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The colony of Virginia began in a suitably dramatic fashion. The dashing soldier and courtier Walter Raleigh financed an audacious project to plant England's first settlement in the New World. From a hidden base on the island of Roanoke, the colonists were to prey on Spanish shipping for the enrichment of themselves, their proprietor, and their queen - but these plans evaporated when the settlement mysteriously disappeared. Raleigh sent multiple expeditions to find the colonists without success. When Raleigh fell out of favor and was imprisoned in the Tower of London, a new company of investors picked up where he left off, using maps and documents from his project to help them found a new settlement, Jamestown.

The Jamestown project also faltered, barely surviving for fifteen years in part thanks to the martial discipline of its first governor, Captain John Smith, who is remembered as Virginia's second founder. The colony was finally revived by a royal takeover and the development of tobacco as an export crop. The system of Headrights, which began in 1618, rewarded large tracts to owners who could bring along crews of dependents, and this began to gradually attract a sizeable English population. Most of the laborers were paupers from England and Ireland who indentured themselves in the hope of finding prosperity in the colony after the end of their terms.

A small but growing portion of the laborers were slaves purchased from Africa, who worked the land under various forms of bonded labor. The system of New World slavery, with its attendant strict racial caste divisions, had not yet been codified. At this point, African and European workers lived and worked side by side, and the Africans' bondage was limited to a term of years.

The relatively low Black population at this time, and the high death rate among all the colonists, meant that the freed Black workers of the early 17th century left few descendants in most of Virginia. The exception was the Accomac Peninsula, also called the Eastern Shore, where a few Black families acquired land and became a nucleus for a large free population. Almost immediately there was intermarriage with local White farmers, so that by the 18th century the "Accomacs" were recognized as a distinct, mixed-race group within Virginia. Their presence in the state and their rights as citizens continually stymied the efforts of those who wished to replicate the absolute slave system that had come to define the Caribbean sugar islands. The Accomacs had to weather three centuries of social discrimination and attempt after attempt to chip away at their rights, but still they were there, and their very presence meant that Virginia could never define citizenship in purely racial terms, as happened in Carolina and elsewhere.

For most of the colonial era, Virginia governed itself with minimum interference from England. The governor was a crown appointee and represented royal authority, but Virginian landowners had ample power to make laws in their own interests through the House of Burgesses, a legislature whose roots went back to the earliest days at Jamestown. As long as the tobacco trade remained profitable, the English government did not care to involve itself in its affairs.

Conflict with the Indians that surrounded the colony went on almost without ceasing throughout the era. The Headright system practically demanded that Virginia constantly acquire new land. As the zone of tobacco cultivation spread its tendrils up both sides of every river in the region, many of the inhabitants fought back. Despite efforts by some governors to be diplomatic, the colonists usually retaliated brutally. Bacon's Rebellion of the 1670s erupted in part out of a desire of the poorer colonists for a more aggressive policy against the Indians. By the later 18th century, most of the Indians had been reduced to small dependent towns or had left the area completely to join independent nations further west.

In 1689, Maryland declared for the Jacobite pretender, prompting Virginia's governor Lord Effingham to lead an invasion of the rebellious colony to the north. The Virginians were not enthusiastic soldiers when not defending their own homes, and Effingham found himself unable to keep his force together after the first year. He returned to the new capital Williamsburg with the Jacobites still in power in Maryland. The war had one concrete result, however. Effingham had sent a detachment south to garrison the little settlements, largely made up of Virginians, that Carolina had claimed around Roanoke Sound - supposedly for their security in case of Jacobite attack or infiltration. But the governor did not relinquish the sound after the war ended. Virginia stayed in control, and thus began centuries of border disputes between the two states. The disputes mostly went in Virginia's favor, for the territory in question remains part of Lower Virginia today.

For a half century, Virginia's growth was fast and steady. The greatest landowners grew fabulously rich from the sale of tobacco, and even the common free people were able to live prosperously.

