Notes on Virginia History

(I figure this is better than a post about insane shopping) 

 

As a clear date emerged for my move to Virginia, which happened in December 2018, I decided I should learn something about the state and bought a recent history of Virginia textbook. I have now finally got down to reading it (yes, it took me like 7 years). It's quite well written and very informative.  Some things I've gleaned thus far:

• As perhaps some of you will know, the legal case that made laws in states which banned interracial marriages unconstitutional was appropriately Loving vs.Virginia (Loving was the name of the couple involved); it was finally settled by the Supreme Court in 1967 (it took that long???) One would think that the laws were a straightforward case of white supremacy, racial superiority, and similar crap, but it was more convoluted than that. Such laws actually go back to colonial times. In 1662, the Virginia Assembly decreed that to settle issues of the status of interracial offspring, the status of the mother, slave or free, would determine the status of the offspring. The problem that emerged, as the Assembly saw it, was that children of a black father and white mother would be, according to the law, freeborn. The concern was the possibility of an increasing population of free "colored" people. The law did not produce the desired effect, and heavy fines and penal servitude were successively put in place. Finally 1691, interracial marriage was banned by law, and offenders were banished from the colony,

• Most of us are aware of the "Evangelical Movement" in the US which has been such a factor in social policy and conservative politics in recent years. Given my background, my thought was "where did these people come from?" Well, as it turns out Evangelicalism took hold in the the American colonies in the 1730's. In New England, it split the predominant Puritan and Presbyterian congregations into those who followed the new enthusiasm and those who did not. In Anglican Virginia it was different. Evangelicalism was deeply involved with status, with middling and lower-class whites embracing it in opposition to the formality, ritual, and class-structure of the established Anglican church. (Remember those governors' thrones inside the sanctuary at Jamestown & Williamsburg?) The Evangelicals refused to act as earlier religious dissidents; they refused to behave and keep quiet to themselves but preached to everyone and anyone. Unlike Lutherans or Presbyterians, the Evangelicals, called Separate Baptists, abjured a trained clergy, believing that anyone who was truly converted could spread the Word. They were determined to be religious revolutionaries. Wandering self-appointed preachers roamed the countryside preaching in fields, homes, barns, and taverns, vociferously proclaiming that their way was the only way. Sound eerily familiar?