Historian and editor Katharine Harbury wrote that "in spite of social limitations," some people were able to make positive differences in other people's lives during the 19th century. Mary Randolph, of Richmond, tried "to improve women's lives by limiting their time spent in the kitchen and on other forms of household drudgery." Randolph's 1824 book, The Virginia Housewife, "listed inexpensive ingredients that any housewife could purchase to make impressive meals, popularized the use of more than 40 vegetables, and introduced dishes, such as gazpacho, from abroad."

Harbury also reported that Randolph invented an early version of a refrigerator but did not attempt to patent or manufacture the appliance. Such was the pervasive influence of "the male business world." Later, a man "copied her design and patented it in his name."

Historian and archivist Jennifer McDaid recommended for remembrance Grace Whittle, of Norfolk. She "cast only the faintest shadow on the historic record," McDaid wrote, but Whittle kept a diary during the 1855 Yellow Fever epidemic that terrorized modern-day Hampton Roads. Whittle's diary "describes city life and public health at a time when other records are silent."

Most of the people nominated for greatest or most influential Virginian of the 19th century were associated with slavery or were involved in the Civil War and their aftermaths.

Harbury singled out one white woman for particular notice, Ann Randolph Meade Page -- one of many women who early in the century spoke out against slavery. Page was also one of the Virginians who supported the work of the American Colonization Society that offered to fund emigration of free blacks from Virginia to the West Coast of Africa. Unlike Page, other advocates of colonization were not opponents of slavery. They hoped that removing free blacks from the state would make it easier to preserve slavery. The society's internal divisions may have reduced its ability to achieve any of its objectives.

Nevertheless, the colonization of West Africa proceeded. The most famous and successful of the emigrants was Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a free man who was a native of Norfolk and a Petersburg merchant before moving with his family to West Africa. There, he became governor of the colony and in 1847, when the colony became the new independent nation of Liberia, Roberts was the first president. He served a second term as president later and in 1861 became president of the University of Liberia.

Joseph Jenkins Roberts, historian Marie Tyler-McGraw wrote, "remained true to an initial set of values that reflected those of the early American republic in which he had grown up. He was a small-business man, an evangelical Protestant, a believer in education, and a citizen of a republic based on merit."

Nat Turner of Southampton County -- like Gabriel of Hanover 31 years before him -- reacted to slavery by rebelling. In August 1831, Turner led the largest and bloodiest revolt against slavery in Virginia's history. Historian and editor Emily Salmon nominated him for greatest Virginian of the 19th century because he fought for freedom for himself and others, even though members of her ancestors' families died at the hands of Turner's rebels.

White people in the county reacted with equal or greater violence. Historian and archivist Ervin Jordan wrote, "Approximately 55 blacks were executed and another 175 tortured and killed by white mobs; numerous free blacks were forcibly deported. Virginia and the South enacted and enforced harsher laws against abolitionists, free blacks, and slaves.

"Any hopes the state would enact gradual emancipation were gone, yet slaves and whites realized slavery's days were numbered, and probably at the hands of violence."

Matthew Gibson concluded about Turner's rebellion, "The uprising made clear to the white consciousness that there was a potential Nat Turner in every black man, woman, and child. Because of this fear, Southern whites tightened their controls over slaves and some became vigilant to the point of paranoia."

Mayor L. Douglas Wilder carried that theme further in writing about Gabriel and about Nat Turner. "Single, solitary figures of greatness for ability or greatness for virtue are hard to come by during this period," he wrote. "Consequently, it was that period of time in Virginia's history that has afforded us a great opportunity for reflection to see what might have been."

Other than Robert E. Lee, who re ceived fewer nominations as greatest or most influential Virginian than might have been expected, few military leaders of the Civil War were nominated -- although Ross Mackenzie did suggest Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.

Another Virginia general of great achievement during the Civil War does require some commentary. George H. Thomas, of Southampton County, was a professional Army officer all of his life. In 1861 he remained in the United States Army and as a consequence his family in Virginia disowned him. Often rated one of the best generals in the Union army, Thomas paid a heavy price for his loyalty to the United States.

Elizabeth Van Lew, of Richmond, also remained loyal. In addition to ministering to the sick and to the prisoners of war in the city's hospitals and prisons, she organized and conducted the most successful Union espionage operation of the war. Long after the war a legend arose that Van Lew disguised her opinions and activities by going about the city streets pretending to be insane, hence the 20th-century nickname, "Crazy Betty."

Van Lew never disguised her opinions, and she successfully outwitted the city's Confederate authorities in other ways. After the war she played a major role in Republican Party politics, serving for seven years as postmaster of Richmond.