In the 1760s, England's colonies grew increasingly resentful of its policies in the New World, in particular its policies on trade and taxes. This resentment spawned protest, then resistance, and finally revolution. Virginia was one of the leaders of the movement to break away from the English monarchy. Virginians provided much of the intellectual and military leadership behind the revolution and were at the center of the fiercest fighting. First among these leaders was George Washington. When the war broke out, he was a young militia officer with some experience in Indian wars and diplomacy. He distinguished himself enough to become the commander-in-chief not just of Virginia's rebel army, but of a united force combining troops from all the Republican colonies. More of a strategic than a tactical thinker, Washington enabled his army to outlast the English and Loyalists despite not winning many battles. He is remembered as Virginia's third and greatest founding figure.

Especially in the inland parts of the state, the revolution was drawn out into a bloody, protracted civil war between partisans of the different factions. Much of the fighting shifted to the southern border after Carolina declared for the Loyalists. Virginia was able to hold most of its territory, defeating an invading English army with the help of French allies. Its only major loss was the island of Bermuda, a colony dependent on Virginia, which England had occupied shortly after war broke out.

The War of Independence ended inconclusively in Virginia. England, recognizing the impossibility of controlling thousands of miles of unruly countryside, was prepared to concede and recognize Virginia's independence. However, it would not acquiesce to what it saw as Virginia's extravagant land claims. Virginia demanded the return of Bermuda and recognition of its claim to almost the entire Ohio basin. These claims frustrated even Virginia's allies, who by and large did not lay claim to huge lands in the west. They each made a separate peace with England, the New England states in the Treaty of the Hague and Pennsylvania through less formal negotiations in London. Virginia saw them as traitors, while they criticized the greed of the Virginians. Virginia's borders were the scene of low-intensity but still bloody fighting for another generation.

Washington was elected unopposed to be Virginia's first postwar President. More concerned with stability than with greatness, he did not aggressively pursue expansion west of the Appalachians. He focused his external policy on the dream of Confederation with the other newly independent states. This dream is reflected in the flag of Lower Virginia and the other states that descend from it: the rattlesnake is a symbol of revolutionary defiance, while the stripes represent unity among the new republics.

However, these policies did not last. Conflict among the republics blocked every attempt at unity. Instead, a new alliance took shape that encompassed all the English states, both Republicans and Loyalists. The Annapolis Congress of 1781 laid the groundwork for this alliance, and Washington's enthusiastic support helped to win acceptance for it among Virginians who might otherwise oppose any ties with their recent enemies. Congresses were held throughout the 1780s that helped the states resolve many issues left over from the wars. They did not stop new rivalries from forming, especially as the states came into conflict over control of the west.

Virginia's occupation of the Ohio valley began during the war, when General Clark built his line of blockhouses along the southern bank of the river. After the war, thousands of Virginians headed west to occupy the land that they claimed as rightfully theirs. Washington, wary of any policy that could provoke further conflict, gave only lukewarm support to expansion, but his successors eagerly promoted westward migration. Soon Virginians and groups of allied Cherokee were flocking to growing settlements on both sides of the river. The fortified stations of the early period were giving way to prosperous farming villages and river towns.

Westward interests brought Virginia into direct competition with its fellow republic Pennsylvania, and led it to renew its alliance with its wartime ally, French Canada. Canada and Virginia complemented each other well. Their spheres of interest in the Ohio Country did not overlap much: Canada was interested in the north and Virginia in the south. Canada had unmatched experience in village politics and a network of allies, while Virginia had a large population and a strong military and militia. In 1802 they signed a pact - the League of Saint Joseph - that divided the entire area between them.

The alliance achieved the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than making Canada and Virginia the masters of the west, it provoked all the other states to declare war to defend their claims. The course of the war was largely favorable for Virginia, especially at sea: it managed to capture and hold its coveted dependency of Bermuda. In the 1808 Treaty of Bath Virginia got much of what it wanted: Bermuda and its western claims south of the Ohio. It had to surrender its claims north of the river, but was permitted to keep its interests in three small provinces of the territory, which became known as Losanti, General Clark, and The Ranges. In those provinces, Virginia was allowed to own a number of forts, roads, and ferries, and to grant some land to its citizens, but it did not have legal jurisdiction over the territory.

