Tag: civil war

First Families of Virginia – The Armisteads

Published on by Robert Van NessLeave a comment


SOURCES:

  1. Appleton, William S. The Family of Armistead of Virginia. Boston: Press of David Clapp and Son, 1899.
  2. Barnhart, Becky F. “Hesse Research” Compiled for Matthews County Historical Society Inc. March, 2006. Unpublished.
  3. Billings, Warren M.; Selby, John E.; and Tate, Thad W. Colonial Virginia: A History. White Plains, NY: KTO Press. 1986.
  4. Billings, Warren M. Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2004.
  5. Billings, Warren. A Little Parliament: The Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century. Richmond, VA: Library of Virginia, 2004.
  6. Billings, Warren, and Dictionary of Virginia Biography. “John Armistead (fl. 1650s–1690s)” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (22 Dec. 2021).
  7. Bruce, Phillip Alexander. Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Higher Planting Class. New York: JP Bell Company, 1927.
  8. Dabney, Virginius. Virginia: The New Dominion, A History from 1607 to the Present. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1971.
  9. Dozier, Graham. “Lewis A. Armistead (1817–1863)” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (22 Dec. 2021).
  10. Evans, Emory G. A “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 1680-1790. Charlottesville, VA: UVA Press, 2009.
  11. Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a cultural history). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
  12. Freeman, Douglas Southall. George Washington: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribners, 1957. (Specifically Volume 1).
  13. Garber, Virginia Armistead. The Armistead Family: 1635-1910. Richmond, VA: Whittet and Shepperson Printers, 1910.
  14. Horn, James. Adapting to A New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
  15. James, Clifford. “Battles That Saved America: North Point and Baltimore 1814” The National Museum of the United States Army.
  16. Mapp, Alfred J. Virginia Experiment: The Old Dominion’s Role in the Making of America, 1607-1781. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, Inc., 2006.
  17. McCartney, Martha W. Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers: A Biographical Dictionary, 1607-1635. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2007.
  18. Meade, William. Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia. in Two Volumes. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1891.
  19. Neill, Edward D. Virginia Carolorum: The Colony under the Rule of Charles The First and Second, A.D. 1625-A.D. 1685. Albany, NY: Joel Munsell’s and Sons, 1886.
  20. Pecquet du Bellet, Louise. Some Prominent Virginia Families, 4 Volumes. Lynchburg, VA:  J.P. Bell Company, 1907.
  21. Rothbard, Murray N. Conceived in Liberty. Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1999.
  22. Salmon, John, and Dictionary of Virginia Biography. “James Lafayette (ca. 1748–1830)” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (22 Dec. 2021).
  23. Tyler, Lyon Gardiner. The Cradle of the Republic: Jamestown and the James River. Richmond, VA: The Hermitage Press, 1906.
  24. Walsh, Lorena S. Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
  25. Washburn, Wilcomb E. Virginia Under Charles I and Cromwell 1625-1660. Kindle Edition.
  26. Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Virginia Under the Stuarts: 1607-1688. New York: Russell and Russell, 1959.
  27. Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. The Planters of Colonial Virginia. Kindle Edition.
  28. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 6, no. 1 (1897): 31–33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914798
  29. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1897): 97–102. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1915366
  30. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1898): 164–71. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1914603
  31. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1898): 226–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1915886
  32. “Armistead Family (Continued from Vol.VI p.226).” The William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1898): 17–24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1919906
  33. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1899): 181–86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1923246
  34. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1899): 63–70. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1915807
  35. Armistead, Constance. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1902): 144–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1915166
  36. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1906): 282–85. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1916230
  37. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1908): 145–46. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1916059
  38. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1913): 64–67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1915076
  39. “Armistead Family.” The William and Mary Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1916): 117–23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1915194
Original Hesse Drawing
James Armistead Lafayette
Hesse Plantation-1983
General Louis Addison Armistead
Hesse Plantation-1935

All photography used on this site is owned and copyrighted by the author unless otherwise noted. The Featured Image is of the Armistead Family Crest. Photographs from top left to bottom right – Original Hesse Drawing, James Armistead Lafayette, Hesse Plantation – 1983 Lewis Addison Armistead, Hesse Plantation 1935.

Music used for the first episode – Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers,”Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” available on Apple Music, and “The Crossing” performed by The East Pointers, also available on Apple Music.

Virginians and their Histories – Brent Tarter Interview, Part 3

Published on by Robert Van NessLeave a comment

Writing Virginia’s history has a long history itself reaching back to the 17th century. Telling those stories has evolved and expanded in various ways during the past 400 years reflecting differing angles, viewpoints, and ideologies. Brent Tarter’s work is part of that long history, and he adds a new volume in which he attempts to give voice to those differing angles and viewpoints.

The volume in focus is entitled Virginians and Their Histories, a title meant to highlight the people who make Virginia’s story what it is. Tarter draws from decades worth of research work to bring this book together. It’s such a work that when Mr. Tarter and I discussed doing an interview, it soon became apparent that one recording wouldn’t do his work justice. To that end, here is the third installment, which covers the end of the Civil War period up until contemporary times.

