Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia,[a] is a state in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The state's capital is Richmond and its most populous city is Virginia Beach. Its most populous subdivision is Fairfax County, part of Northern Virginia, where slightly over a third of Virginia's population of 8.7 million live.
Eastern Virginia is part of the Atlantic Plain, and the Middle Peninsula forms the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Central Virginia lies predominantly in the Piedmont, the foothill region of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which cross the western and southwestern parts of the state. The fertile Shenandoah Valley fosters the state's most productive agricultural counties, while the economy in Northern Virginia is driven by technology companies and U.S. federal government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency. Hampton Roads is also the site of the region's main seaport and Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval base.
Virginia's history begins with several Indigenous groups, including the Powhatan. In 1607, the London Company established the Colony of Virginia as the first permanent English colony in the New World, leading to Virginia's nickname as the Old Dominion. Slaves from Africa and land from displaced native tribes fueled the growing plantation economy, but also fueled conflicts both inside and outside the colony. Virginians fought for the independence of the Thirteen Colonies in the American Revolution, and helped establish the new national government. During the American Civil War, the state government in Richmond joined the Confederacy, while many northwestern counties remained loyal to the Union, which led to the separation of West Virginia in 1863.
Although the state was under one-party rule for nearly a century following the Reconstruction era, both major political parties have been competitive in Virginia since the repeal of Jim Crow laws in the 1970s. Virginia's state legislature is the Virginia General Assembly, which was established in July 1619, making it the oldest current law-making body in North America. Unlike other states, cities and counties in Virginia function as equals, but the state government manages most local roads inside each. It is also the only state where governors are prohibited from serving consecutive terms.
Nomadic hunters are estimated to have arrived in Virginia around 17,000 years ago. Evidence from Daugherty's Cave in Russell County shows it was regularly used as a rock shelter by 9,800 years ago.[5] During the late Woodland period (500–1000 CE), tribes coalesced, and farming, first of corn and squash, began, with beans and tobacco arriving from the southwest and Mexico by the end of the period. Palisaded towns began to be built around 1200, and the native population in the current boundaries of Virginia reached around 50,000 in the 1500s.[6] Large groups in the area at that time included the Algonquian in the Tidewater region, which they referred to as Tsenacommacah, the Iroquoian-speaking Nottoway and Meherrin to the north and south, and the Tutelo, who spoke Siouan, to the west.[7]
In response to threats from these other groups to their trade network, thirty or so Virginia Algonquian-speaking tribes consolidated during the 1570s under Wahunsenacawh, known in English as Chief Powhatan.[7] Powhatan controlled more than 150 settlements that had a total population of around 15,000 in 1607.[8] Three-fourths of the native population in Virginia, however, died from smallpox and other Old World diseases during that century,[9] disrupting their oral traditions and complicating research into earlier periods.[10] Additionally, many primary sources, including those that mention Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, were created by Europeans, who may have held biases or misunderstood native social structures and customs.[4][11]
Several European expeditions, including a group of Spanish Jesuits, explored the Chesapeake Bay during the 16th century.[12] To help counter Spain's colonies in the Caribbean, Queen Elizabeth I of England supported Walter Raleigh's April 1584 expedition to the Atlantic coast of North America.[13][14] The name "Virginia" was used by Captain Arthur Barlowe in the expedition's report, and may have been suggested that year by Raleigh or Elizabeth, perhaps noting her status as the "Virgin Queen" or that they viewed the land as being untouched, and may also be related to an Algonquin phrase, Wingandacoa or Windgancon, or leader's name, Wingina, as heard by the expedition.[15][16] The name initially applied to the entire coastal region from South Carolina in the south to Maine in the north, along with the island of Bermuda.[17] Raleigh's colony failed, but the potential financial and strategic gains still captivated many English policymakers, and in 1606, King James I issued a charter for a new colony to the Virginia Company of London. The group financed an expedition under Christopher Newport that crossed the Atlantic and established a settlement named Jamestown in May 1607.[18]
Though more settlers soon joined, many were ill-prepared for the dangers of the new settlement. As the colony's president, John Smith secured food for the colonists from nearby tribes, but after he left in 1609, this trade stopped and a series of ambush-style killings between colonists and natives under Chief Powhatan and his brother began, resulting in mass starvation in the colony that winter.[19] By the end of the colony's first fourteen years, over eighty percent of the roughly eight thousand settlers transported there had died.[20] Demand for exported tobacco, however, fueled the need for more workers.[21] Starting in 1618, the headright system tried to solve this by granting colonists farmland for their help attracting indentured servants.[22] Enslaved Africans were first sold in Virginia in 1619. Though other Africans arrived under the rules of indentured servitude, and could be freed after four to seven years, the basis for lifelong slavery was developed in legal cases like those of John Punch in 1640 and John Casor in 1655.[23] Laws passed in Jamestown defined slavery as race-based in 1661, as inherited maternally in 1662, and as enforceable by death in 1669.[24]
_September_2012.jpg/1280px-The_Governor's_Palace_--_Williamsburg_(VA)_September_2012.jpg)
From the colony's start, residents agitated for greater local control, and in 1619, certain male colonists began electing representatives to an assembly, later called the House of Burgesses, that negotiated issues with the governing council appointed by the London Company.[26] Unhappy with this arrangement, the monarchy revoked the company's charter and began directly naming governors and Council members in 1624. In 1635, colonists arrested a governor who ignored the assembly and sent him back to England against his will.[27] William Berkeley was named governor in 1642, just as the turmoil of the English Civil War and Interregnum permitted the colony greater autonomy.[28] As a supporter of the king, Berkeley welcomed other so-called Cavaliers who fled to Virginia. He surrendered to Parliamentarians in 1652, but after the 1660 Restoration made him governor again, he blocked assembly elections and exacerbated the class divide by disenfranchising and restricting the movement of indentured servants, who made up around eighty percent of the colony's workforce.[29] On the colony's frontier, Piedmont tribes like the Tutelo and Doeg were being squeezed by Seneca raiders from the north, leading to more confrontations with colonists. In 1676, several hundred working-class followers of Nathaniel Bacon, upset by Berkeley's refusal to retaliate against the tribes, marched to Jamestown and burned it.[30]
Bacon's Rebellion forced the signing of