A plaque at Van Lew's gravesite reads: "She risked everything that is dear to man -- friends, fortune, comfort, health, life itself, all for one absorbing desire of her heart -- that slavery might be abolished and the Union preserved."

A white Virginia man, James E. Hanger of Augusta County, served Virginia well in an entirely different way. He had his left leg shot off in the very first battle of the Civil War in Virginia, at Philippi. Before the end of the war he created a factory to produce artificial limbs for the 10,000 or more men who lost arms or legs during the war.

Historian and archivist Jennifer McDaid wrote that Hanger's prosthetic limbs, particularly the legs, which were made of willow and enclosed in rawhide, "were more durable than other artificial limbs" and weighed much less. "Hanger's prosthetic legs enabled men to pick up the pieces of their lives in the postwar South." The company he founded is still in business.

A white man, a black man, and a black woman were nominated for their accomplishments and influence during the years between the Civil War and the end of the 19th century.

The white man was William Mahone, of Petersburg, who before the Civil War created what became the Norfolk and Western Railroad (and what is today Norfolk Southern). He was a general in the Confederate Army, but he was nominated for his accomplishments afterward. During the 1870s and 1880s Mahone fashioned an unprecedented coalition of white and black Virginians -- referred to as the Readjuster Party -- that won a majority in the General Assembly in 1879 and swept the statewide elections two years later.

The Readjusters solved the financial problems that the unpaid antebellum public debt imposed on the state, and they improved schools and medical facilities for the state's black residents. The Readjusters founded what became Virginia State University and created the first mental hospital for blacks in Virginia. They also instituted other reforms in state government that allowed the debt to be paid and the new public school system to be improved.

That any man so soon after the end of slavery could lead a successful biracial political organization in Virginia was remarkable. Mahone's skills as a political organizer were legendary in his own time, and historians who have had access to his personal papers can testify to his genius for politics.

The Readjuster movement was short, though. After the General Assembly elected Mahone to the United States Senate, he joined the Republican Party, alienating many Democrats who had supported his program to restore fiscal integrity to the state government.

Thereafter, Virginia Democrats and white supremacists made Mahone the most-hated man in the state, and during the following decade virtually drove black politicians out of public life. Indeed, appeals to white supremacy during generations that followed were so persistent and effective that historian and editor Gordon Poindexter nominated Mahone, who died in the 1890s, as the most influential Virginian of the 20th century.

"Many of my colleagues," Poindexter wrote, "will argue that Harry Byrd casts a long shadow in Virginia. They'll be right, but he created and maintained his shadow by aping machine politics practiced by Mahone. Byrd and his immediate Democratic predecessors, however, loved nothing about Mahone except his methods." Virginia politicians ran against Mahone's racial coalition for half a century after it ceased to exist.

The black man of late 19th-century Virginia who was nominated as the greatest Virginian was Richmond newspaper editor John Mitchell Jr. Historian James Sweeney summarized his career and greatness this way: "John Mitchell Jr. exemplified courage in his role as editor of the African-American weekly newspaper, The Richmond Planet. Mitchell was born into slavery. He became editor of the paper at the age of 21. He spoke out against the epidemic of lynching then staining the South, often with the blood of innocent African-Americans.

"Mitchell defied death threats in his crusade against lynching. In one case after denouncing a lynching he was warned that he would be killed if he visited the site. Armed with a revolver, he made the trip and spent the night in the local jail."

Mitchell was a leading Richmond businessman from the 1890s until his death in the 1920s. "He attained his greatest distinction," Sweeney wrote, "in the decade and a half before the turn of the century when his scathing editorials against lynching and the system of Jim Crow inspired blacks and outraged whites. In 1892 he was elected to Richmond's Board of Aldermen at age 28. He received recognition from his peers in the black press when he was twice elected president of the National Afro-American Press Association in the 1890s. John Mitchell Jr. was for many years a pillar of strength in Richmond's black community."

The black woman nominated for greatest Virginian of the 19th century could as easily have been nominated also for greatest Virginian of the 20th century -- Maggie Lena Walker of Richmond. From the 1880s until her death in the 1930s, Walker was one of the most successful educational reformers and business leaders in Virginia. She transformed a small self-help organization into the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, which later became the nationally famous Consolidated Bank and Trust Co. of Richmond. Walker is reputed to be the first black woman bank president in the United States.

"Walker became the symbol of independent African-American culture," Ben Campbell wrote, "including both finance and education. She was black. She was a woman. She founded a bank. She led an entire community, a vanguard, into a development process which had to traverse the developments of centuries in a single generation."

The Maggie Walker House in Richmond, where she lived and died, is a National Historic Park, administered by the federal government's National Park Service in recognition of her extraordinary achievements and leadership.

As in the centuries before, Virginians left national and international legacies not to be forgotten. -- B.T.