Virginia
State
Commonwealth of Virginia
Flag Seal
Nicknames:  Old Dominion, Mother of Presidents
Motto(s):  Sic semper tyrannis (English: Thus Always to Tyrants)[1]
Anthem: "Our Great Virginia"
Map of the United States with Virginia highlighted
Country	United States
Before statehood	Colony of Virginia
Admitted to the Union	June 25, 1788 (10th)
Capital	Richmond
Largest city	Virginia Beach
Largest metro and urban areas	Washington (metro and urban)
Government
• Governor	Glenn Youngkin (R)
• Lieutenant Governor	Winsome Sears (R)
Legislature	General Assembly
• Upper house	Senate
• Lower house	House of Delegates
Judiciary	Supreme Court of Virginia
U.S. senators	Mark Warner (D) Tim Kaine (D)
U.S. House delegation	6 Democrats 5 Republicans (list)
Area
• Total	42,774.2 sq mi (110,785.67 km2)
• Rank	35th
Dimensions
• Length	430 mi (690 km)
• Width	200 mi (320 km)
Elevation	950 ft (290 m)
Highest elevation (Mount Rogers[2])	5,729 ft (1,746 m)
Lowest elevation (Atlantic Ocean)	0 ft (0 m)
Population  (2023)
• Total	8,715,698[3]
• Rank	12th
• Density	219.3/sq mi (84.7/km2)
• Rank	14th
• Median household income	$80,615
• Income rank	10th
Demonym	Virginian
Language
• Official language	English
• Spoken language	English 86% Spanish 6% Other 8%
Time zone	UTC-05:00 (Eastern)
• Summer (DST)	UTC-04:00 (EDT)
USPS abbreviation	VA
ISO 3166 code	US-VA
Traditional abbreviation	Va.
Latitude	36° 32′ N to 39° 28′ N
Longitude	75° 15′ W to 83° 41′ W
Website	virginia.gov

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, though its most populous subdivision is Fairfax County, part of Northern Virginia, where slightly over a third of Virginia's population of 8.72 million live.

The Blue Ridge Mountains cross the western and southwestern parts of the state. The state's central region lies predominantly in the Piedmont. Eastern Virginia is part of the Atlantic Plain, and the Middle Peninsula forms the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. 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. Virginia's state nickname, the Old Dominion, is a reference to this status. Slaves from Africa and land from displaced native tribes fueled the growing plantation economy, but also fueled conflicts both inside and outside the colony. Virginia was one of the original Thirteen Colonies in the American Revolution and several key battles were fought there during that war. More major battles were fought in Virginia during the American Civil War, which split the state as the government in Richmond joined the Confederacy, but 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. It is made up of a 40-member Senate and a 100-member House of Delegates. Unlike other states, cities and counties in Virginia function as equals, but the state government manages most local roads inside each. It is the only state where governors are prohibited from serving consecutive terms.

History

Earliest inhabitants

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 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]

Colony

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 London Company. 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]

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 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 Bacon's Laws, which restored some of the colony's rights and sanctioned both attacks on native tribes and the enslavement of their men and women.^[31] The Treaty of 1677 further reduced the independence of the tribes that signed it, and aided the colony's assimilation of their land in the years that followed.^[32][33] Colonists in the 1700s were pushing westward into this area held by the Seneca and their larger Iroquois Nation, and in 1748, a group of wealthy speculators, backed by the British monarchy, formed the Ohio Company to start English settlement and trade in the Ohio Country west of the Appalachian Mountains.^[34] The Kingdom of France, which claimed this area as part of their colony of New France, viewed this as a threat, and in 1754 the French and Indian War engulfed England, France, the Iroquois, and other allied tribes on both sides. A militia from several British colonies, called the Virginia Regiment, was led by 21-year-old Major George Washington, himself one of the investors in the Ohio Company.^[35]

Statehood

In the decade following the French and Indian War, the British Parliament under prime ministers Grenville, Chatham, and North passed new taxes on various colonial activities. These were deeply unpopular in the colonies, and in the House of Burgesses, opposition to taxation without representation was led by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, among others.^[36] Virginians began to coordinate their actions with other colonies in 1773 and sent delegates to the Continental Congress the following year.^[37] After the House of Burgesses was dissolved in 1774 by the royal governor, Virginia's revolutionary leaders continued to govern via the Virginia Conventions. On May 15, 1776, the Convention declared Virginia's independence from the British Empire and adopted George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was then included in a new constitution that designated Virginia as a commonwealth, using a translation of the Latin term res publica.^[38] Another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, drew upon Mason's work in drafting the national Declaration of Independence.^[39]