Virginia came out of the war ready to take on the world. It had managed to more than hold its own, defending its major settlements and becoming a veritable naval power with the capture of Bermuda. Most Virginians expected that their state would continue to expand its territory, and state policy reflected this expectation. But the political situation in postwar Boreoamerica had irrevocably changed. New systems were coming into being that would block the ambitions of any one state.

For about a decade after the war, Virginia continued to seek new territory. To the west, it secured an outlet to the Mississippi by purchasing a tract from the Chicasaw Nation, a region today known as Tishomingo after the chief who led the negotiations. In exchange, Virginia gave Chicasaw a generous annual subsidy and help to develop a Mississippi River port. Virginia was intentionally maintaining its alliance with the Chicasaw, its wartime ally, in order to keep it on its side in the next war. To the northwest, Virginia did all it could to develop its properties in Ohio, predicting that before too long, changing circumstances would allow it to annex the areas directly. In Illinois, Virginia managed to pressure France into ceding it territory in the far south where its own settlers formed a majority. And to the east, Virginia's navy garrisoned its new islands, including Bermuda's distant dependency of Turks and Caicos, and discussed what other islands it could take next.

Despite these successes, Boreoamerica and its geopolitics were changing. The Grand Council had its roots in meetings between France and Indian leaders, both allied and nonaligned; after the war, it became a much larger, more permanent, and more powerful body that all of the formerly warring states turned to to interpret details of their treaties. In the community of English states, the restored Congress also passed many acts aiming to prevent future wars, led by firmly antiwar delegations from New England. And locally, the Ohio Alliance gradually centralized its authority over the region north of the river, making it impossible for Virginia to treat its properties there as extensions of its state territory.

Within Virginia, a key policy issue became the question of Affiliation. Some Virginians supported the new order that was emerging, while others objected to it in the belief that it violated Virginia's founding ideas of revolutionary republicanism. Was it appropriate for the state to respect the interests of monarchical powers like New France and the English Loyalists? Was not the state, with its republican system, destined to overspread the continent? Could Virginia affiliate with its neighbors and still maintain the purity of its ideals? The revolutionary ideology had been central to Virginia's identity in the war years and had driven much of its land hunger. Now, political realities required Virginians to rethink it.

Virginia's political life in the decades following 1810 was in many ways a search for a new republicanism that could be reconciled with the new situation on the continent. Patriotic symbolism infused the culture during these years, including a reverence for the ancient Roman Republic. An ideology of assertive social egalitarianism took root, at least among White citizens, though the Accomacs and other free nonwhites also tried to newly assert their own rights in this climate. Virginia's gentry had to step aside from their traditional overt displays of power and wealth.

The result was a boisterous, rough-and-tumble political culture. Supporters and opponents of Affiliation competed in elections that featured rallies, songs, drinks, and brawls that made this an iconic era in Virginian history. The leading supporter of Affiliation was Cassius Clay, a young leader with an impeccably republican name, whose biography of westward migration seemed to encapsulate the recent history of the state. Despite his personal connection to Virginian expansionism, Clay became the champion of compromise and Affiliation in his long career in Congresses and Great Councils during these decades. While most Virginians were probably still skeptical of the emerging confederation, leaders like Clay helped to make the historical change more palatable.

Virginia's own system of alliances also nudged it toward affiliation. Virginia had begun to see its two closest allies, Watauga and Chicasaw, more or less as loyal client states, and when it sponsored their admission into the growing Affiliated Congress, it expected them to vote accordingly. However, both states became champions of Affiliation. It seems that the Chicasaw never intended their alliance with Virginia to be more than an expedient that would help them to avoid the ambitions of France and England, and a wider alliance helped them achieve this better than links to Virginia ever could. And Watauga in the era of Crockett famously led the largely Indian states of the inland south in a movement toward closer alliance and consolidated government.

