On Exhibition

Virginia in the American Revolution
September 19, 2009 - March 6, 2010

Virginia was the oldest, largest, and most populous of Great Britain’s American colonies on the eve of the American Revolution. It may have also been the most valuable, with enormous tobacco crops shipped to Britain each year and untapped natural resources luring more settlers to Virginia’s shores. By the eighteenth century, Virginia surpassed all other American colonies with political and military talent -- George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason among them -- but many of its residents hesitated just as their fellow colonists did to break ties with the mother country.

Tensions between Virginia colonists and their royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, culminated in the Battle of Great Bridge near Norfolk in December 1775 -- the first battle of the Revolution in the South. To defend their rights, and ultimately secure their independence, Virginians joined local militias, state units, and Continental regiments, as well as the state’s own navy. Virginia contributed as many as twenty-five thousand soldiers in fifteen regiments to serve under George Washington in the Continental Army -- an effort surpassed only by Massachusetts. These Continental troops served from Canada to Georgia. In 1781 the joint American-French siege of Yorktown in Tidewater Virginia forced the British army’s surrender. As peace drew near in 1783, more than three hundred officers of the Virginia Continental Line joined their fellow soldiers in establishing the Society of the Cincinnati to promote the achievement of American independence. The Society’s first president general was George Washington, the "American Cincinnatus." Among Virginia’s original members of the Society were Horatio Gates, John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, and Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee.

Through forty manuscripts, portraits, and other objects drawn almost exclusively from the Society’s museum and library collections, Virginia in the American Revolution chronicles the political and military events of the war in Virginia, as well as the founding of the Virginia branch of the Society and the service of its most famous son as the Society’s president general. Highlights of the exhibition include a 1775 edition of Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson’s seminal Map of the most Inhabited part of Virginia, spectacles worn by future chief justice John Marshall, orderly books for two Virginia units, portraits of Revolutionary War soldiers by artists including Charles Willson Peale and Matthew Harris Jouett, and domestic artifacts used by George Washington. The Society of the Cincinnati in the State of Virginia provided generous support for this exhibition, which is the twelfth in a series examining the character of the American Revolution in each of the thirteen original states and France. An illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition. To download a PDF version of the exhibition catalogue, click on the icon below:

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Past Exhibition Catalogs

Maryland in the
American Revolution (2009)

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Image credits:
(1) Portrait of Lt. Col. Richard Clough Anderson (1750-1826) possibly by Matthew Harris Jouett (American, 1788-1827), early 19th century. The Society of the Cincinnati, Gift of Isabel Anderson, 1941.
(2) Plan of the Investment of York & Gloucester by the Allied Armies in Septr. & Octr. 1781.Trenton, N.J.: Isaac Collins, 1785. The Society of the Cincinnati, The Robert Charles Lawrence Fergusson Collection.