On April 17, 1861, delegates meeting in Richmond adopted Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession by a vote of 88 to 55. The decision pushed the Commonwealth into the Confederacy and helped set Richmond on the path to becoming the Confederate capital. In later generations, Lost Cause mythology tried to soften that break as a matter of abstract principle. But Virginia’s political crisis cannot be separated from slavery. The state convention itself was divided along lines shaped by slaveholding power, and secession placed the defense of that racial order at the center of Virginia’s war making.
For Black Virginians, April 17 was not simply a constitutional turning point. It was a day when white political leaders chose a future built on the continuation of bondage, family separation, and forced labor. That is part of the story Richmond still has to tell plainly. The city’s memorial landscape has changed because the older version of this history was not only incomplete. It was designed to protect white innocence while obscuring the fact that slavery sat at the heart of secession.
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