The history of Richmond, Virginia, as a modern city, dates to the early 17th century, and is crucial to the development of the colony of Virginia, the American Revolutionary War, and the Civil War. After Reconstruction, Richmond's location at the falls of the James River helped it develop a diversified economy and become a land transportation hub.
17th century
Until 1609, Parahunt, the weroance of the Powhatan tribe, had his main capital on a high hill overlooking the falls of the James, shown as a "king's house" on the 1608 map made by John Smith. The Powhatan "proper" were one of the main constituent groups in the confederacy of the same name, and the river, in their language, was likewise known as the Powhatan. The village where Richmond is now also went by the name of Powhatan (transcribed by William Strachey as Paqwachowng), as well as Shocquohocan.
Soon after settling on Jamestown Island, a party of English under Captain Christopher Newport, during their next exploration up the James, first learned of the existence of this important site from the natives upon reaching Turkey Island on May 22, 1607. The falls marked the western frontier of the confederacy with its enemies, the Monocan tribe, and Newport soon became obsessed with this location and the idea of assisting the Powhatans against them militarily. The next day, while being entertained by a weroance at Arrahatec, the explorers were visited by Parahunt, whom by his title (weroance Powhatan), they mistook for his father, the Mamanatowick Wahunsunacawh (who actually resided at Werowocomoco).
Gabriel Archer, who wrote the fullest account of the visit to Parahunt's village later that day, gave a vivid description of this inhabitation, which he called Pawatah's Tower. He reported that there were 12 houses on the hill, with various crops growing on the plain between the hill and the islands in the river, such as wheat, beans, peas, tobacco, pumpkins, gourds, hemp, and flax. The islands were planted with maize, and had six or seven families living on them. After meeting with the two weroances while the women provided them strawberries and mulberries, the Englishmen decided to visit the nearby waterfalls, found they could pass no farther in their pinnace, and anchored for the night between the islands and the village.
The following day, Newport shared some of his ship's provisions, pork and peas, with Parahunt, and learned what he could of local geography and politics from him. As they were particularly eager to proceed beyond the falls, Parahunt agreed to meet them there, where he dissuaded Newport from going into Monacan country. Returning downriver, the Captain erected, on one of the islands, a cross reading Jacobus Rex, 1607, declaring the country to be the possession of James I of England; however, he told his guide, Navirans, that the cross signified an alliance between himself and the weroance of Powhatan. Meeting Parahunt one last time, Newport presented him with a gown and an English hatchet, and returned to Jamestown.
The English did not visit the falls again for a year and a half, although during this time they continued attempting to negotiate with the Mamanatowick Powhatan for an assault on the Monacans. After Newport's return from England in September 1608, he unilaterally took a party of 120 soldiers to the falls and explored the country beyond. This upset Chief Powhatan, and the natives at Powhatan village hid their corn, refusing to sell it.
By a year later, in September 1609, Powhatan's people seemed in such awe of the colony's then-President, Captain John Smith, that Smith felt emboldened to send another force of 120 men under Francis West to settle at the falls, in the district known as Rockett's. Smith then personally came to "West Fort" and arranged to purchase the entire Indian village (about from the fort) from Parahunt for an amount of copper and an Englishman named Henry Spelman. Even so, the Powhatans did not fully appreciate that the English were now actually in possession of their fortified town (which Smith had renamed Nonsuch), and thus they began to harass the settlers, eventually forcing West to abandon the project and return to Jamestown. In fall 1610, Lord de la Warre (West's brother) made a second attempt to build a fort at the falls, which managed to last all winter, but was then likewise abandoned.
Following this, the English made no attempt to settle any higher than Henricus (in modern Chesterfield County), which lasted from 1611 until the Indian massacre of 1622. Following the Second Anglo-Powhatan War of 1644–45, the Powhatan tribes signed a peace treaty in 1646 ceding the settlers all territory below the Fall Line, from the Blackwater River to the York River. At this time, the colony built Fort Charles at the falls of the James, near where the legal frontier was for over half a century. After two years, the site of Fort Charles was relocated to Manastoh on the South Side of the river (later known as Manchester, Virginia), where the ground was considered slightly more fertile.Francis Earl Lutz, 1954, Chesterfield: An Old Virginia County, p. 49.
In 1656, several hundred Nahyssans and Mahocks and Rechahecrians (possibly Erie) threatened both the Powhatans and the English by settling near the falls; a combined force of English and Pamunkeys was sent to dislodge them in Battle of Bloody Run, where the Pamunkey weroance Totopotomoi was slain.