By the 1830s and 40s, most Virginians accepted that their state could not realistically pursue a course that was totally independent of its neighbors. In this environment, the newly settled west began to seek greater autonomy. There had always been an independent streak in the cultural DNA of the west, going back to the separatist founders of Watauga and Transylvania, but the need to stay united in the face of outside attacks had so far kept the two parts of Virginia united. Now, with continental war looking less likely all the time, that independent streak was coming to the surface again. There were calls to split off the west as a separate state as early as 1820. Decades of proposals and counter-proposals followed, including multiple plans to divide the state into several federalized regions. Finally, the General Assembly in 1850 approved a division into two states, Upper and Lower Virginia.

As a side note, the other modern state that has broken away from Virginia, Bermuda, did not go through this same difficulty. For the entire colonial era, Bermuda was self-governing and had its own legislature despite being connected to Virginia. After the Wars of Independence, when England occupied the islands, it kept Bermuda's government and had it participate in the Anglo-American Congress as a loyalist state. When Virginia reconquered it, it did not attempt to curtail any of these liberties, so Bermuda had most of the rights of statehood despite being legally part of Virginia. It began to call itself the State of Bermuda around the same time that Upper and Lower Virginia were divided, but its relationship to Lower Virginia did not change yet.

The end of Virginia's physical expansion also had economic consequences. Since the days of colonial Headrights, new available land had been the main driver of the economy. Without new land, Virginia found that its system of slave plantations made for economic stagnation. This became even more clear after the division of the state, since almost all of the remaining unused arable land was west of the new border. Virginia's economic stagnation compared to some of its northern neighbors began to embolden the critics of slavery. In the meantime, Virginia's slave system only entrenched itself further as the sale of slaves to work the growing cotton fields of Muscoguia and Choctaw was the one area of the economy to show lively growth. But everyone knew that this would not last forever. Both Indian states were already putting restrictions on the notorious trade in the 1850s, and a total ban on importation came not long after.

By midcentury, the question of Affiliation had been answered in the affirmative. The confederal institutions adopted the name Affiliated States of Boreoamerica in 1841; a few years later they had their own representative body, the Parliament; by 1868 Parliament was acting as something like a confederal government rather than a forum for discussion. Lower Virginia had to content itself with being an influential player in confederal politics rather than a regional power. Its own state politics now had other issues to occupy it.

The issues of race and slavery fill the pages of Virginia's history for the next century. These questions played out differently in every state. In Virginia, the following complex factors pulled the state in different directions:

• Slaves were a minority of the state's population, but their numbers were high enough that in many areas, they did constitute a majority.
• Virginia's free Black population was long established; the state had a solid demographic and legal basis for Black freedom, unlike states like Carolina where race and enslaved status were synonymous.
• Virginia's slaveowning class had centuries of experience cultivating a politics of White solidarity against Blacks, stamping out class-based opposition to slavery. This is also in contrast to Carolina, where antislavery royal governors worked to harness lower-class resentment of the power of slaveowners.
• The ASB had no confederal law on fugitive slaves. States that had abolished slavery had differing laws on fugitives from other states, but by the later 19th century the clear trend was to welcome them as refugees rather than pursue them as criminals
• After the interstate slave trade was abolished, slavery became more of an economic burden than a benefit for many planters.

That last factor proved to be the most crucial in slavery's endgame in Lower Virginia. The first major conflict erupted in the 1860s over manumissions. With slavery no longer as profitable as it had been, especially for small and mid-sized planters, many owners began to free their slaves in greater njumbers. A frightened General Assembly, dominated by the interests of the great planters, passed a series of restrictions on when and how masters could manumit their slaves. A slew of court cases followed, brought by both planters and freedmen, challenging these laws on constitutional grounds. Some of the suits were successful and others were not, so for many years it was hard to say just what the law was on manumission. To meet the objections of the planters, some politicians proposed subsidies that would essentially pay the masters for keeping their slaves, but the state's treasury could not support such a program.

