Chapter 2 relates the shocking death of Elmer Ellsworth, the effect it had on his men, and the regiment’s first battle experience at Bull Run. Conflicting accounts emerged in the aftermath of the fight: some positive, heralding the Fire Zouaves’ reckless bravery; but many others were damning, painting a portrait of the men’s panic and fear.

Chapter 2 relates the shocking death of Elmer Ellsworth, the effect it had on his men, and the regiment’s first battle experience at Bull Run. Conflicting accounts emerged in the aftermath of the fight: some positive, heralding the Fire Zouaves’ reckless bravery; but many others were damning, painting a portrait of the men’s panic and fear.

Arlisha Norwood examines a special category of women, those who temporarily or permanently could be classified as “single” in Virginia. This chapter argues that this population which includes unmarried, divorced, widowed, abandoned and separated women were the most economically vulnerable group during and after the war. Despite the unique obstacles they faced, single Black women asserted their needs, worked together to prevent destitution, and challenged the agendas of governmental agencies and private organizations whose well-meaning intentions often clashed with their own expectations. Their petitions for support and compensation altered the roles and responsibilities of federal and local agencies and made these women prominent characters in defining freedom, welfare, citizenship, and womanhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This chapter centers on a plot by three generations of slaves, led by the elderly matriarch, to murder their owner. This Virginia enslaved family used an ax, shovels, and fence posts to end their owner’s abuse.

This chapter is about Jane Williams, an enslaved woman who hacked her owners and their infant daughter to death with an ax as they slept in Richmond, Virginia, in 1853.

For decades, historians have expressed divergent perspectives on the question of genocide in North America. These debates often hinged on legal technicalities and narrow political definitions of genocidal “intent.” This chapter takes a more robust view of the causes of genocidal violence early colonial North America. Paying particular attention to the contested terrain of historical causation, the following chapter encourages readers to remain cognizant of the overlapping, intersecting, and competing ideas, motives, and patterns of mass violence that shaped, and reshaped, North America prior to the Revolutionary era. From New England to Michigan Territory, the Chesapeake Bay to southern Appalachia, Indigenous nations navigated preexisting rivalries while also grappling with the arrival of often-aggressive European colonizers. As the bloody history of the Kikotan people in early-seventeenth-century Virginia reveals, the perpetrators of genocide came in many forms. And when violence did come, it caused social discord and the loss of life and culture as the violence of settler greed, ambition, a brute force took root and extended across eastern North America like a “spreading fire.”

The new Constitution had existed for a short time before Madison and others became concerned about constitutional interpretations that were expanding the power of the national government. This early dialogue about federalism centered on what each state viewed as undesirable equilibrium: either forces that would weaken the relative authority of states or forces that would diminish national authority. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s financial and economic policies were broad expansions of national powers including assuming Revolutionary War debts and establishing a national bank. Anti-Federalists and others viewed these policies as part of a dangerous trend towards national consolidation that would eventually annihilate the states. Southern states, in particular, thought that without constitutional amendments to constrain the powers of a Northern majority, the South would be unable to protect slavery. When Virginia’s legislature passed the nation’s first interposition resolutions and a memorial in 1790 to sound the alarm to other states and Congress, it faced Federalist criticism that it was illegitimately intruding into the federal government’s sphere.

Chapter 3 traces the expansion of demographic governance from ad hoc engagements with specific multitudes to a more systematic approach to the mobility and mutability of populations across expanding imperial territory. Important to this shift was the impact of reason-of-state political thought, notably in the work of Jean Bodin and Giovanni Botero, who both treated policy as an art that could improve upon or perfect nature. Botero drew attention to the instrumental use of colonies in managing population growth, and the chapter turns to English thinking about empire (in Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting and other works) as a solution to the threat of overpopulation – and to early colonial settlements in Virginia and New England as sites for envisioning the transplantation and transformation of excess or idle English people into loyal and industrious colonial subjects. Closing with a consideration of themes raised in Francis Bacon’s Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, the chapter argues that by the second quarter of the seventeenth century, demographic governance was seen as a matter of constant management of populations across England and its expanding empire.

This chapter seeks to better understand the formation of literary-geographical identities and imaginaries by examining the publications and cultural afterlife of Captain John Smith, the explorer, promoter, author, soldier, and self-made knight so closely associated with the beginning of English involvement in North America, and particularly with the original colony of Virginia. The chapter provides a brief overview of the longstanding tendency to see Smith and his works as belonging to, and even a point of origin for, the literature and character of America and the U.S. South, and how this has made him a political and historical lightning rod in highly contentious constructions of North/South identity. To account for this contentious afterlife, but to also move beyond it, the chapter surveys critical approaches that have since better situated Smith’s place in the literature and culture of Renaissance England. Looking at examples from his major works, the chapter attempts to show some of Smith’s experimental structuring and shaping of oppositional and antithetical literary-geographical imaginaries, which he employed to address economic and geographical challenges for the English nation state in the modern colonial and plantation context.

The 1830s saw a reconsideration of the institution of slavery across the South, in which the sense of slavery as an anomalous institution within a republican society gave way to the articulation of more aggressive claim of slavery as a positive good. As southern intellectuals and polemists shifted from apology for slavery to celebration of it, the sanctity of property rights both in slaves and more generally came to be interpreted as a measure of the Southern States’ success in balancing freedom and order. Alongside that shift, the importance of constitutions within the Southern imaginary grew. This chapter traces the constitutionalization of slavery that these developments gave rise to. In the first instance, slavery as an issue was “constitutionalized” through an overt association of slavery with constitutional rights. At a second level, constitutionalization proceeded in a greater attachment to extant constitutions and a call for their preservation as central objects of political life. This chapter shows how these two developments, placed together, resulted in a conflux of slavery and constitution that made defense of each imperative to the other.

Between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, England’s dramatic enlargement in commerce, manufacturing, and territory encouraged this peripheral north-western European power to view it as not only desirable but practicable to secure to itself a silk industry and to supply itself with homegrown silk. This chapter considers firstly the increasing familiarity with silk within the British Isles, and the motivations and incentives that followed for producing silk domestically – paying close attention to the experimentation and measures introduced under James I, who offered particular patronage to sericulture. While novel initiatives and flagship projects brought some attention and investment, low temperatures and issues with expertise compromised production in England. The trials did constitute a breakthrough in understanding however, and stimulated extensive projection in new colonies under the auspices of the Virginia Company in North America. The goal of silk production prompted Virginians to introduce international experts, new buildings and literature, and new policy initiatives – albeit in the face of the dramatic and all-consuming rise of tobacco culture. The final part of the chapter highlights how a second wave of Virginian experimentation in the 1650s and 1660s brought more focus to women’s roles and embedded sericulture within economic and scientific ideas about English colonialism.

In four former Confederate states, the Lily-White movement not only succeeded in taking control of the local Republican party organization but subsequently used this control to exclude blacks from participating in the party either entirely (North Carolina and Alabama) or nearly so (Virginia and Texas). These white Republicans went the exclusion route despite many other Lily-White-controlled states allowing black Republicans to continue participating in the party to some extent. Why did white Republicans in these four states choose to implement Lily-Whiteism in such a "strong" way? As the case studies presented here show, there is no consistent answer to this question. The path toward Lily-White control, and the subsequent nature of white rule in the state GOP, was dependent (at least in part) on the unique historical context in each state. For example, in Virginia, black Republicans were excluded from the party much earlier than in most other states. Local party leaders consistently kept black representation at national conventions close to zero, and even criticized the local Democratic Party for becoming the "black party" during the New Deal era. In Texas, the Lily-White Movement was a response to a black man – Norris Wright Cuney – controlling the state party organization in the 1880s and 1890s. After the end of Cuney’s rule, Lily-Whites took control of the party and expelled nearly all blacks from participation in state and national conventions. In North Carolina, the Lily-White takeover followed the dramatic events of the 1898 and 1900 elections, in which extreme violence against (black) Republicans instigated the passing of new voter laws banning black participation. In response, white GOP leaders explicitly banned blacks from the party organization entirely in 1902. Finally, in Alabama, Lily-White control came in 1912 and resulted in a slow but consistent reduction of black delegates at the national convention until no blacks were left in the state’s national convention delegation from 1924 onwards.

Enslaved people sought freedom by any means possible. Most often they achieved free status through hard work, financial accumulation, negotiation, and legal confrontation. Building on slaves’ initiatives, Chapter Two looks at two legal areas in which Cuba diverged from Virginia and Louisiana: manumission and interracial marriage. Although seventeenth-century Virginians set no restrictions on the ability of a person of color to become free, or to marry a white person, that began to change toward the end of the century. By the early eighteenth century, manumission and interracial sex and marriage were restricted in both Virginia and Louisiana, unlike Cuba, where manumission never faced a serious legal challenge. Slaveholders and local authorities in Cuba resented the existence and social assertiveness of free blacks but were constrained by a deep-rooted legal order in which manumission was firmly entrenched and not tied to racial concerns. In Virginia and Louisiana, however, manumission became tied to the development of legal racial regimes that linked freedom to whiteness. In Cuba, black freedom became a contested but integral part of colonial society.

Chapter One traces the development of local legal regimes in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana in which blackness was identified with enslavement and social degradation. We demonstrate that legal and social precedents such as those invoked by Frank Tannenbaum and Alan Watson mattered deeply to the development of these new slave societies, yet not in the way traditional comparisons argued. By the time the Iberians arrived in the New World, they were familiar with the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans, and set about immediately to establish a racially based society in Cuba. In Virginia, by contrast, distinctions of race were not systematized in law until slave status was set in stone decades after the colony’s settlement. The French arrived in Louisiana at a much later point in the development of their empire, and had already written a code for slaves and “noirs.” Across the regions, colonial legislators established a degraded status for people of African descent, but they did so much more quickly in Cuba and Louisiana.

Founders of the earliest American colonies considered religious piety an essential civic virtue and therefore continued the tradition of religious establishment found in Britain and other Protestant countries. New sects and denominations (especially Quakers and Baptists) contended against Congregationalist and Anglican establishments throughout the colonies. Though prominent dissenters Roger Williams and William Penn founded colonies respecting religious liberty, the decline of religious establishment elsewhere was owed primarily to changes in British law, commercial and political expediencies necessary for increasingly diverse immigrant populations, and, in the case of Anglican establishments, the difficulty of securing ordination and a self-sustaining parish. Though Roman Catholics enjoyed some degree of toleration, enthusiastic Protestant identity on both sides of the Atlantic further reduced Catholic rights and liberties. Jews enjoyed some limited degree of toleration, but only in a handful of colonies.