Col. David Crawford, a Virginia Burgess 1692–94, owned much of the land in the latter 17th century that would become Richmond. By around 1699 or 1700, the Monacan had abandoned their closest settlement, Mowhemencho, above the falls at Bernard's Creek — which was then repopulated with French Huguenot pioneers, to serve as a further buffer between the downriver English plantations and the native tribes. The name of the Huguenots' village survives today in that of the Richmond suburb of Manakin-Sabot, Virginia.
In 1673, William Byrd I was granted lands on the James River that included the area around Falls that would become Richmond and already included small settlements. Byrd was a well-connected Indian trader in the area and established a fort on the site. William Byrd II inherited his father's land in 1704.
18th century
By the early 18th century, the population of the area was still below 200. In 1730, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed the Warehouse Act, which required inspectors to grade tobacco at 40 different locations. This led to much development at the Falls of the James. Seven years later, in 1737, William Mayo laid out the original street plan for the town of Richmond, on land provided by Colonel William Byrd II of nearby Westover Plantation. Mayo divided the town into four-lot thirty-two squares, and immediately outside of town limits there were larger plots of land which were to be sold as the future sites for suburban villas. The name came from Richmond, England. In 1741, Henrico Parish Church (affiliated with the Church of England) was built in the present day neighborhood of Church Hill, the oldest neighborhood in the city, overlooking downtown Richmond, Shockoe Bottom and Shockoe Slip. The First Great Awakening impacted the area in the 1740s, leading Samuel Davies to be sent from Pennsylvania in 1747 to lead and minister to religious dissenters in Hanover County, Virginia. He eventually helped found the first presbytery in Virginia (the Presbytery of Hanover), evangelized slaves (remarkable in its timePresidents of Princeton from princeton.edu. Retrieved September 18, 2012.), and influenced young Patrick Henry who traveled with his mother to listen to sermons. Richmond was chartered as a town in 1742. By 1768, William Byrd III had squandered the family fortune and resorted to a public lottery to raise money for his debts. He auctioned off large lots of still-undeveloped Byrd family land in the Richmond region.
Revolutionary War In 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his famous "Give me Liberty or Give me Death" speech in what is now known as St. John's Church, during the Second Virginia Convention. This speech helped convince members of Virginia's House of Burgesses (that Governor Dunmore had tried to dissolve in Williamsburg the previous year) to pass a resolution delivering Virginia troops to what became the American Revolutionary War.
Another year later, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the colonists' revolt became official (and Virginia's delegates in turn signed the resolution drafted by Thomas Jefferson upon a Virginia model). Jefferson became Virginia's governor during the war, although he had to flee British raiders and pass through Richmond several times. In 1780, Virginia's state capital was officially moved from Williamsburg to Richmond. During the war, British troops captured Williamsburg and often raided Virginia towns accessible by water (including Richmond). The worst raid to befall Richmond (a port city at the falls of the James River) occurred in 1781, when troops under the command of the turncoat Benedict Arnold burned Richmond and its neighboring port at Warwick. Yet Richmond recovered, and grew such that in May 1782, the Virginia General Assembly meeting in Richmond incorporated it as a city.
In 1785, the General Assembly laid the cornerstone for the Virginia State Capitol, which Jefferson designed. Also that year, it chartered the James River Company, with soon-to-be U.S. President George Washington as its honorary corporate president, in part because Washington had advocated westward canal development. Development of the James River Canal (ultimately to connect to the Kanawha River across the Appalachian Mountains) ensued. This led to Richmond's further development as a commercial (and slave-trading) center. The first bridge across the James River, named Mayo's Bridge after the town's founder, was built in 1787.
The General Assembly passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which Jefferson had drafted in 1779, in Richmond on January 16, 1786, which is now commemorated annually as National Religious Freedom Day. From 1785 to 1787, the oldest Masonic Hall in America still in continuous use was constructed on Franklin Street between 18th and 19th Streets in downtown Richmond.
Virginia ratified the proposed U.S. Constitution on June 26, 1788, after a tumultuous and nearly month-long Virginia Ratifying Convention held at the Richmond Theatre. This averted the potential problem of a geographical split between states previously ratifying the document which created a stronger national government than in the previous Articles of Confederation. The Virginia Ratifying Convention also recommended adoption of a Bill of Rights modeled on one previously adopted in the Commonwealth, as eventually occurred on December 15, 1791.
19th century
1800–1860: Antebellum period
For much of the 19th century, the institution of slavery shaped several local issues. Shockoe Bottom became a center for slave trading in the years after Congress prohibited the US-African Slave Trade in 1808. It is believed that between 1800 and 1865, 300,000 slaves were sent from Virginia, a majority of them from Richmond's Shockoe Bottom markets and auctions, to work in the deep south.