LINKS TO THE PODCAST:

MORE FROM BRENT TARTER:

  1. Batson, Barbara C., Julienne, Marianne E., and Tarter, J. Brent. The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia (American Heritage). Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2020.
  2. Tarter, J. Brent.Virginians and Their Histories.Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020.
  3. Tarter, J. Brent.Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia.Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2019
  4. Tarter, J. Brent. The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
  5. Tarter, J. Brent ed. and Billings, Warren M. ed.  “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe” and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia (Early American Histories. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2017.
  6. Tarter, J. Brent. A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia.Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016.
  7. Tarter, J. Brent. Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War (A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2017.
  8. The Dictionary of Virginia Biography at the Library of Virginia.

PREVIOUS EPISODES:

 

 

 

All photography used on this site is owned and copyrighted by the author. The Featured Image is of Brent Tarter’s Virginians and Their Histories.

Music used for this episode – Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers,”Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” available on iTunes, and Six Gnossiennes: Gnossienne No. 5 by Erik Satie, performed by Roland Pöntinen, also available on Apple Music.

Interview with Fort Monroe’s Terry Brown

Published on by Robert Van Ness2 Comments

_DSC0057.jpg
National Park Service’s Terry Brown

LINKS TO THE PODCAST:

Fort Monroe_001.jpg
Freedom and Salvation was found at Fort Monroe for many former slaves.

I love traveling all over Virginia. Finding off the beaten path locations, eating at local dives, learning poignant stories combine to make each trip memorable. Sometimes, however, I don’t have to travel to experience all that Virginia has to offer. Sometimes it’s in my back yard. That’s the case with Fort Monroe.

Fort Monroe’s story spans more than 400 years, even longer if one includes what we know of the native Kecoughtan tribe. The original Jamestown colonists first met the Kecoughtans in Spring 1607 before the colonists sailed up river to establish Jamestown. The colonists came back, established friendly relations, and over time built a series of lookout posts that endured through some hardest struggles that the colonists suffered.

That colonial outpost became the port of entry for one of America’s great peoples. In 1619 “20 and odd negroes” from Angola arrived signaling the beginning of a new era in Virginia and America’s history. That history hasn’t always been laudable as those original settlers built new lives and saw their progeny forced into slavery by as early as the 1640s. Those slaves and their stories have left a deep imprint not only on Virginia’s historical landscape, but on her physical makeup as well.

Point Comfort and her early fortifications developed into more permanent bastions in the early 19th century, largely aided by slave labor. After the British marauded the Chesapeake Bay region and burned Washington DC during the War of 1812, the sorely embarrassed government undertook a series of forts built to ensure such an invasion would never happen again. Fort Monroe was the keystone in that military wall.

_DSC0138.jpg
Old Point Comfort Lighthouse at night

The best military engineers of the day, including Robert E. Lee, descended upon Hampton to build the stone structure, as well as her sister fort known then as Fort Calhoun, but now known as Fort Wool, just off of Point Comfort’s coast.

These engineers were so successful that when the Civil War exploded onto history’s pages the Union maintained control of Fort Monroe, and never endured a serious threat to losing control of the strategic location.

Because the Union kept control they could use the fort as a starting point of major campaign thrusts toward Richmond. But the fort was also used for something else. Area slaves viewed Fort Monroe as potential salvation. Freedom.

On one May 1861 night three slaves tested their fate. They got into a skiff near Sewell’s Point, Norfolk, and rowed across the dangerous Hampton Roads waterway to reach Fort Monroe.

The Fort’s commanding officer, Benjamin Butler, had just been installed a day earlier, and now he had a decision to make. Butler was a lawyer from Massachusetts. He knew full well the law stating that runaway slaves were to be returned to their masters under the Fugitive Slave Law, but in a history changing decision, Butler decided to keep the runaway slaves as “contrabands of war.”

Word of Butler’s decision spread, and many more slaves poured into “Freedom’s Fortress” throughout the war.

After the Civil War ended, the region’s blacks largely remained. They started schools, notably built upon Mary Peake’s pioneering work, some of which was done in Fort Monroe before her 1862 death.

The American Missionary Association brought black and white leaders together in 1868 to formalize education by starting the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, today’s Hampton University. Their mission was to teach and train freed black slaves, which attracted attention far and wide, perhaps most famously, Booker T. Washington.

Because of new opportunities, America’s black history, beginning in 1619, could now be seen as beginning anew in the 1860s, and it still centered at Point Comfort. The shining monument to that storied history is Fort Monroe, “Freedom’s Fortress.”

