a land transportation hub.
Nat Turner's Rebellion, historically known as the Southampton Insurrection, was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Led by Nat Turner, the rebels, made up of enslaved African Americans, killed between 55 and 65 White people, making it the deadliest slave revolt for the latter racial group in U.S. history. The rebellion was effectively suppressed within a few days, at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, but Turner survived in hiding for more than 30 days afterward.
Charles Fenton Mercer was a nineteenth-century politician and lawyer from Loudoun County, Virginia who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Virginia General Assembly.
Mary Hemings Bell was born into slavery, most likely in Charles City County, Virginia, as the oldest child of Elizabeth Hemings, a mixed-race slave held by John Wayles. After the death of Wayles in 1773, Elizabeth, Mary, and her family were inherited by Thomas Jefferson, the husband of Martha Wayles Skelton, a daughter of Wayles, and all moved to Monticello.
Tuckahoe, also known as Tuckahoe Plantation, or Historic Tuckahoe is located in Tuckahoe, Virginia on Route 650 near Manakin Sabot, Virginia, overlapping both Goochland and Henrico counties, six miles from the town of the same name. Built in the first half of the 18th century, it is a well-preserved example of a colonial plantation house and is particularly distinctive as a colonial prodigy house. Thomas Jefferson is also recorded as having spent some of his childhood here. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1969.
The Shockoe Hill Cemetery is a historic cemetery located on Shockoe Hill in Richmond, Virginia.
Elizabeth Hemings was a female slave of mixed-ethnicity in colonial Virginia. With her owner, planter John Wayles, she had six children, including Sally Hemings. These children were three-quarters white, and, following the condition of their mother, they were considered slaves from birth; they were half-siblings to Wayles's daughter, Martha Jefferson. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and some 120 other slaves were inherited, along with 11,000 acres and £4,000 debt, as part of his estate by his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Jefferson.
Lumpkin's Jail, also known as "the Devil's half acre", was a slave breeding farm, as well as a holding facility, or slave jail, located in Richmond, Virginia, just three blocks from the state capitol building. More than five dozen firms traded in enslaved human beings within blocks of Richmond's Wall Street between 14th and 18th Streets between the 1830s and the end of the American Civil War. Its final and most notorious owner, Robert Lumpkin, bought and sold slaves throughout the South for well over twenty years, and Lumpkin's Jail became Richmond's largest slave-holding facility.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts.
The western part of Virginia which became West Virginia was settled in two directions, north to south from Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey and from east to west from eastern Virginia and North Carolina. The earliest arrival of enslaved people was in the counties of the Shenandoah Valley, where prominent Virginia families built houses and plantations. The earliest recorded slave presence was about 1748 in Hampshire County on the estate of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, which included 150 enslaved people. By the early 19th century, slavery had spread to the Ohio River up to the northern panhandle.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Coromantee, Coromantins, Coromanti or Kormantine is an English-language term for enslaved people from the Akan ethnic group, taken from the Gold Coast region in modern-day Ghana.
The Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground was established by the city of Richmond, Virginia, for the interment of free people of color, and the enslaved. The heart of this now invisible burying ground is located at 1305 N 5th St.
Brookfield Plantation was an about 2,000 acre plantation in Henrico County, Virginia in the late 18th and 19th-centuries. It was first owned by the Prosser family and it is where Gabriel Prosser planned Gabriel's Rebellion of 1800. It is one of several lost historical buildings of the county, and it is near Bon Air, Virginia and Bryan Park in Richmond, Virginia.
The Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground, known historically as the "Burial Ground for Negroes" and the "old Powder Magazine ground", is the older of two municipal burial grounds established for the interment of free people of color and the enslaved in the city of Richmond, Virginia. It is located at 1554 E Broad St., across from the site of Lumpkin's Jail, in Shockoe Bottom. The area now known as Shockoe Bottom, was historically known as Shockoe Valley. Richmond's second African Burial Ground, called the Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground is the larger of the two burial grounds, and is located a mile and a half away at 1305 N 5th St, on Shockoe Hill.
