Virginia

"Episcopal saw itself as part of Old Virginia. If the country was a chessboard, Virginia was the white queen, the most important state in the nation, the home of presidents. As a child, I memorized every president in order as a kind of parlor trick. My dad had given me three-inch white figurines of each president, and I could perform on command, placing them in chronological order. Asked to choose my favorites, I picked, in order, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe. Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia. (I would never pick John Adams from Massachusetts.) I knew more Virginia trivia. The American Revolution ended with the American victory at Yorktown- in Virginia. The Old Dominion hosted more Civil War battles than any other state. First again. I knew that Virginia was so far and away the best, but a Virginian would never say that. Boasting? That was for Texans. One writer described the Virginia state of mind five years before I was born as a "regal humility" or a mystique "rooted in instincts of graciousness, chivalry, generosity and a benevolent aristocratic idealism, all attributes of the plantation society.""

"Today, the more I learn about segregation and the Jim Crow system in Virginia, the more I agree with the great Virginia civil rights lawyer Oliver W. Hill Sr., a law partner with Samuel Tucker. Hill found a better way to explain the "Virginia way of life" that helped form me. In 1985, he described life for southern African American citizens during the Jim Crow era: "Virginia and the whole South were police states. There isn't a question about that. Negroes didn't serve on juries... You saw no blacks in places like city hall, or public buildings, unless, maybe an elevator operator or janitor. And that's the way it was." If the Virginia of my youth was no democracy, if I call a plantation an enslaved labor farm, then I should also call segregated Virginia by its true name- a racial police state. To be clear, the South of my birth was no democracy."

"I wanted to be a Virginia gentleman, not a lawyer, not a teacher, not a businessman, and certainly not an army officer. Those were all careers, professions, jobs. I wanted to be a gentleman. That meant something to a white boy growing up in the South. A gentleman meant honor, chivalry, and good manners. It meant status."

"Maybe my wife is right. Alexandria might be a Washington suburb now. And that leaves me hopeful. Yet my white southern roots know that beneath the veneer of civility lurks a dark past of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. Maybe we are both right. Alexandria is both southern and not so southern, trying to shed its glorification of the Confederate cause incrementally. I understand. We find it hard to confront our past because it's so ugly, but the alternative to ignoring our racist history is creating a racist future."

"The popular tourism slogan "Virginia Is for Lovers" has so many meanings to me. It certainly has meant love in the traditional sense: I fell deeply in love and got married in the Old Dominion. But the slogan also means a love of everything the state has to offer. There's a lot to love: the history, the southern charm of the people and places, the mountains, the water, the big cities, the small towns, and the many country roads. I was born and raised in Virginia and have lived in the state for all but six years of my life, when I was in the U.S. Army. My army time gave me a wanderlust that led to a career of travel. I'm a travel writer and photographer by trade and roam the world in search of a good story. But there's nothing better than roaming my own state on a country road."

""Virginia is for lovers"- of weekends. There's a lot to love: the history, the southern charm of the people and places, the mountains, the water, the big cities, and the small towns. All of this makes for many great weekend options. I was born and raised in Virginia and have lived in the state most of my life. My Army time gave me a wanderlust that led to a career of travel. I'm a travel writer and photographer by trade and roam the world in search of a good story. But there's nothing better than a weekend spent in Virginia."

"Richmond is a city rich with tradition and vibrant with growth. It's a great place to spend a weekend. Richmond is at the heart of everything wonderful about the Old (and new) Dominion, offering an interesting blend of the modern and the historic. Over a billion dollars of shiny new buildings grace the downtown skyline, but they coexist with restored mansions, museums, and warehouses. Richmonders and visitors alike enjoy the new and old riches, but city life still moves at a southern gentleman's (and gentlewoman's) pace."

"[I]n 1782, Virginia passed a bill permitting private manumissions. Over the next ten years, Virginians manumitted about 1,000 slaves, including some who had fought as substitutes for their owners. Many more, however, were returned to slavery, so many, in fact, that the legislature felt compelled to speak out against this obvious injustice. In the fall of 1783, it passed a bill condemning owners who contrary to principles of justice and to their own solemn promise," kept their substitutes in slavery. It also instructed the Attorney General of Virginia to act on behalf of slaves held in servitude despite their war-time service and grant them the freedom they had earned. It is unknown how many slaves were freed in Virginia as a reward for military service."

"Virginia led the way among the colonies in excluding blacks from militia service, when the House of Burgesses required in January 1639 that only white Virginians arm themselves."

"I think Stone Mountain is amusing, but then again I find most representations of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson outside of Virginia, and, in Jackson's case, West Virginia, to be amusing."

"'The people of the South', says a contemporary, 'are not fighting for slavery but for independence'. Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy, a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland... Our doctrine is this. WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork."

"Virginians typically treated their slaves harshly."