1619 was the beginning of Black History in English North America. That history began here at Point Comfort.
Lee’s Quarters, as seen from Fort Monroe’s South Wall
Lee’s Quarters
Fort Monroe’s Southeastern wall and moat
Gun emplacements atop Fort Monroe
Quarter’s #1, where Lincoln stayed while visiting Fort Monroe
The “Lincoln” gun
Entrance to Fort Monroe’s Casemate Museum
Casemate Museum at Fort Monroe
Harriet Tubman honored at Fort Monroe
Edgar Allan Poe at Fort Monroe
Inside Fort Monroe’s Casemate Museum
Jefferson Davis Park
The Jefferson Davis Exhibit at Fort Monroe’s Casemate Museum
Jefferson Davis Jail Cell at Fort Monroe
Inside Jefferson Davis Jail Cell at Fort Monroe
Examples of the types of shells used at Fort Monroe
A recreated watering hole at Fort Monroe’s Casemate Museum
A cargo ship passes Fort Monroe and her outer defenses at Hampton Roads
3″ Gun atop Batter Irwin
Ghost still on watch
Old Point Comfort Lighthouse

SOURCES:

  1. Brasher, Glenn David. The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom (Civil War America). Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2012.
  2. Clancy, Paul. Hampton Roads Chronicles: History from the Birthplace of America. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2009.
  3. Cobb, Michael J. Fort Wool: Star-Spangled Banner Rising. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2009.
  4. Cobb, Michael J. and Holt, Wythe. Hampton (Images of America). Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.
  5. Dunaway, Wilma A. The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Studies in Modern Capitalism). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  6. Fairfax, Colita Nochols. Hampton, Virginia (Black America Series). Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005.
  7. Gallivan, Martin D. The Powhatan Landscape: An Archaeological History of the Algonquian Chesapeake (Society and Ecology in Island and Coastal Archaeology). Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2016.
  8. Gould, William Benjamin. Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
  9. Lippson, Alice Jane and Lippson, Robert. Life in the Chesapeake Bay. Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins, 2006.
  10. Newby-Alexander, Cassandra. An African American History of the Civil War in Hampton Roads. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2010.
  11. Quarstein, John V. The Civil War on the Virginia Peninsula. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1997.
  12. Quarstein, John V. Old Point Comfort Resort:: Hospitality, Health and History on Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2009.
  13. Weaver, John R. A Legacy in Brick and Stone: American Coastal Defense Forts of the Third System, 1816-1867. Pictorial History Publishing, 2001.
  14. Weinert Jr., Richard P. and Arthur, Robert. Defender of the Chesapeake: The Story of Fort Monroe. White Mane Publishing, 1989.

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

  1. National Park Service: Fort Monroe
  2. Fort Monroe Authority
  3. Commemoration 2019
  4. Previous Episode – 1619: Women and Africans Arrive

_DSC0052.jpg
Couples enjoying the boardwalk outside of Fort Monroe’s walls

 

 

 

All photography used on this site is owned and copyrighted by the author. The featured image is of Fort Monroe as seen from the North Sallyport.

Music used for this episode – Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers,”Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” available on iTunes, and “Egmont Overture” by Ludwig von Beethoven, performed by the Chicago Symphony.

Virginia’s Outstanding Women – Interview with Sandra Gioia Treadway

Published on by Robert Van Ness1 Comment

Virginia has certainly had her fair share of outstanding historical figures, both men and women. In this interview, the Library of Virginia’s Dr. Sandra Gioia Treadway and I discuss just 5 of the many important women to have graced our storied past.

Women highlighted in this episode are –

  1. Cockacoeske
  2. Anna Maria Lane
  3. Elizabeth Van Lew
  4. Caroline Putnam
  5. Mary Jackson

These women were daring, powerful, and brilliant. Tune in to hear what made them great!

Anna Maria Lane Marker in Richmond, Virginia
Elizabeth Van Lew’s Grave at Shockoe Hill Cemetery, Richmond, VA
Mary Jackson’s Grave at Bethel AME Church, Hampton, VA
The Pamunkey Frontlet, presented to Cockacoeske as a gift from King Charles II
Caroline Putnam

LINKS TO THE PODCAST:

SOURCES:

  1. The Library of Virginia
  2. Virginia Women In History Series
  3. Encyclopedia Virginia
  4. Treaty of Middle Plantation
  5. Abbott, Karen. Liar, Temptress, Soldier Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War. New York: Harper Collins, 2014.
  6. Kierner, Cynthia A. and Treadway, Sandra Gioia. eds. Virginia Women Their Lives and Times. vol. 1. Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2015.
  7. Shetterly, Margot Lee. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: Harper Collins, 2016.
  8. Varon, Elizabeth R. Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

_DSC0001
The Library of Virginia’s Dr. Sandra Gioia Treadway

_DSC0017.jpg
The Library of Virginia

COMMEMORATION 2019 LINKS:

  1. American Evolution 2019
  2. Facebook
  3. Instagram
  4. Twitter
  5. Youtube

 

 

 

All photography used on this site is owned and copyrighted by the author. The Featured Image is of The Library of Virginia, Richmond, VA. The Caroline Putnam portrait can be found on Wikipedia.

Music used for this episode – Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers,”Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” available on iTunes, and This Is a Man’s World by Postmodern Jukebox, featuring artist Morgan James, available on iTunes.