Virginia's Lieutenant Governor Wyndham Robertson announced the state's chosen electors for the 1836 presidential race, declaring 24 men from across the commonwealth duly elected to cast Virginia's votes. This proclamation came as the nation prepared for a contentious election without Andrew Jackson on the ballot for the first time in eight years. Meanwhile, Richmond's economy hummed with activity: lottery advertisements promised magnificent capitals—including a $10,000 prize from the Virginia State Lottery drawing December 17th—while the city's property market boomed with offerings ranging from the Union Hotel on Market Street to a substantial farm near Richmond called French Hay, featuring 617 acres of red clover fields and brick mansions, being sold because the owner was relocating his enslaved workers to cotton country. New businesses opened their doors: Porter Robinson took over the medicines and dye-stuffs shop, William H. Morling launched a fashionable clothing store featuring Polish and invisible green coats, and George Rogers prepared his newly renovated Boydton Hotel to serve travelers.

This December 1836 edition captures America at a pivotal democratic moment. With Jackson's presidency ending, the election represented a test of the new Democratic Party without its founder. Virginia, still the nation's most influential state demographically and politically, controlled significant electoral power—those 24 electors mattered enormously. Simultaneously, the ads reveal the South's economic obsession: enslaved labor was being relocated wholesale to cotton plantations, reflecting the Mississippi Valley's explosive growth as the cotton kingdom. The booming property market and business openings show Richmond profiting from this brutal expansion, even as the classifieds betray its human cost.

• A runaway slave notice advertises for three enslaved men—David, Simon Peter, and Hercules—with a $50 reward each if caught, offering precise physical descriptions including that Hercules had a 'bright complexion' and one man 'speaks quick when spoken to.' The notice directs rewards to James Pritchett in Henry County, Tennessee, revealing the interstate tracking networks slavery required.
• The Widderminster Academy advertisement lists tuition at $100 for a classic year of ten months—but only $25 tuition for students who furnished their own bed and bedding, showing how even elite education operated on a two-tiered system based on wealth.
• French Hay farm, being sold for $617 acres near Richmond, explicitly states the owner is 'determined to send his Negroes to a cotton country'—a transparent admission that Virginia planters were dismantling their estates to participate in the westward enslaved labor trade.
• The lottery tickets sold for as little as $1 per share, with packages available, suggesting lottery gambling was accessible to working people—not just the wealthy—making it de facto working-class entertainment.
• A clothing store advertisement specifically invites 'Country Merchants' to examine stock and buy, indicating Richmond retailers were already positioning themselves as wholesalers serving rural Virginia, previewing the urban-rural commercial networks that would define antebellum commerce.

• The 1836 election featured in Robertson's proclamation was won by Martin Van Buren, Jackson's handpicked successor—but it would be the last Democratic victory before William Henry Harrison's Whig triumph in 1840, which inaugurated a period of genuine two-party competition.
• Virginia's 24 electors mentioned here represented enormous power: Virginia still had more electoral votes than any state except New York. Within just 25 years, Virginia's political dominance would be shattered by westward migration and the rise of the industrial North.
• The French Hay farm listing mentions the 'Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Rail road' passing nearby—this railroad, chartered in 1834, represented the cutting edge of infrastructure technology that would transform Virginia's economy by connecting interior plantations directly to Richmond ports.
• George Rogers' Boydton Hotel reopening in Mecklenburg County reflects how even small-town taverns were becoming formalized 'Hotels' with advertised amenities like 'neat and comfortable' bedrooms—the professionalization of hospitality was underway across the South.
• Wyndham Robertson, issuing this proclamation as acting Governor, was a wealthy Tidewater planter who would later become a railroad executive—embodying how Virginia's planter elite were transitioning into industrial capitalism while maintaining their enslaved-labor fortunes.