After the American Revolutionary War began, George Washington was selected by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to head the Continental Army, and many Virginians joined the army and other revolutionary militias. Virginia was the first colony to ratify the Articles of Confederation in December 1777.^[40] In April 1780, the capital was moved to Richmond at the urging of Governor Thomas Jefferson, who feared that Williamsburg's coastal location would make it vulnerable to British attack.^[41] British forces indeed landed around Portsmouth in October 1780, and soldiers under Benedict Arnold managed to raid Richmond in January 1781.^[42] The British army had over seven thousand soldiers and twenty-five warships stationed in Virginia at the beginning of 1781, but General Charles Cornwallis and his superiors were indecisive, and maneuvers by the three thousand soldiers under the Marquis de Lafayette and twenty-nine allied French warships together managed to confine the British to a swampy area of the Virginia Peninsula in September. Around sixteen thousand soldiers under George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau quickly converged there and defeated Cornwallis in the siege of Yorktown.^[43] His surrender on October 19, 1781, led to peace negotiations in Paris and secured the independence of the colonies.^[44]

Virginians were instrumental in the new country's early years and in writing the United States Constitution. James Madison drafted the Virginia Plan in 1787 and the Bill of Rights in 1789.^[39] Virginia ratified the Constitution on June 25, 1788. The three-fifths compromise ensured that Virginia, with its large number of slaves, initially had the largest bloc in the House of Representatives. Together with the Virginia dynasty of presidents, this gave the Commonwealth national importance. In 1790, Virginia and Maryland ceded territory to form the new national capital, which moved from Philadelphia to the District of Columbia a decade later, in 1800. In 1846, the Virginian area of the new capital was retroceded.^[45] Virginia is called the "Mother of States" because of its role in being carved into states such as Kentucky, which became the fifteenth state in 1792, and for the numbers of American pioneers born in Virginia.^[46]

Civil War

Between 1790 and 1860, the number of slaves in Virginia rose from around 290 thousand to over 490 thousand, roughly one-third of the state population during that time, and the number of slave owners rose to over 50 thousand. Both of these numbers represented the most in the U.S.^[48][49] The boom in cotton production across the South using cotton gins increased the amount of labor needed for harvesting raw cotton, but new federal laws prohibited the importation of additional slaves from abroad. Decades of monoculture tobacco farming had also degraded Virginia's agricultural productivity.^[50] To capitalize on this situation, Virginia plantations increasingly turned to exporting slaves, which broke up countless families and made the breeding of slaves, often through rape, a profitable business for their owners.^[51][52] Slaves in the Richmond area were also forced into industrial jobs, including mining and shipbuilding.^[53] The failed slave uprisings of Gabriel Prosser in 1800, George Boxley in 1815, and Nat Turner in 1831, however, marked the growing resistance to the system of slavery. Afraid of further uprisings, Virginia's government in the 1830s encouraged free Blacks to migrate to Liberia.^[50]

On October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led a raid on an armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to start a slave revolt across the southern states. The polarized national response to his raid, capture, trial, and execution in Charles Town that December marked a tipping point for many who believed the end of slavery would need to be achieved by force.^[54] Abraham Lincoln's 1860 election further convinced many southern supporters of slavery that his opposition to its expansion would ultimately mean the end of slavery across the country. In South Carolina, the first state to secede to preserve the institution of slavery, a regiment loyal to the newly formed Confederate States of America seized Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861, prompting President Lincoln to call for a federal army of 75,000 men from state militias the next day.^[55]

In Virginia, a special convention called by the legislature voted on April 17 to secede on the condition it was approved in a referendum the next month. The convention then voted to join the Confederacy, which named Richmond its capital on May 20.^[46] During the May 23 referendum, armed pro-Confederate groups prevented the casting and counting of votes from many northwestern counties that opposed secession. Representatives from 27 of these counties instead began the Wheeling Convention that month, which organized a government loyal to the Union and led to the separation of West Virginia as a new state.^[56]

The armies of the Union and Confederacy first met on July 21, 1861, in Battle of Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia, where a bloody Confederate victory established that the war would not be easily decided. Union General George B. McClellan organized the Army of the Potomac, which landed on the Virginia Peninsula in March 1862 and reached the outskirts of Richmond that June. With Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston wounded in fighting outside the city, command of his Army of Northern Virginia fell to Robert E. Lee. Over the next month, Lee drove the Union army back, and starting that September led the first of several invasions into Union territory. During the next three years of war, more battles were fought in Virginia than anywhere else, including the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania, and the concluding Battle of Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865.^[57] After the capture of Richmond that month, the state capital was briefly moved to Lynchburg,^[58] while the Confederate leadership fled to Danville.^[59] 32,751 Virginians died in the Civil War.^[60]

