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This is the second page of an itemized list of the expenses that the state's engineer department incurred in renting slaves and horses to work on defensive works at Gloucester Point, on the north bank of the York River, in the month of April 1861.…

Peter Jacob Carter won election to the House of Delegates in 1871 to represent Northampton County. He served eight consecutive years and became a leader in the Republican Party.

These two photographs show some of Virginia's first interracial jury members. In May 1867, the United States Circuit Court for the District of Virginia appointed a grand jury composed of African American and white men. The court also named African…

In 1867 a former enslaved man named Peter Wiggins petitioned the Westmoreland County Court to gain custody of the two sons and two daughters he and Malinda Thompson had before the Civil War; but because Wiggins had been married to a woman named Ann…

For several months after the end of the war, the army stationed soldiers, including African Americans, throughout Virginia to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and protect the freedpeople. White Lunenburg County residents petitioned Governor…

In November 1865, the Norfolk County Court petitioned the officer of the Freedmen's Bureau in Norfolk to take away the firearms belonging to African Americans. Local white residents had complained complained about African Americans "in the habit of…

This plat of the grounds of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, prepared for a lawsuit settled in 1906, shows the placement of buildings as well as the use of space for raising crops, both to feed the faculty and students and to teach…

In 1865 David B. White, a former colonel of the New York 81st Infantry Volunteers, established the True Southerner in Hampton (later moved to Norfolk). Operating with the motto "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created…

African Americans cheered as Abraham Lincoln toured the city of Richmond a day after it had been liberated by the United States Army in April 1865.

After the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation in 1866 to legalize marriages of formerly enslaved men and women and to legitimate their children. In addition to registering couples, Freedmen's Bureau agents also compiled separate registers of…