Early Years
Davis was born of mixed-raced ancestry probably during the 1820s. His mother may have been Vina Roane, who resided in his household in 1880, but his birthplace and his father’s name are unknown. He may have been the freeborn John Davis who was about twenty-seven years old in March 1847 when his name appeared in a Lynchburg register of free blacks or the John Davis, formerly the slave of M. Omohundro, who was enumerated with his wife, Ann, among the city’s black population in 1865. Davis married Ann Eliza Stuart, a tobacco stemmer, sometime between April 1, 1863, and July 27, 1870, when the couple lived near Lynchburg, in Campbell County. Most likely they did not have children.
Norton was born enslaved early in the 1840s in Williamsburg. His brother F. S. Norton, a member of the House of Delegates (1869–1871), was older by more than a decade. He was close in age to Robert Norton, another brother who was a member of the House of Delegates (1869–1874, 1876–1883), and they were reportedly the sons of an enslaved woman and her owner. The identities of their parents are not known for certain, but Robert Norton provided different names for his mother on each of his two marriage records: Richard and Elizabeth without surnames in one instance, and Charlotte E. Norton in another. About the middle of the 1850s, Norton and his brother Robert escaped from slavery in Gloucester County to freedom in Troy, New York. He received medical training from a doctor there and on January 23, 1860, married Edmonie, last name unknown, in Philadelphia. Two days later, she traveled to Virginia, where he refused to go, fearing re-enslavement. They did not often live together befo
Prior to the American Civil War (1861–1865), Virginia’s most influential political leaders had been reluctant to accept universal white male suffrage during the decades when it was more eagerly welcomed elsewhere in the United States. The state’s Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830 debated but declined to adopt a proposal that ownership of land no longer be a prerequisite for voting rights, continuing restriction of the electorate to one class of adult white men. The Constitutional Convention of 1850–1851 eliminated the property qualification, but only after a contentious struggle.
In accordance with federal Reconstruction legislation, General John M. Schofield called for a state constitutional convention, which met in Richmond from December 3, 1867, to April 17, 1868. In protest of black suffrage, however, many of Virginia’s conservative whites refused to participate in the voting for delegates; as a result, Radical Republicans (those Republicans who not only favor
Conrad was born on August 1, 1837, in Fairfax Court House and was the son of Nelson Conrad and Lavinia M. Thomas Conrad. He attended Fairfax Academy and Dickinson College, which awarded him a bachelor’s degree in 1857 and a master’s degree in 1860. Conrad became a lay Methodist preacher and taught at a private school in Georgetown, District of Columbia, before establishing the Georgetown Institute, a boys’ school there.
After the Civil War began, Conrad made no effort to conceal his Confederate sympathies, which had attracted the attention of United States government authorities even before the institute’s commencement exercise in June 1862, when his students made fiery pro-Confederate speeches, and he ordered the band to play “Dixie,” to uproarious applause. On August 2 he was arrested on charges of communicating with the enemy and recruiting students for the Confederate army. Conrad was locked up in Old Capitol Prison and later paroled pending exchange. Many years afte
Constructing a HouseGeorge William Cole was born in Athens, Georgia, late in the 1840s. The record of his 1879 marriage identified his parents, William Cole and Martha Cole, as freedpersons, but little else is known of his youth. By early in the 1870s he was living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Inspired perhaps by his parents or by the heady events of emancipation and Reconstruction, Cole developed a desire for education and self-improvement. In 1872 he enrolled in the junior class of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University). Having earned promotion to the middle class, Cole left the school during the 1873–1874 academic year. By 1879 he had made his way to Essex County, where he found work as a teacher and probably also farmed. On April 21, 1879, Cole married Edith Banks, a native of the county. They had at least one daughter.