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This dissertation seeks to explain why more than 110 African American individuals proposed to enslave themselves (and, in some cases, their children as well) in Virginia from 1854 to 1864. I examine the act of the Virginia legislature in 1856 "providing for the voluntary enslavement of the free negroes of the commonwealth" and suggest that this law provided some free Afro-Virginian individuals with an alternative to removal from the state and separation from their families (as called for by the sporadically enforced 1806 expulsion law, passed in part to discourage manumissions). I argue that if receiving legal freedom threatened a free black Virginian with removal, then a legal enslavement that allowed for domestic freedoms---a meaningful family life and a connection to a homeland or community---could come to seem preferable.;Many scholars have suggested that, by passing the 1856 self-enslavement law, legislators intended to facilitate the wholesale enslavement of Virginia's free black population. They have assumed that the passage of Virginia's so-called voluntary enslavement law marked the nadir of free black life in the state and the height of antebellum repression of a class that Virginia politicians at times unequivocally deemed to be "an evil." But such an interpretation of the law in Virginia is a misreading both of the intentions of white lawmakers and of the law's use by free blacks. to enslave oneself in the state during the politically tense 1850s was generally not an easy task. Safeguards incorporated into the law itself ensured that neither the state nor individual slaveholders could coerce free blacks into servitude. In fact, if the state played any part in self-enslavement, it was in an attempt to prevent it.;Through data gathered in county will books, court minutes, ended papers in chancery and law causes, personal property tax lists, and various other county sources, as well as state and federal records, I attempt to illuminate the lives of those individuals who chose to become legally enslaved---all in an effort to draw larger conclusions about the multiple meanings of manumission, freedom, and slavery to African Americans in nineteenth-century Virginia.

The presence of pests and the effect of their activity emerged very early in the colonial era, from the early seventeenth century through the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as a major challenge to the financial and social success of Euro-American settlers, predominantly English, in the tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland, or the Chesapeake. Pests were not only a feature of the natural environment, they were a factor in the modified and built environments that settlers created. The problem of pests cut across ethnic, race, gender and class lines in the Chesapeake.;Euro-American, African-American and Native American residents of the colonial Chesapeake consistently characterized pests as not simply annoying, but as also as threats. their responses to pests reflected notions about both the nature of the threat pests presented, and the commodities and resources that residents valued. Pest control schemes were based on the establishment and reinforcement of boundaries across which pests and their effects were not tolerated. These boundaries quickly assumed a social function. In addition to defining an area in which the presence and activity of pests was restricted, these boundaries functioned as thresholds across which human interaction had to be negotiated. Pest control assumed boundary maintenance functions on several levels.;In different times, places and circumstances, the role of vermin killer fell to different people in Euro-American traditions. In the domestic sphere the responsibility for managing pests in the home fell to women. In connection to their role in pest control, women had an important role in managing the establishment, reinforcement and maintenance of physical and social boundaries in the home.

Historians have, of course, long been aware of the importance of Virginia's seventeenth-century conversion from white to black labor. But while scholars have devoted considerable effort to explaining why this pivotal transition occurred, a detailed analysis of how it happened does not exist, nor by extension have scholars ever fully considered the repercussions of what one might call the "process of conversion.";Although Virginia's black population remained small throughout much of the seventeenth century, it was heavily concentrated on the estates of a relatively small circle of wealthy planters. By the middle decades of the century some members of the gentry had acquired sizable quantities of slaves. as early as the 1660s, when the typical Chesapeake planter still only employed servants, on many elite plantations blacks made up nearly half of the workforce, and in some cases were numerous enough to comprise a considerable majority.;The gentry's early turn to slavery had a profound effect on the development of the plantation "machine." From a socio-economic perspective, it was instrumental in facilitating the rise of Virginia's great families. The founding members of these dynasties arrived in the colony with wealth and social status. But it was their remarkable success in building up their holdings in land and slaves that distanced them from their peers and that proved decisive in securing the lasting predominance of their descendants.;Yet because of their limited access to the transatlantic slave trade, even the wealthiest Virginians initially found it difficult to procure slaves and for decades elite-owned labor forces remained racially mixed. Early African immigrants consequently faced enormous pressure to conform to the behavioral norms of the dominant Anglo-American society, giving the cultural compromises that they ultimately reached with each other an assimilationist bent. as the founding generations relinquished community leadership to their native-born children and grandchildren, African-American society in the colony acquired an anglicized veneer that continued to persist and shape life in slave quarters even after the advent of large direct deliveries in the early eighteenth century.

When news of the Coercive Acts reached the mainland colonies of British North America in May 1774, there was no such thing as a Continental Congress. Provincial leaders, agreeing that an intercolonial gathering was necessary to protest recent Parliamentary measures, anticipated only a congress---an isolated diplomatic convention in the tradition of the Stamp Act Congress and the Albany Congress. Although the fifty-six colonial deputies assembling in Philadelphia knew that they attended an historic meeting, none of them foresaw that this conference would turn out to be the genesis of the United States government. Recasting the First Continental Congress as an essentially diplomatic encounter, this dissertation asks how members of twelve independent delegations, products of a dozen disparate and distrustful American provinces, defied precedent to construct an imperfect yet permanent intercolonial coalition.;"Fifty Gentlemen Total Strangers" argues that the congressional deputies' unified public support for the Suffolk Resolves and revolutionary Continental Association, hardly preordained, was heavily dependent on the identities and actions of the men who were present and on the character of their interactions with one another. Using biographical information, letters, and portraits made prior to 1774, the dissertation develops a prosopography of the congressional delegates that encompasses age, family, religious affiliation, education, professional background, political involvement, and previous associations. What emerges is a collective profile of leaders with similar values, sensibilities, and life experiences. Dominating the Congress were cosmopolitan men who had come of age in the 1730s and 1740s---established members of the popularly-elected political elite shaped by both the persistent localism of their respective provinces and the homogenizing and Anglicizing forces of the Consumer Revolution.;Turning to the Congress itself, the dissertation focuses especially on ostensibly non-political encounters and venues, carefully examining the deputies' out-of-doors experiences as crucial political and diplomatic work took place outside of Carpenters' Hall. Making formal visits to one another's lodgings, attending dinner parties at the homes of local gentlemen, and gossiping in quiet private conversations, the delegates continually manipulated mutually understood standards of gentility, speech, and sensibility to advance their political interests. Building on relationships formed in person or through correspondence prior to 1774, a crucial nucleus of resistance leaders---including Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee, Christopher Gadsden, and Thomas Mifflin---were able to fashion a potent and organized faction while in Philadelphia that successfully shaped the direction of the meeting, pushing the Congress to take irrevocable steps towards revolution.

This dissertation offers the first full-length study of the Richmond Junto and its role in shaping politics in Virginia between 1815 and 1845. The Junto led the Jacksonian movement in Virginia and worked successfully to keep the state allied with the Democratic party of andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren until the early 1840s. The Junto represented an influential force in Virginia politics during this transitional period, and to a certain extent this small group of men, led by Thomas Ritchie, Peter V. Daniel, andrew Stevenson, William H. Roane, and Richard E. Parker, epitomized the state's response to the turbulent events of the era. its actions were expressive of the way in which Virginians chose to come to terms with the changes in American politics and society during the Age of Jackson.;The Junto's course was marked by ambivalence. It sought, for instance, to preserve both the rights of the states and a strong federal Union, and to revive Virginia's influence at the national level without compromising the state's political principles. to achieve these goals, the group consistently articulated a traditional states' rights position, but also moved to adopt the modern features of the second party system. This strategy produced mixed results. The Junto managed to maintain influence in the state for nearly three decades, and Virginia never cast its presidential ballot for a Whig candidate. at the same time, bitter factionalism and violent partisan debate came to characterize Virginia politics in the years after 1832.;The goal of this study is to reveal the pivotal role played by the Richmond Junto in defining and shaping political debate in Jacksonian Virginia. It offers an analysis of the group's political ideology and its methods of operation, as well as a discussion of the Junto's objectives, accomplishments, and failures.

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