Quotes About Virginia

White resistance to putting African Americans under arms was strongest in areas with the greatest concentrations of slaves. But even in Virginia, the heart of tobacco land, patriots could not ignore the possibilities for exploiting black manpower. More than half the free Negro males of military age in Virginia joined the army, probably for the same reason that freemen from the North enlisted: it was the best or only job available.

The fear of slaves on the one hand, and the military potential of mobilizing slaves on the other, gave a peculiar twist to the logic of war in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Maryland.

On November 14, 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, made it official: And I do hereby further declare all indented Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free, that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining HIS MAJESTY'S Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to HIS MAJESTY'S Crown and Dignity.42

Although Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, was the only British official to promise emancipation, many enslaved people throughout the South assumed that if they offered their services to the British they would be set free. To some extent this was true.

As governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson signed a bill granting every white male who enlisted for the duration of the war "300 acres of land plus a healthy sound Negro between 20 and 30 years of age or 60 pounds in gold

B. A. Botkin's Lay My Burden Down and the Federal Writers' Project book, The Negro in Virginia.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.

They say that Virginia is the mother of Texas. We never knew who the father was, but we kinda suspected Tennessee.

[Virginia] has a very sizeable collection of democrats, liberals and moonbats. (Yes, they can be separated.)

One of the few points of agreement between Anglican Virginians and Puritan New Englanders was their common loathing of Quakers.

Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century.

Not a good night for President Obama. He lost elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and he's not doing good in Afghanistan either.

A lot of good things start in Virginia; a lot of good things have started in Virginia. We're no strangers to firsts.

In all her history, from the formation of the federal government until the hour of secession, no year stands out more prominently than the year 1858 as evidencing the national patriotism of Virginia.

When I'm at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home.

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known euphemistically as the stately homes of England.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Vir

I took her in my arms and kissed her. And thus in the midst of a city of wild conflict, filled with the alarms of war; with death and destruction reaping their terrible harvest around her, did Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, true daughter of Mars, the God of War, promise herself in marriage to John Carter, Gentleman of Virginia.

E così, nel cuore di una città dove infuriava un conflitto selvaggio, piena di grida guerresche, mentre la morte e la distruzione mietevano dovunque un sanguinoso raccolto, Dejah Thoris, Principessa di Helium, vera figlia di Marte, Dio della Guerra, si promise in sposa a John Carter, gentiluomo della Virginia

In the spring of 1844, a good many white people in Manchester County remained uneasy about news from other places about slave "restlessness" that had gone on a few years before. In the North, people called it slave uprisings, but in much of Virginia the word uprisings had an abolitionist undertone and was felt to be too strong for what many slaveowners preferred to characterize as "a family squabble," instigated by unknowns not part of the family.

In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew each other's business.

The first example is that of Virginia, a State which, as we have seen, has expressly declared in its constitution, that the three great departments ought not to be intermixed. The authority in support of it is Mr. Jefferson, who, besides his other advantages for remarking the operation of the government, was himself the chief magistrate of it.