Reconstruction and Jim Crow

Virginia was formally restored to the United States in 1870, due to the work of the Committee of Nine.^[62] During the post-war Reconstruction era, African Americans were able to unite in communities, particularly around Richmond, Danville, and the Tidewater region, and take a greater role in Virginia society, as many achieved some land ownership during the 1870s.^[63][64] Virginia adopted a constitution in 1868 which guaranteed political, civil, and voting rights, and provided for free public schools.^[65] However, with many railroad lines and other infrastructure investments destroyed during the Civil War, the Commonwealth was deeply in debt, and in the late 1870s redirected money from public schools to pay bondholders. The Readjuster Party formed in 1877 and won legislative power in 1879 by uniting Black and white Virginians behind a shared opposition to debt payments and the perceived plantation elites.^[66]

The Readjusters focused on building up schools, like Virginia Tech and Virginia State, and successfully forced West Virginia to share in the pre-war debt.^[67] But in 1883, they were divided by a proposed repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, and days before that year's election, a riot in Danville, involving armed policemen, left four Black men and one white man dead.^[68] These events motivated a push by white supremacists to seize political power through voter suppression, and segregationists in the Democratic Party won the legislature that year and maintained control for decades.^[69] They passed Jim Crow laws and in 1902 rewrote the state constitution to include a poll tax and other voter registration measures that effectively disenfranchised most African Americans and many poor whites.^[70]

New economic forces would meanwhile industrialize the Commonwealth. Virginian James Albert Bonsack invented the tobacco cigarette rolling machine in 1880 leading to new large-scale production centered around Richmond. Railroad magnate Collis Potter Huntington founded Newport News Shipbuilding in 1886, which was responsible for building six dreadnoughts, seven battleships, and 25 destroyers for the U.S. Navy between 1907 and 1923.^[71] During World War I, German submarines like U-151 attacked ships outside the port,^[72] which was a major site for transportation of both soldiers and supplies.^[61] After the war, a homecoming parade to honor African-American troops returning from service was attacked in July 1919 by the city's police as part of a renewed white-supremacy movement that was known as Red Summer.^[73] The shipyard continued building cruisers and aircraft carriers in World War II, and quadrupled its pre-war labor force to 70,000 by 1943. The Radford Arsenal outside Blacksburg also employed 22,000 workers making explosives.^[74]

Civil rights to present

Protests against underfunded segregated schools started by Barbara Rose Johns in 1951 in Farmville led to the lawsuit Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. This case, filed by Richmond natives Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, was decided in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the doctrine of "separate but equal". But, in 1956, under the policy of "massive resistance" led by the influential segregationist Senator Harry F. Byrd and his Byrd Organization, the Commonwealth prohibited desegregated local schools from receiving state or private funding as part of the Stanley Plan. After schools in many districts began closing in September 1958, state and district courts ruled the plan unconstitutional, and on February 2, 1959, the first Black students integrated schools in Arlington and Norfolk, where they were known as the Norfolk 17.^[75] Prince Edward County still refused to integrate and closed their county school system in June 1959. It only reopened in 1964, after the Supreme Court ordered the county's public schools to be, like others in the state, open and integrated, which they finally did that September.^[76][77]

Federal passage of the Civil Rights Act in June 1964 and Voting Rights Act in August 1965, and their later enforcement by the Justice Department, helped end racial segregation in Virginia and overturn Jim Crow era state laws.^[78] In June 1967, the Supreme Court also struck down the state's ban on interracial marriage with Loving v. Virginia. In 1968, Governor Mills Godwin called a commission to rewrite the state constitution. The new constitution, which banned discrimination and removed articles that now violated federal law, passed in a referendum with 71.8% support and went into effect in June 1971.^[79] In 1977, Black members became the majority of Richmond's city council; in 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African American elected as governor in the United States; and in 1992, Bobby Scott became the first Black congressman from Virginia since 1888.^[80][81]

The expansion of federal government offices into Northern Virginia's suburbs during the Cold War boosted the region's population and economy.^[82] The Central Intelligence Agency outgrew their offices in Foggy Bottom during the Korean War, and moved to Langley in 1961, in part due to a decision by the National Security Council that the agency relocate outside the District of Columbia.^[83] The agency was involved in various Cold War events, and its headquarters was a target of Soviet espionage activities. The Pentagon, built in Arlington during World War II as the headquarters of the Department of Defense, was one of the targets of the September 11, 2001 attacks; 189 people died at the site when a jet passenger plane was flown into the building.^[84] Mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and in Virginia Beach in 2019 led to passage of gun control measures in 2020.^[85] Racial injustice and the presence of Confederate monuments in Virginia have also led to large demonstrations, including in August 2017, when a white supremacist drove his car into protesters, killing one, and in June 2020, when protests that were part of the larger Black Lives Matter movement brought about the removal of statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond and elsewhere.^[86]

