This landmark work is presented for the first time since its debut in 1965 when a limited number of copies were privately printed. The study focuses on a portion of the Northern Neck of Virginia that today comprises primarily Essex and Richmond Counties but extends to neighboring counties as well. It begins with details about the interactions between native Indians and the incoming white man who largely moved in from Jamestown, the York River, and other points south, and then spins forward through the establishment of church parish boundaries, clearing of forested lands for corn and tobacco fields, the construction of private and public buildings, and the organization of local governments. The text is accompanied with three illustrations by the late Sydney E. King, a nationally famous documentary artist whose pictures are found at national monuments and in state and national parks across the nation. An additional illustration is drawn by Mrs. John L. Motley, Jr. (Viven Farish) from old family photographs of Colonel John Catlett's home that once stood above Port Royal, Virginia, which was in her childhood the home of her grandparents. "Old" Rappahannock County was first created from Lancaster in 1656 and became extinct in 1692 when it was divided into Essex and Richmond Counties. The present county of the same name was formed in 1833 from Culpeper County and is located some 100 miles to the west. Because of the loss of the earliest court order books, historical details before 1683 are limited and are drawn by the author from Lancaster County records. The original mimeographed text has been retyped and reformatted with a new detailed index by Wesley E. Pippenger. Be advised that page citations to the original text are therefore modified in this edition. We thank the author's family for permission to reprint this unique and valuable documentation of Virginia's early years.

Examines the roots of white supremacy and mass incarceration from the vantage point of history Why, asks Pem Davidson Buck, is punishment so central to the functioning of the United States, a country proclaiming “liberty and justice for all”? The Punishment Monopoly challenges our everyday understanding of American history, focusing on the constructions of race, class, and gender upon which the United States was built, and which still support racial capitalism and the carceral state. After all, Buck writes, “a state, to be a state, has to punish ... bottom line, that is what a state and the force it controls is for.” Using stories of her European ancestors, who arrived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and following their descendants into the early nineteenth century, Buck shows how struggles over the right to punish, backed by the growing power of the state governed by a white elite, made possible the dispossession of Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites. Those struggles led to the creation of the low-wage working classes that capitalism requires, locked in by a metastasizing white supremacy that Buck’s ancestors, with many others, defined as white, helped establish and manipulate. Examining those foundational struggles illuminates some of the most contentious issues of the twenty-first century: the exploitation and detention of immigrants; mass incarceration as a central institution; Islamophobia; white privilege; judicial and extra-judicial killings of people of color and some poor whites. The Punishment Monopoly makes it clear that none of these injustices was accidental or inevitable; that shifting our state-sanctioned understandings of history is a step toward liberating us from its control of the present.