"Better, far better! Endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar."

"Our story actually begins at Jamestown, as almost all Virginia stories do... yes, even the story of Hampden-Sydney's College Presbyterian Church."

"The Jamestown settlers never ever pretended to have come to the New World on a noble quest for religious freedom. Instead, they represented a daring economic endeavor which was sponsored by a group of venture capitalists who were collectively known as The Virginia Company. Many of these forefathers of the fabled "First Families of Virginia" were, in fact, escaping Old World arrest warrants, debt collectors, paternity suits, military obligations, home duties, and the like. No, for the Jamestown pioneers- as well as for most of those who soon followed them to other nearby Tidewater villages and plantations- the purity and the practice of their Christian faith were secondary matters... although the Jamestown colony did have an Anglican priest among its settlers, and very shortly he began celebrating the Eucharist for these men. There were Calvinist Puritans in this group, but they just quietly tolerated this religious exercise without protest, while not completely embracing its theology."

"However, even if these earliest Virginians had been seeking the free and unfettered practice of their particular type of Christianity, there would be no true "religious freedom" anywhere in Virginia for nearly two more centuries... and therefore surviving with one's personal faith intact would become the defining struggle for most of the Presbyterians who immigrated to this same colony during the 17th and 18th centuries."

"Officially all of the early white Virginia settlers [and any of their black slaves and their native neighbors (e.g., Pocahontas) who were subsequently evangelized into Christianity] were supposed to be, or assumed to be, members of the Anglican Church. While those who openly declared themselves to be otherwise were not specifically labeled as "outlaws", their rather prejudicial classification as "dissenters" meant that those daring-to-be-different Christians were living on the teeter-totter edge of colonial legality, Crown loyalty, and civil propriety."

"When a civil war began in the 1640s between the King's forces and the Parliamentary forces, many English religious dissenters joined the anti-royalists. At this time, Virginia's royal governor, William Berkeley, reacted by arbitrarily condemning all Virginia dissenters as similar being seditious anti-royalists; some Tidewater dissenters were banished from Virginia at this time, while others simply moved farther up the James River to areas (in present-day Hanover County) north and west of its fall-line. Some of these "uprooted and transplanted" Piedmont dissenters became the ancestors of the Presbyterian congregation that would later be formed at Hampden-Sydney, Virginia."

"The Virginia town of Charlottesville is a good place to remember. I was born there on March 13, 1887, and lived there until 1909 when I left for a new home, the Marine Corps. Forty years later I returned, then moved to Florida, my current home. Charlottesville is still a good place to remember. To me Charlottesville will always be a little town sitting quiet in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the home of some 8,000 people, dirt streets lighted by gas lamps, a yellow glow that on a winter evening peeped comfortably through the drawn drapery of the red-brick houses on East High Street- my route when I was hurrying to explain to my parents why I was late for supper."

"In those years we lived rather close to the Civil War, an atmosphere that molded our likes and dislikes almost into one. We were so soundly Democratic that our parents always pointed out Charlottesville's only Republican to any visitor. The first time politics meant anything to me was during Grover Cleveland's second campaign. My mother took me to the balcony of Monticello Hotel to watch a torchlight political parade which to me meant my father handsomely dressed in a gray alpaca coat, a gray beaver hat and a rooster on his shoulder. Such state occasions rarely occurred. Most of the time we entertained ourselves. In spring, when Virginia smells sweeter than any place I have since visited in the world, we went blackberrying to bring back loaded pails which Henrietta, my mother's cook of long years, baked into fragrant and delicious pies. Summers we swam in the Rivanna River, a muddy little stream about two miles from town; sometimes we fished it from an old flat-bottomed boat and occasionally pulled out a perch or catfish. When the leaves turned brown we took schoolbags and hiked to the nearby Ragged Mountains to garner bushels of chestnuts and later to cook them over red coals and enjoy their odor as much as their meat. After Christmas the little ponds sometimes froze over, which meant digging out skates from the hall closet and trying our luck on ice never more than an inch and a half thick- and many were the duckings we took."

"This being only thirty years after the Civil War, Charlottesville abounded in military experiences. From as long as I can remember Grandfather Carson told me stories about his campaigns. He was a very impressive man and I listened carefully to his tales. He was also very devout. A Baptist deacon, he said prayers before breakfast; if you missed these, you missed breakfast. He held few men in awe, but those few he treated mighty respectfully- he always prayed to "the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.""

"A well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."

"Sic semper tyrannis"

"Virginia for so long has made me look back on whatever regional identity it might have. My first impression is that it doesn't really have one... Virginia, for those without easy transportation options, is downright god-awfully boring."

"Today, I offer the Commonwealth's sincere apology for Virginia's participation in eugenics. We must remember the Commonwealth's past mistakes in order to prevent them from recurring."

"There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. We have consistently denied the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause."