The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 — Reading Notes

French were driven from Canada, the Forks of the Ohio, the Illinois Country, and Louisiana; the Spanish were forced to give up Florida; and the Indians, now without any allies, were defeated or banished beyond the Appalachians. Virginians were free to continue their remarkable growth of the past 40 years during which they had left the Tidewater, pushed up the James, Rappahannock, Appomattox, and Potomac river basins, and joined thousands of Scotch-Irish and Germans pushing southward out of Pennsylvania into the Valley of Virginia. Although they were halted temporarily in 1755 when Braddock's disastrous defeat in Pennsylvania and the massacre of frontier pioneer James Patton at Draper's Meadow (Blacksburg) encouraged the Indians to resist the white man's advance, Virginians eagerly eyed the lands in southwestern Virginia along the Holston, Clinch, and French Lick Rivers and those that lay beyond the mountains along the Ohio. This territory, from which was carved the states of Kentucky and West Virginia, made Virginia, even without considering her strong claim to all the lands north of the Ohio, the largest of the American colonies.

Following the end of the French and Indian war, Virginians expected to recapture the economic prosperity that had been interrupted by the conflict. In 1763, they were the most affluent and the most populous white colonists. There were at least 350,000 settlers, including 140,000 slaves, in Virginia. Pennsylvania, the next largest colony, had 200,000 residents. If the past was any indication, the numbers of Virginians surely would multiply. In 1720 there were 88,000 colonists in Virginia, 26,000 of whom were black. The years between 1720 and 1750 had been very fruitful ones and were to be remembered as "the Golden Age" of Colonial Virginia. Virginia and Maryland were ideal colonies for the British. The Chesapeake colonies produced a raw material (tobacco) which the British sold to European customers, and they bought vast quantities of finished products from craftsmen and manufacturers in the mother country. These were years when the English mercantile system worked well. There was lax enforcement of the Navigation Acts, liberal credit from English and Scots merchants, generous land grants from the crown, a minimum of interference in Virginia's government, and peace within the empire. Both mother country and colony were happy with the arrangement. With peace would come a renewal of those "good old days." Or so Virginians thought. But it was not to be so.

It is never possible to return to the status quo ante bellum. It would not be possible for Great Britain to do it in 1763. The British ended the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War 1756 became a general world war) as the dominant country in Europe, triumphant over France in India, the West Indies, and North America, and owners of Spanish Florida. Yet victory had its price and its problems. The wars had to be paid for; a policy for governing the new territories had to be formulated; the Indian tribes beyond the Appalachians had to be pacified and protected; and Britain had to remain "at the ready" to defend her newly-won position of power.

Neither France, nor Spain, was about to give in easily. The French, particularly, were awaiting the chance to challenge the British. For that reason, the Peace of Paris was only a truce in a series of wars which began in the 1740's and did not end until the defeat of Napoleon in 1814. The eager French support of the American Revolution was based on more than the attraction of young aristocrats like Lafayette to the republican ideals of a war for independence. French self-interest and revenge also were heavily involved.

The foremost task facing Britain was meeting the costs of victory. To gain and maintain the new empire cost great sums of money which the crown knew it could not extract from British taxpayers already overburdened with levies on land, imports, exports, windows, carriages, deeds, newspapers, advertisements, cards and dice, and a hundred other items of daily use. The land tax, for instance, was 20 percent of land value. These were taxes parliament had levied on residents in Great Britain but not on the colonists. Many taxes had been in effect since an earlier war in the 1740's (King George's War). With the national debt at a staggering £146,000,000, much of it the result of defending interests in the New World, and several million pounds owed to American colonies as reimbursement for maintaining troops during the war, British taxpayers, rich and poor alike, expected relief. In fact, these war debts forced parliament to impose additional taxes in 1763, including a much-despised excise tax on cider. It is hardly surprising to find most Britons agreed that in the future the Americans should be responsible for those expenses directly attributable to maintaining the empire in America. That future costs were to be shared seemed politically expedient and the reasonable thing to do. Every ministry which came to power in Britain after 1763 understood this as a national mandate it could not ignore.

The French and Indian War produced a rather curious and very significant by-product: the English literally rediscovered America and Virginia. Since the late 17th Century there had been very little personal contact between Englishmen in authority and the colony. From 1710 to 1750, the years when all was running so well, the only contact Virginia had with English government was through her royal governor. Most of the other royal officials in Virginia were Virginians, not Englishmen. And, as events turned out, even the royal governors were a thin line of communication. Governor Alexander Spotswood (1710-1722) became a Virginia planter rather than go home to Britain; Governor Hugh Drysdale (1722-1726) died in Williamsburg; and Governor William Gooch (1727-1749) served in the colony for 22 years without once visiting England. Moreover, fewer young Virginians were going to England for their schooling, preferring to attend the College of William and Mary or the recently opened College of New Jersey (Princeton). There were, of course, London and Bristol tobacco merchants who knew Virginia well, but the great increase in Virginia wealth after 1720 was partially obscured from Englishmen because it was the Scots merchants, not the English, who came to control much of the Chesapeake tobacco trade.

English politicians and citizens alike had a very incomplete understanding of the great strides made by Virginia. They still thought of Virginians as provincials, struggling in the wilderness, or as impoverished Scots, Irish, and Germans living in the back-country. Hundreds of English military officers, many of whom would achieve positions of political influence in the 1760's and 1770's, were surprised to find Virginia and other American colonies to be economically prosperous, socially mature, and attractive places in which to live. Englishman after Englishman wrote about Virginians who lived in a style befitting English country gentry and London merchants. Over and over again they noted the near absence of poverty, even on the frontier. Their discoveries matched English political needs. Not only was it necessary for the Americans to assume a greater share of the financial burdens, Englishmen now knew they could do it.

These Englishmen also made another major discovery--the colonies were violating the English constitution. They had grown independent of the crown and the mother country. They paid little attention to parliamentary laws and the Navigation Acts; they smuggled extensively and bribed customs officials; and they traded with the enemy in wartime. They had developed political practices which conflicted with the constitution as the British knew it. Legislatures ignored the king's instructions, often refused to support the war efforts until they had forced concessions from the governors, and had taken royal and executive prerogatives unto themselves. Worse yet, royal governors like Robert Dinwiddie and Francis Fauquier yielded to the demands of the House of Burgesses and accepted laws explicitly contrary to their royal instructions. What these Englishmen discovered was the collapse of the imperial system as set forth in the creation of the Board of Trade in 1696. In its place there had been substituted, quite unnoticed by British officials, the House of Burgesses which thought of itself as a miniature House of Commons.[1]

[1] An excellent summary of the ways in which the Virginia burgesses and their counterparts in North and South Carolina and Georgia quietly gained the upper hand by mid-century, see Jack P. Greene, Quest for Power (University of North Carolina Press, 1963).

Once the British made the discovery about these constitutional changes they quite understandably believed such conditions could not be ignored. Quite understandably, the Virginians were not willing to give up rights and privileges which they believed were theirs, or the semiautonomy they had enjoyed the previous 30 years.

The New Generation in Politics: Britain and Virginia

There came to power in the 1760's an entirely new political leadership in England. The most important change was the kingship itself. George II, who had come to the throne in 1727, died in 1760 and was succeeded by his grandson, George III. Unlike his grandfather and his great-grandfather, George I (1715-1727), both of whom were essentially Hanoverians, George III "gloried in the name of Briton" and believed it was essential for the king to be his own "prime" minister and for the king to be active in managing the crown's political affairs in parliament. Unlike the first two Georges, the third George could not achieve the political stability which Robert Walpole and the Duke of Newcastle had imposed on parliament from 1720 to 1754. It is well known that George had a congenital disease which pushed him into periods of apparent insanity during his long reign (he died in 1820). Present day medical scholars now believe that this illness was perhaps porphyria or some type of metabolic illness, which could now be treated and controlled by diet and medication. Such illness does not appear to have been a major factor in his actions prior to the Revolution, the first significant attack not occurring until 1788. Instead, the stolid and often plodding king tended to rely upon men like the unimaginative Lord Bute or his somewhat stodgy wife, Charlotte of Mecklenberg (for whom two Virginia counties and the town of Charlottesville are named.) The breakdown of the once-powerful Whig political coalition also added to the king's problems.

About the time George ascended the throne, the English Whigs who had dominated English politics since 1720 fell victim to their own excesses. Walpole and Newcastle had controlled and directed parliament and the ministry through the "judicious" use of patronage and government contracts and contacts. Nevertheless they had done so with a consistent governmental program in mind and in a period of peace. By the 1760's the Whigs had deteriorated into factions quarreling over patronage, spoils, and contracts, not policy. They became thoroughly corrupt and interested in power primarily for personal gain. Consequently, the king could not find anyone whom he could trust who could also provide leadership and hold together a coalition capable of doing his business in the House of Commons. He tried Whigs George Grenville (1763-1765), Lord Rockingham (1765-1766), Lord Chatham, the former William Pitt (1766-1768), and the Duke of Grafton (1768-1770). Finally, in 1770, he turned to Lord North and the Tories. North held on until 1782.

What these frequent changes suggest is that at the height of the American crisis in the 1760's, when the real seeds of the Revolution were being sown, the instability of the British parliamentary government precluded a consistent and rational approach to American problems. Lacking internal cohesion, the English government could not meet the threat of external division. It also means that the colonists, especially the Virginians, saw parliament as being thoroughly corrupt and the king surrounded by what even the mild-mannered Edmund Pendleton called "a rotten, wicked administration". Not until the eve of independence in 1776 were Virginians to think of George as a tyrant and despot. In fact, he was neither. He was a dedicated man of limited abilities in an age demanding greatness if the separation of the American colonies from the empire was to have been prevented. Perhaps even greatness could not have prevented what some have come to believe was inevitable. (For a sympathetic study, see King George III, by John Brooke, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1972).

Leadership also changed dramatically in Virginia in the 1760's. This was partially due to changing economic conditions. Prosperity did not return as rapidly as expected. The long war probably masked a basic flaw in the Virginia economy which Virginians believed they had solved--they were too reliant on tobacco. The great Virginia fortunes of the mid-18th Century were built on extensive credit from Britain, the efficient operation of the mercantile system, the initiative and enterprise of Scots merchants who had succeeded in marketing in Europe nearly all the tobacco produced by the new planters in the Piedmont and Northern Neck, and by the prudence of the planters themselves.

Such a favorable balance of economic factors did not exist in the 1760's. The European market could not absorb continued annual increases in the good, cheap tobacco Virginia produced. Prices fell. With an oversupply of tobacco in the warehouses, English and Scots merchants limited further credit extensions and called for repayment of long-outstanding loans. Within Virginia the centers of tobacco production shifted from the older, worn-out Tidewater lands to the newer, richer soils along the Fall Line, on the Piedmont, and in the Northern Neck. A few men like George Washington switched from tobacco to wheat, corn, barley, and rye. Most Tidewater planters did not realize fully what was happening to them, presuming at first that they were just in another swing of the unpredictable tobacco business cycle, and were not caught in a situation which would be permanent. Eventually the total debt of Virginians, most of it owned by Tidewater planters, to Scots and English merchant houses reached £2,000,000, equalling the total private debts of the other 12 colonies.

One other economic factor was apparent to many Virginians--they were living beyond their means, building fine houses, furnishing them with exquisite taste, wearing the latest fashions, riding in expensive carriages, and occasionally over-extending themselves at the gaming tables and race courses. Although these personal extravagances added to the debt structure, they would not have been so significant if they had not been accompanied by a lack of business ability among some of the younger Tidewater planters. The sons did not seem to have inherited the same business acumen and hard-driving business instincts of their fathers and grandfathers. Having grown up in a period of affluence, they were eternally optimistic that it would continue, that their setbacks were temporary, and their social positions were secure. Like men everywhere when their private world begins to break down, they tended to strike out at those closest to them--the merchants who extended the credit, the tobacco buyers who would not pay top prices, and the politicians in power. It was not the best of times for London to be asking some Virginians to pay new and quite different taxes.

