http://encyclopediavirginia.org http://encyclopediavirginia.org/img/EV_Logo_sm.gif This is the url http://encyclopediavirginia.org The first and ultimate online reference work about the Commonwealth /Convict_Labor_During_the_Colonial_Period Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:28:09 EST http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/encyclopediavirginia/cat7/~3/cO21tyrgiRI/Convict_Labor_During_the_Colonial_Period In 1615, English courts began to send convicts to the colonies as a way of alleviating England's large criminal population. This practice was unpopular in the colonies and by 1697 colonial ports refused to accept convict ships. In response, Parliament passed the Transportation Act of 1718 to create a more systematic way to export convicts. Instead of relying on merchants to make arrangements on their own to ship felons to the colonies, the British government subsidized the shipment of convicts through a network of merchants, giving a contract for the service to one individual at a time. Between 1700 and 1775, approximately 52,200 convicts sailed for the colonies, more than 20,000 of them to Virginia. Most of these convicts landed and were settled along the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Although many were unskilled and thus put to work in agriculture, particularly tobacco production, others with skills were sold to tradesmen, shipbuilders, and iron manufacturers, and for other similar occupations. Convict laborers could be purchased for a lower price than indentured white or enslaved African laborers, and because they already existed outside society's rules, they could be more easily exploited. Nevertheless, Virginia tried repeatedly to pass laws to prevent England from sending convicts, though those laws were overturned by the Crown. At the beginning of the American Revolution (1775–1783), colonial ports virtually ceased accepting convict ships. By 1776, when the last boatload of convicts arrived on the James River, many of the convicts had served their seven-to-fourteen-year terms and returned to Great Britain, while others had become honest citizens and blended into Virginia's colonial economy.
Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:28:09 EST]]>http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Convict_Labor_During_the_Colonial_Period /Billy_fl_1770s-1780s Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:58:23 EST http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/encyclopediavirginia/cat7/~3/qHhsHAhJiXQ/Billy_fl_1770s-1780s Billy was an enslaved African American who became a principal in a court case during the American Revolution (1775–1783). In 1781, the Prince William County Court indicted him for waging war against the state from a British armed ship. Despite his testimony that he had been forced to board the vessel against his will and had never taken up arms on behalf of the British, the court convicted Billy of treason and sentenced him to be hanged. Two dissenting judges argued to Governor Thomas Jefferson that a slave, being a noncitizen, could not commit treason. Billy received a gubernatorial reprieve, and the General Assembly pardoned him on June 14, 1781. What happened to him after that is not known. Billy made his mark on history because his trial forced white leaders to confront the logic of slavery. Excluded from the protections conferred by citizenship, he was ultimately shielded from execution because Virginia's law of treason could not logically apply to him.
Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:58:23 EST]]>http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Billy_fl_1770s-1780s /Military_Executions_During_the_Civil_War Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:30:10 EST http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/encyclopediavirginia/cat7/~3/4Akft0dLKf8/Military_Executions_During_the_Civil_War More soldiers were executed during the American Civil War (1861–1865) than in all other American wars combined. Approximately 500 men, representing both North and South, were shot or hanged during the four-year conflict, two-thirds of them for desertion. The Confederate Articles of War (1861) specified that "all officers and soldiers who have received pay, or have been duly enlisted in the services of the Confederate States, and shall be convicted of having deserted the same, shall suffer death, or such other punishment as, by sentence of a court-martial, shall be inflicted." The General Orders of the War Department (1861, 1862, 1863) directed that those men convicted of desertion were "to be shot to death with musketry, at such time and place as the commanding General may direct."
Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:30:10 EST]]>http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Military_Executions_During_the_Civil_War /_Confessions_of_Nat_Turner_The_1831 Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:25:53 EST http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/encyclopediavirginia/cat7/~3/cTBO5wPnZYQ/_Confessions_of_Nat_Turner_The_1831 "The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late insurrection in Southampton, Va., as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray" is a pamphlet published shortly after the trial and execution of Nat Turner in November 1831. The previous August, Turner, a slave preacher and self-styled prophet, had led the only successful slave revolt in Virginia's history, leaving fifty-five white people in Southampton County, Virginia, dead, the slaveholding South convulsed with panic, and the myth of the contented slave in tatters. His confessions, dictated from Turner's jail cell to a Southampton lawyer, have provided historians with a crucial perspective missing from an earlier planned uprising, by Gabriel (also sometimes known as Gabriel Prosser) in 1800, as well as fodder for debate over the veracity of Turner's account. Meanwhile, the book arguably is one of two American literary classics to come from the revolt, the other being The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Virginia-native William Styron, published at the height of the Black Power movement in September 1967. Each of these texts has demonstrated the power of print media to shape popular perceptions of historical fact, even as each raised critical questions of accuracy, authenticity, and community control over historical interpretations of the past.
Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:25:53 EST]]>http://encyclopediavirginia.org/_Confessions_of_Nat_Turner_The_1831 /Allen_Floyd_1856-1913 Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:56:23 EST http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/encyclopediavirginia/cat7/~3/Otg6S8ykNFs/Allen_Floyd_1856-1913 Floyd Allen was the central figure in one of the most sensational and bizarre incidents in Virginia criminal and legal history, the so-called "Hillsville Massacre." In the great Carroll County shootout in Hillsville on March 14, 1912, a judge, a sheriff, a commonwealth's attorney, a juror, and a spectator were all killed by shots fired by Allen and others after Allen was convicted of assault. Allen and several members of his family immediately fled the courtroom but were later captured and convicted of murder. Allen and his youngest son, Claude Swanson Allen, were both executed for their crimes.
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 12:56:23 EST]]>http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Allen_Floyd_1856-1913 /Cornwell_Patricia_1956- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:33:13 EST http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/encyclopediavirginia/cat7/~3/YWWcSvLjjRs/Cornwell_Patricia_1956- Patricia Cornwell is the prolific author of best-selling crime novels, as well as a major history of Jack the Ripper. Her Kay Scarpetta crime novels pioneered the detailed use of forensic science in detective fiction and have received a number of major English-language awards in the genre, as well as many international honors. Although Cornwell now resides in Massachusetts, her literary success was a Virginia phenomenon and her most successful works are set there. She lived in Richmond for more than twenty years and gained an intimate knowledge of forensic science through her job at Richmond's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where she worked occasionally in the morgue. Patricia Cornwell remains the city's most famous crime writer since Edgar Allan Poe—in Trace (2004), one of the Scarpetta novels, she even pays tongue-in-cheek homage to Poe in the character of Edgar Allan Pogue.
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:33:13 EST]]>http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cornwell_Patricia_1956-