On a warm Wednesday morning in May 2008, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rounded up thirty-three men and women hired to help construct the new federal district court on Broad Street, two blocks from the capitol in downtown Richmond, Virginia.¹ While authorities booked Dominguez Cano, Juan Perez-Hernandez, and fellow “aliens” from Central and South America for working and residing in Virginia illegally, I sat across the street, in the silent sanctuary of the manuscript reading room of the Library of Virginia, discovering a roundup that had occurred 150 years earlier in Frederick County. There, the sheriff had arrested Henry...

As autumn approached in 1859, Henry Champ, along with his wife and five young children, absconded from Frederick County, Virginia, leaving home and loved ones behind for new lives in the verdant hills near Barnesville, Ohio. Like a fictional fugitive in the recently publishedUncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry Champ undertook his epic journey to secure liberty for himself and his family on Ohio’s free soil. Champ was unusual, however, in that he had been free—by birth—in Virginia, and his story reminds us that the iconic crossing of the Ohio River not only symbolized the perilous attainment of freedom...

Daniel Hickman was born enslaved, likely in Accomack County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, in 1787, the same year James Madison and other slaveholding Virginians helped to draft the United States Constitution in Philadelphia.¹ Hickman, like others born after him, entered a society of contradictions in a new nation whose founding principles professed to “secure the blessings of liberty” to Americans and their posterity, yet which denied his personhood and promised to hold him forever as the property of others. If the Revolution had transformed Americans’ notions of freedom, the foundations of the peculiar institution in Virginia and other southern states...

In December 1829 David Walker drafted a letter from his home on Boston’s Brattle Street to Thomas Lewis, a free black resident of Richmond, Virginia. “I having written an Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World—it is now ready to be submitted for inspection,” Walker declared in a note to Lewis that accompanied thirty copies of hisAppealfor distribution “among the coloured people” of Richmond. In his self-published tract, Walker insisted that “we (coloured people of these United States) are, the most degraded, wretched and abject set of beings, that ever lived since the world began” and...

On a spring morning in 1850, seventy-year-old planter William Arvin Sr. sat with seventeen other grand jurors in circuit court, listening to charges brought against various men of Lunenburg County in Southside Virginia.¹ Older than the nation itself, Arvin might have had the impression that the political system he had witnessed develop as a boy was now rapidly unraveling. Politicians in Washington fiercely debated how best to absorb new territory won in the Mexican War and whether to allow the institution of slavery within it. The fragile political equilibrium between North and South that lawmakers had carefully sought to preserve...

Word of Willis and Andrew’s re-enslavement in spring 1854 did not spread quickly through Lunenburg County’s white community, or if it did, it was met with quiet indifference. “Nothing of interest transpired at Court; fewer people than usual,” noted one white man who had witnessed the application of Virginia’s first self-enslavement law at the Lunenburg courthouse. More remarkable were the “great coats” worn by many, “a thing very unusual for the 8th of May,” and the “great complaints about the scarcity of tobacco plants” heard among bystanders, due to extraordinarily late frosts and bitter cold.¹ Amid “the fatigue and bustle...

Lucy Booker of Prince Edward County, Virginia, had lived long enough to know that her master’s death was nothing to celebrate—no matter what she might think of his character or temperament—having lived more than a half century as the legal property of others. In 1824 she had experienced the death of a previous owner, whose belongings had been sold and his slaves divided among various family members near and far.¹ Lucy, along with her son William and her mother Amy, had been relatively fortunate. It was unusual for a slaveowner to bequeath anything to a slave, yet Lucy...

One day in 1875, long after the Civil War had ended, Betsy Payne of Rectortown, in Fauquier County, Virginia, took a moment to reflect upon the contents of a letter that had just been read to her. It was signed by “your granddaughter Nellie B. Francis”—a name she did not recognize—and was mysteriously postmarked Providence, Rhode Island. Betsy Payne had lost track of her large extended family, especially those who ended up in the North.¹ She turned to the woman who had just read the letter to her and asked which of her grandchildren now called themselves “Francis,”...

In April 1867 African Americans in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, commemorated the second anniversary of general emancipation by parading through the town of Boydton. According to a rhapsodic contemporary account, Watt Love, a 35-year- old barkeeper and businessman, was among those “mounted on fiery steeds, their white sashes flying, and batons in hand,” leading a procession of “some twelve or fifteen hundred souls” in “files of four” that “extended from one end of Boydton to the other.” While the men, women, and children in attendance ate, drank, and engaged in “general jollification,” Love employed his “oratorical powers” to inspire the crowd...

A brief front-page article in Richmond’sDaily Dispatchin 1856 reported that Caroline Banks and Mary Frances, sisters who recently had been emancipated in Virginia and then sent to New York, had returned with their children and now were willing to give up their hard-won liberty for the right to live at home. The two women desired legal re-enslavement, the newspaper pronounced, “a condition far preferable to the ‘pleasures’ of freedom they had experienced among the flinty-hearted abolitionists at the North.” Banks and Frances’s arrival in Richmond offered “something for Abolitionists to Reflect Upon” and affordedDispatchreaders “a fair...