The next conflict concerned discriminatory laws. Lower Virginia's free Black population had long enjoyed the protections afforded them by common law, but some laws had made their way into the state code that did discriminate based on race. Now, with the number of freedmen in the state seeming to get bigger by the day, new laws were trotted out to restrict their rights, especially their right to vote. Racial discrimination in general could not pass legal muster, but judges were more favorable to laws that discriminated based on prior condition of servitude, and even the status of the parents.

By the late 1870s, the state had reached a legal consensus over what laws were permissible on manumission and discrimination. But the writing was on the wall that slavery would have to end. In 1880, Lower Virginia, Carolina, and Cuba were the only states where slavery still existed and had not been slated for eventual abolition - and that year, Carolina passed a law of immediate, universal emancipation in an atmosphere of civil turmoil. Fighting in Carolina easily crossed the border into Lower Virginia. When some freedman and fugitives started to join up with antislavery militias, the state appeared on the verge of a full-blown rebellion.

The rest of the ASB now stepped in. Public opinion across the confederation had turned sharply against the diehard slave states, and for many, the bloodshed in the south was the last straw. Parliament passed a law in 1882 that gave all states five years to abolish slavery, however they went about it. When some in Lower Virginia vowed to resist the law, Chief Minister James Garfield declared that abolition was not a matter of mere internal state policy, but of general peace and security; and that the confederal troops that Carolina had requested were more than able to go north to deal with civil strife in Lower Virginia. Cornered, the Lower Virginians acquiesced. However, they would be able to gain more support from other states in forcing Garfield to withdraw his even more controversial proposal for universal voting rights.

Since slavery had been declining for decades before the 1887 deadline, emancipation was not as much of a shock in Lower Virginia as it was elsewhere. The remaining slaves largely were working for only the wealthiest masters on the largest plantations, and a majority stayed there as sharecroppers and paid workers when their status changed. Laws limiting the civil and political rights of freedmen faced only weak opposition from the established free people of color. In 1896 universal male suffrage became the law of the ASB; Lower Virginia resorted to clever ways to limit this group's participation in elections.

The turn of the twentieth century brought still more changes as the Industrial Revolution came to Lower Virginia. The end of slavery indeed added stimulus to the economy as both capital and labor were freed up to redirect themselves to industry. Growing urban middle and working classes would transform Lower Virginia in the coming century.

Both the economy and political life of Lower Virginia changed but slowly, however. The state lacked a clear urban center, so factories and neighborhoods appeared piecemeal in the various tiny cities throughout the state. Eventually the region called Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the Chesapeake, emerged as the most attractive area for the obvious value of its ports. The capital, which had moved around a few times since Independence, returned to the city of Williamsburg in 1928 to be close to this new center of economic activity. The cities of Hampton Roads have kept growing since then, and Williamsburg remains the capital.

Lower Virginia's system of segregation, based on descent from slaves rather than on race per se, remained in effect until the 1970s. It proved to be a system ripe for fraud. People migrating from Carolina and elsewhere found it easy enough to fake their ancestries. The market for falsified genealogies was brisk. Meanwhile, plenty of people with bona fide free status found themselves the victims of discrimination, too. Just like in the 19th century, Lower Virginian leaders faced a disconnect between their desire for a society clearly demarcated by race, and the more fluid racial reality in which they actually lived.

Once again, the personal intervention of an activist Chief Minister was necessary to effect change in the state. Lindon Jordan of Muscoguia negotiated with the leaders of the segregationist states, offering confederal aid in exchange for reform. Lower Virginia's president, Wyatt Williams, and the leaders of both houses of the General Assembly agreed to the terms and pushed through a set of reform bills that made all citizens equal under the law. The decision would end the political careers of all three men, but it spared Lower Virginia much of the turmoil that engulfed more recalcitrant states like Carolina and Choctaw.

The modern history of Lower Virginia has been characterized by tension between the old state and the new. A free, modern society exists together with old resentments. Lower Virginians have derived some inspiration from the ideals of their own revolutionary past. Their state once led the world in the fight for freedom and equality for all, they say, and there is no reason why it cannot do so again.