Had the opposition to taxes been led mainly by those who faced bleak economic futures or the loss of once-powerful positions and declining family status, one could agree with those who say that the reaction of Virginians to the Currency, Sugar, Stamp, or Tea Acts was primarily economic. However, there were many other rising young leaders, families which had managed their estates, and men who lived within their means, paid attention to their debts, and resisted credit extensions until their tobacco was harvested and cured. They also took violent exception to crown and parliamentary solutions to imperial problems. The growing personal indebtedness caused Virginians to rethink their economic ties to the empire, it did not cause them to seek independence in order to avoid paying their bills.[2]

[2] For differing views of the debt situation see Lawrence H. Gipson, The Coming of the Revolution (Harper and Row: New York, 1954), 40-54, and Emory G. Evans, "Planter Indebtedness and the Coming of the Revolution in Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. series, XIX (1962), 511-33. Evans holds an anti-debt position.

Political leadership changed during the 18th Century from the council to the House of Burgesses and from a few great families to a broad-based gentry. In the early 18th Century several great families directed Virginia politics. Mostly members of the Governor's Council, they not only won power and wealth for themselves, they challenged the power of the royal governors and managed to defeat or neutralize several strong-willed governors, including Governor Francis Nicholson (1698-1705) and Governor Alexander Spotswood. They even converted Spotswood into a Virginia planter. The council reached its height of power in the 1720's and then lost its influence as the great planters passed on. Robert "King" Carter died in 1732, Commissary James Blair in 1743, William Byrd II in 1744, Thomas Lee in 1750, and Lewis Burwell in 1751. Only Thomas Lee successfully passed on his political position to his heir, Richard Henry Lee. Unlike his father, Lee achieved his power in the House of Burgesses.

The day of the House of Burgesses had come. Its leader was John Robinson, of King and Queen County, whose father and uncle had been councilors. From the day in 1738 when he became Speaker of the House and Treasurer of Virginia until his death in 1766, Robinson quietly and efficiently built the power and influence of the burgesses. He took as his watchword the promise of his predecessor as speaker, Sir John Randolph, to the burgesses:

The Honour of the House of Burgesses hath of late been raised higher than can be observed in former Times; and I am persuaded you will not suffer it to be lessened under your Management.

I will be watchful of your Privileges, without which we should be no more than a dead Body; and advertise you of every Incident that may have the least tendency to destroy or diminish them...[3]

[3] Journal of House of Burgesses, 5 August 1736.

Robinson never flagged in his devotion to protecting and advancing the privileges of the house.

Robinson correctly understood the times. By the 1730's the number of affluent families numbered well over 100 and could no longer be effectively represented by the 12-member council. Many burgesses not only were as wealthy as councilors, they were their social equals. Quite commonly they were their brothers or nephews. As the burgesses gained the ascendancy over the council, the house became, in the words of Carl Bridenbaugh, "the tobacco gentry club". There sat the new generation of Randolphs, Harrisons, Nelsons, Robinsons, and Lees.

There developed around Robinson and his cousin, Attorney-General Peyton Randolph, a group of like-minded gentry known in Virginia politics as the "Robinson-Randolph Clique." Mostly planters and burgesses from the James and York river basins, they included a few of their heirs who had built substantial plantations on the Piedmont. Their principal rivals had been northern Tidewater and Northern Neck planters led by Councilor Thomas Lee and then by Richard Henry Lee. Although these rival gentry groups might compete for choice lands in western Virginia and the Ohio Valley and for royal offices and positions of influence, they did not differ in political philosophy. Nor did they deny house leadership to men with talent. Unlike their counterparts in the House of Commons they did not differ on matters of English policy--political and economic decisions were to be made in Virginia by Virginians and not by royal governors, the Board of Trade, the crown, or the English Parliament. Above all it was not to be made by parliament. They were the parliament for Virginia.

In the 1760's three new groups joined the prevailing Robinson-Randolph leadership. The first was the generation born in the 1730's and 1740's which would reach maturity in the 1760's and be waiting to enter the "tobacco club" as a matter of birth. The second was a generation of men who had achieved wealth and influence, mainly in the Piedmont, whose fathers and brothers had not been in the first rank of planter gentry. The third was a new element--burgesses from recently established frontier counties who had the ambition, drive, and determination to make good which were characteristics of the late 17th Century founders of the great families. Rarely did these men want to overturn the prevailing political leadership, they wanted to join it. The declining fortunes of the Tidewater planters and the crises of the 1760's accelerated the rise to power of all three of these new elements in the House of Burgesses.

The Political Philosophy of Virginia, 1763