RICHMOND

Founded in 1742, Richmond became the capital of Virginia in 1780. The initial city charter allowed male property owners to elect a council, known as the "Common Hall," twelve citizens who appointed the mayor from their membership. After the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1774, delegates to the Virginia Convention descended on Richmond to organize defenses and a provisional government. In support of independence, Richmond provided soldiers, guns, gunpowder, and ship rigging. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was read publicly in Richmond, and in 1788 the Virginia Convention, meeting in Richmond, ratified the Constitution of the United States. Richmond's population grew from 600 inhabitants in 1770 to 5,706 in 1820. Early settlers included Germans from Philadelphia seeking land and Scottish tobacco merchants, but after the Revolution, European immigrants arrived from Haiti, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland. Settlers included Jews, who founded the Beth Shalome synagogue, and blacks, who made up around one-half the population.

Tobacco, coal, wheat, and black laborers were essential to Richmond's economy. Tobacco was Richmond's oldest economic sector; in the city it was warehoused, shipped, and manufactured into chewing tobacco. Between 1790 and 1830, coal output near Richmond grew from 22,000 to 100,000 tons annually. Richmond shipped coal to American cities, the West Indies, and Europe. As wheat became Virginia's major crop, Richmond increased its production of flour and shipped it to South America and California. Richmond manufacturers produced iron, gunpowder, ceramics, beer, musical instruments, paper, cotton textiles, coaches, soaps, and candles. Black slaves worked not only as domestic servants, but also in the flour, tobacco, and coal mining industries. Free blacks dominated the skilled crafts, including blacksmithing, coopering, masonry, and carpentry. At Richmond's slave auctions, traders sold Virginia-born blacks locally, but also sold them south to cotton plantations. The foreign trade embargo of 1807–1809, the War of 1812, and the Panic of 1819 weakened Richmond's industries and export businesses, which did not recover until the 1830s.

In the early national period, Richmond experienced technological and political change. Transportation and communication improved with the introduction of stagecoaches, canals, bridges, and steamboats. Politically, the Republican Party prevailed in the state as a whole, but Federalists dominated Richmond. In 1800, however, Jefferson carried Richmond in the presidential election. Operating from the capital, the Richmond Junto controlled Virginia's Republican organization. The three-man junto, including Judge Spencer Roane, the newspaper editor Thomas Ritchie, and Dr. John Brockenbrough, made officeholders dependent upon their backing and, by influencing financial decisions, controlled the party's purse strings. Junto members served on the boards of the Bank of Virginia and the Farmers Bank of Virginia, both based in Richmond.

In 1800 Gabriel Prosser secretly planned an insurrection involving thousands of other slaves in Richmond and throughout slaveholding areas of Virginia and North Carolina. Betrayed at the last minute, the conspirators delayed their plans, giving whites time to respond. Gabriel's Rebellion forced whites to abandon naïve conceptions of blacks as contented within a violent slave labor system. In 1829 and 1830, delegates to a constitutional convention debated slavery and the low representation of nonslaveholding western counties in the state legislature and, ultimately, adopted a new constitution. In 1831 Nat Turner's slave insurrection reignited these issues. When the Virginia General Assembly convened in Richmond, state legislators narrowly voted down a proposal to abolish slavery.

See alsoConstitution, Ratification of; Gabriel's Rebellion; Virginia .

bibliography

Berman, Myron. Richmond's Jewry, 1769–1976: Shabbat in Schockoe. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979.

Dabney, Virginius. Richmond: The Story of a City. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730–1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Takagi, Midori. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond, Virginia, 1782–1865. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.

Ward, Harry M., and Harold E. Greer Jr. Richmond during the Revolution, 1775–83. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977.

Pamela C. Edwards