Geography

Virginia is located in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States.^[87][88] Virginia has a total area of 42,774.2 square miles (110,784.7 km²), including 3,180.13 square miles (8,236.5 km²) of water, making it the 35th-largest state by area.^[89] The Commonwealth is bordered by Maryland and Washington, D.C. to the north and east; by the Atlantic Ocean to the east; by North Carolina to the south; by Tennessee to the southwest; by Kentucky to the west; and by West Virginia to the north and west. Virginia's boundary with Maryland and Washington, D.C. extends to the low-water mark of the south shore of the Potomac River.^[90]

Virginia's southern border was defined in 1665 as 36°30' north latitude. Surveyors marking the border with North Carolina in the 18th century however started their work about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) to the north and drifted an additional 3.5 miles by the border's westernmost point, likely due to equipment issues and instructions to use natural landmarks when possible.^[91] After Tennessee joined the U.S. in 1796, new surveyors worked in 1802 and 1803 to reset their border with Virginia as a line from the summit of White Top Mountain to the top of Tri-State Peak in the Cumberland Mountains. However, deviations in that border were identified when it was re-marked in 1856, and the Virginia General Assembly proposed a new surveying commission in 1871. Representatives from Tennessee preferred to keep the less-straight 1803 line, and in 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the state's favor in the case Virginia v. Tennessee.^[92][93] One result of this is the division of the city of Bristol between the two states.^[94]

Geology and terrain

The Chesapeake Bay separates the contiguous portion of the Commonwealth from the two-county peninsula of Virginia's Eastern Shore. The bay was formed from the drowned river valley of the ancient Susquehanna River.^[96] Many of Virginia's rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay, including the Potomac, Rappahannock, York, and James, which create three peninsulas in the bay, traditionally referred to as "necks" named Northern Neck, Middle Peninsula, and the Virginia Peninsula from north to south.^[97] Sea level rise has eroded the land on Virginia's islands, which include Tangier Island in the bay and Chincoteague, one of 23 barrier islands on the Atlantic coast.^[98][99]

The Tidewater is a coastal plain between the Atlantic coast and the fall line. It includes the Eastern Shore and major estuaries of Chesapeake Bay. The Piedmont is a series of sedimentary and igneous rock-based foothills east of the mountains which were formed in the Mesozoic era.^[100] The region, known for its heavy clay soil, includes the Southwest Mountains around Charlottesville.^[101] The Blue Ridge Mountains are a physiographic province of the Appalachian Mountains with the highest points in the Commonwealth, the tallest being Mount Rogers at 5,729 feet (1,746 m).^[2] The Ridge-and-Valley region is west of the mountains, carbonate rock based, and includes the Massanutten Mountain ridge and the Great Appalachian Valley, which is called the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, named after the river of the same name that flows through it.^[102] The Cumberland Plateau and Cumberland Mountains are in the southwest corner of Virginia, south of the Allegheny Plateau. In this region, rivers flow northwest, with a dendritic drainage system, into the Ohio River basin.^[103]

The Virginia Seismic Zone has not had a history of regular earthquake activity. Earthquakes are rarely above 4.5 in magnitude, because Virginia is located away from the edges of the North American Plate. The Commonwealth's largest earthquake in at least a century, at a magnitude of 5.8, struck central Virginia on August 23, 2011, near Mineral.^[104] Due to the area's geologic properties, this earthquake was felt from Northern Florida to Southern Ontario.^[105] 35 million years ago, a bolide impacted what is now eastern Virginia. The resulting Chesapeake Bay impact crater may explain what earthquakes and subsidence the region does experience.^[106] A meteor impact is also theorized as the source of Lake Drummond, the largest of the two natural lakes in the state.^[107]

The Commonwealth's carbonate rock is filled with more than 4,000 limestone caves, ten of which are open for tourism, including the popular Luray Caverns and Skyline Caverns.^[108] Virginia's iconic Natural Bridge is also the remaining roof of a collapsed limestone cave.^[109] Coal mining takes place in the three mountainous regions at 45 distinct coal beds near Mesozoic basins.^[110] More than 72 million tons of other non-fuel resources, such as slate, kyanite, sand, or gravel, were also mined in Virginia in 2020^[update].^[111] The largest known deposits of uranium in the U.S. are under Coles Hill, Virginia. Despite a challenge that reached the U.S. Supreme Court twice, the state has banned its mining since 1982 due to environmental and public health concerns.^[112]

Climate