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The rapidly growing eighteenth-century port city of Norfolk, Virginia, occupied an unusual position. It was the largest city in a colony known for its rural gentry culture and also a formally incorporated borough in an era when urban corporate independence was increasingly unusual in the British Atlantic. This essay explores Norfolk's corporate political identity and argues that it was crucial to the city's position in a planter-dominated society. The charter helped reconcile the city's need for local authority over trade and urban policing with the planter elite's suspicion of commerce by effectively quarantining the port city outside the planters' political world. As tensions rose within the British Empire during the 1760s, however, the borough's corporate authority became a contentious issue, as planters asserted their civic authority to regulate trade. The planter revolutionaries' suspicion of Norfolk's corporate status led to the showdown between the borough and the new revolutionary government and eventually to the destruction of the city in January 1776. These experiences informed the efforts of Virginia's new state government to craft a unique subsidiary status for municipal government in the 1780s. Norfolk's corporate status is therefore crucial to understanding the republican political economic vision of Virginia's planter class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virginia's cohabitation registers were compiled after the Civil War to legalize the unions that had formed between enslaved couples and to legitimize the children of those couples. They provide valuable demographic information about more than 13,000 couples and their children – well over 50,000 individuals – drawn from 23 counties across the state. The registers can be very useful to historians of slavery and slave families, but when using them it is essential to understand why and how they were created, what exactly they include, and what they omit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the ways that Richmond City's municipal authorities applied Virginia's pass-code laws governing free African American residency between 1850 and 1860. In Virginia, a free African American had to have a pass – a legal document attesting to one's free status – but that pass had to be renewed every three years, and it had to be approved by the city or county in which the free African American currently resided. Legally, undocumented free blacks included persons who did not have a pass, ones who may have had a pass but failed to carry one on their person, or African Americans with expired passes. Without such attestation, free blacks in antebellum Virginia were subject to incarceration and had to reimburse the city for all attendant fees. If they could not pay the fees, the court hired them out to the highest bidder. While historians have spent considerable time debating the legal status of free African Americans, they have not focused on how municipal authorities, particularly in rapidly industrialising southern cities, used pass codes not only as a way to maintain social control over free African Americans, but also increasingly as a means to provide cheap and accessible unfree labour to local businesses and industries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Attempts to close the gap between women's history and political history in antebellum Virginia. Affinity between women and the Whig party; Expression of partisanship; Democratic commentators; Political campaigns; Analysis of political issues; Theory of women's civic duty; Attendance of campaign events.

Examines the characteristics of black leaders identified by the Virginia Freedmen's Bureau as capable of holding office during the Reconstruction period in 1867. Criticisms against the bureau's alleged bias toward white men; Order by the bureau's assistant commissioner Brevet Brigadier General Orlando Brown to bureau officers to prepare a list of qualified freedmen residing in the state; More.

The article reviews the digital history website "Voting Viva Voce: Unlocking the Social Logic of Past Politics," located at http://sociallogic.iath.virginia.edu and maintained by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia.