ENTRY

Richard Bland (1710–1776)

SUMMARY

Richard Bland was a Virginia planter and statesman whose prolific writings on the colonial right to self-governance helped shape Virginia political opinion in the years leading up to the American Revolution (1775–1783). Bland served as a representative in the House of Burgesses (1742–1776), a member of the Virginia Committees of Correspondence (1773–1775) and Safety (1775–1776), and a delegate to five Virginia Conventions (1774–1776), and was elected to the First and Second Continental Congresses (1774–1775). A dedicated student of history and law who attended the College of William and Mary, Bland was described by Thomas Jefferson as “the most learned and logical” political leader of his generation. Bland first emerged as a defender of Virginia’s rights during the pistole fee dispute, and became well known for his resistance to British interference in Virginia government, whether from Parliament, the colonial governor, or the Church of England. A strong writer, he helped draft the Two Penny Acts of 1755 and 1758, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the Virginia Constitution of 1776, in addition to other bills and documents; he also published a number of essays and pamphlets, the content of which influenced future Patriots such as Patrick Henry. His health began to fail in 1774, and by the Virginia Convention of 1776, his infirmities confined him to a relatively inconspicuous political role; he died in Williamsburg on October 26, 1776.

Personal Life

Bland was born on May 6, 1710, the son of Richard Bland and his second wife, Elizabeth Randolph Bland. His probable birthplace was Jordan’s Point in Prince George County, his father’s plantation. Orphaned in 1720, he grew up under the guidance and tutelage of his guardians and relatives, the Randolphs of Turkey Island, and he attended the College of William and Mary.

Bland married Anne Poythress on March 21, 1730, and they had six sons and six daughters before her death on April 9, 1758. On January 1, 1759, Bland married Martha Macon Massie, a widow who died eight months after their marriage. He subsequently married Elizabeth Blair Bolling, the widowed half sister of councillor John Blair (ca. 1687–1771). She died late in April 1775.

Bland managed his inherited plantations, joined many of his friends and family members in speculating in land, studied law and qualified to practice before the colony’s General Court, and exhibited a litigious streak. At his death his estate included thirty slaves. An erudite and highly intelligent man and a dedicated student of history and law, Bland assembled a large, excellent library as well as many valuable original documents for a history of the colony that he never wrote. Thomas Jefferson, who acquired some of the most useful books and records after Bland’s death, later described him as “the most learned and logical” of all the leading men of that generation. Bland’s eyes were failing him by October 1774, when his acquaintance Roger Atkinson described him as having “something of the look of musty old Parch[men]ts w’ch he handleth & studieth much.”

Political Career

Bland served on the Prince George County Court and sat on the local parish vestry, where he sometimes officiated as a lay reader. Like his father before him he sat on the board of visitors of the College of William and Mary. Elected to the House of Burgesses from Prince George County in the spring of 1742, Bland remained in the Virginia legislature without a break until his death more than thirty-four years later. He quickly became a leading burgess with high positions on the most important committees and frequently chaired one or more standing committees or the committee of the whole. His able pen and extensive knowledge of law and history almost always got him onto critical drafting committees for important bills and resolutions concerning Virginia and its place in the British empire. Bland ranked with speaker John Robinson and Peyton Randolph as one of the most influential and productive burgesses during the last quarter century of the colonial period. Following Robinson’s death, Bland lost a bid for becoming speaker to Randolph.

During the 1750s and 1760s Bland took a leading role in defending the colony’s use of paper money to finance its part in Great Britain’s war against France. Late in November 1764 he helped to frame the colony’s first protests against the Stamp Act, but it is unclear whether, as was later reported, he opposed or was even present when Patrick Henry introduced a second, more inflammatory set of resolutions the following year. Later in the 1760s Bland was a key draftsman of the assembly’s stern objections to the Townshend Acts. In addition he opposed creation of an American bishopric to govern the colonial Church of England and maintained that local vestries, rather than the General Court or the bishop of London through the colonial commissary, had full authority over the parishes and the right to select and provide for the support of their ministers. At every turn Bland argued for colonial control of colonial affairs and against any extension of British control over Virginia’s internal political and economic life. Between 1753 and 1774 his newspaper articles, public letters, and pamphlets made him one of the best-known Virginians of his day. Bland’s cultivated mind and spirited pen helped lay the groundwork for revolution, although revolution was never his goal nor independence his purpose. Rather, as each new political crisis strained the relationships between the General Assembly and the royal governor, between colony and Parliament, and between colony and Crown, he gradually developed and asserted Virginia’s constitutional and legal claim—and ultimately its moral claim under natural law—to a large measure of self-government.

Bland first emerged as a defender of Virginia’s rights during the pistole fee controversy. He helped draft the burgesses’ resolutions of November 1753 charging that Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie‘s imposition without legislative approval of a fee of one pistole for signing and affixing the colonial seal to land patents was “of dangerous Consequence to the Liberties of his Majesty’s faithful Subjects, and to the Constitution of this Government.” In response to Dinwiddie’s assertion that he had a right to impose the fee as a part of the royal prerogative, Bland likened the controversy to the struggles of Parliament with Charles I in the 1630s and asserted that just as levying a tax in England was illegal without parliamentary action, so too no fee could legally be imposed in Virginia without approval by the people’s representatives in the General Assembly. He almost went so far as to maintain that even the royal prerogative could not operate contrary to the laws and legal customs of the colony. Bland spelled out his reasoning in a short essay entitled “A Modest and True State of the Case,” now better known as A Fragment on the Pistole Fee, the title under which it was first published in 1891.

Bland acquired a much wider fame during the protracted debates following the adoption in 1758 of the second of the so-called Two Penny Acts, both of which he had helped to write. Passed in the wake of tobacco crop failures, the laws, which applied to all transactions and contractual obligations payable in tobacco, permitted parish vestries to substitute for one year a cash payment of approximately two pence per pound of tobacco in lieu of 16,000 pounds of tobacco and cask, which was the legal annual salary of ministers. The laws raised important and complex issues, including whether the General Assembly could amend or repeal the statute establishing ministers’ salaries without first obtaining royal consent, whether the assembly’s acts diminished ministerial salaries unfairly, and whether these questions could be properly adjudicated in the colony’s courts. Bland fired early salvos in a pamphlet war on these subjects. In A Letter to the Clergy of Virginia, in Which The Conduct of the General-Assembly is vindicated, Against The Reflexions contained in a Letter to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, from the Lord-Bishop of London, published in Williamsburg in 1760, Bland attacked the leaders of the Virginia clergy and the bishop of London while adducing legal precedents and constitutional and practical justifications for the assembly’s actions. He stated that in emergencies the General Assembly of Virginia had the right to do whatever was necessary for the good of the colony, royal instructions to colonial governors notwithstanding. Four years later, after Landon Carter and commissary John Camm had entered the bitter and highly personal debates, Bland published an extended satiric dialogue, Colonel Dismounted: or the Rector Vindicated, in a Letter addressed to His Reverence: Containing A Dissertation upon the Constitution of the Colony, which blasted Camm by name and asserted more boldly than anyone had before that for all strictly provincial purposes the General Assembly of Virginia was the only representative body that could tax or legislate for the colony. In developing his argument Bland distinguished between acts of Parliament made to regulate imperial affairs and those of a purely local nature, a distinction used later in 1764 and in 1765 to help justify the actions of the House of Burgesses and most other colonial assemblies in North America that were busy contesting the power of Parliament to lay a stamp tax on the colonists.

After the Stamp Act crisis, Bland undertook to refute the theory of virtual representation used by defenders of that law against the colonial objection to taxation without representation. In An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766), he took his previous arguments several steps further by denying that Parliament had the authority to lay a tax on a colony or pass legislation respecting its internal affairs. Bland’s pamphlet directly challenged Parliament’s dominance in the British empire. It emphasized instead the importance of representative assemblies in the governance of the colonies and brought to the forefront the power of natural rights as a counterbalance to parliamentary or even royal power and authority.

Later Years

Late in the 1760s and early in the 1770s Bland attended all of the recorded Virginia protest meetings and conventions, served on the Virginia Committee of Correspondence, and signed all of the Virginia associations and pacts directed at British policies. A group of bold and energetic younger men soon began to take the lead, but they built on foundations that he had laid, and he supported their efforts. In September 1774 Bland was a Virginia delegate to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, where he told John Adams that the meeting was so important to the defense of colonial rights that despite his age he would have gone all the way to Jericho if necessary. Bland returned to the Second Continental Congress in the spring of 1775 but retired at about the end of May because of ill health. On July 7 of that year, after being publicly accused of disloyalty to the colonial cause, he vindicated himself and attacked his accuser, a clergyman named Samuel Sheild, in a public letter to the newspaper. Bland also demanded and received a public endorsement of his patriotism from the Convention of July–August 1775.

Bland served on the eleven-man Committee of Safety that in effect governed Virginia between September 1775 and July 1776, and he represented Prince George County in the Virginia Conventions of December 1775 and May 1776. He had never aimed at independence, and some of his comments in the spring of 1776 have been interpreted, possibly incorrectly, as indicating a reluctance to take that last big step. Hugh Blair Grigsby, a Virginia historian able to base his assessment on the firsthand knowledge of many of Bland’s contemporaries, later remarked that unlike many other men whose utterances were unclear because they knew too little, Bland often expressed himself poorly because he knew too much. In the spring of 1776, when Thomas Paine’s Common Sense had many Americans exclaiming over its irresistible rhetorical power and conceding the inevitable necessity of declaring independence, Bland, ever the pedant and close student of history, chose to fault Paine’s reading of history and reportedly declared “that the Author of common sense is a blockhead and ignoramus for that He has grossly mistaken the nature of the Jewish Theocracy.” Bland may merely have been irritated by one of Paine’s historical analogies, and there is no reliable evidence that he hesitated when the question of independence became unavoidable. On May 15, 1776, Bland joined the other members of the Virginia Convention in instructing the colony’s congressional delegation to move a resolution of independence. His infirmities confined him to a relatively inconspicuous role in the Convention of 1776, but he served on the committee that wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the first constitution of the commonwealth, which lodged most governmental power where Bland had always thought it belonged, with the people’s directly elected representatives in the House of Delegates, the lower and more numerous branch of the General Assembly.

After returning to Williamsburg early in October 1776 as a member of the House of Delegates, Richard Bland collapsed in the street on October 26, 1776, and died that evening in the house of John Tazewell. He was buried on November 7, 1776, in the family cemetery at Jordan’s Point.

Major Works

  • “A Modest and True State of the Case” (1753), later published as A Fragment on the Pistole Fee (1891)
  • A Letter to the Clergy of Virginia, in Which The Conduct of the General-Assembly is vindicated, Against The Reflexions contained in a Letter to the Lords of Trade and Plantations, from the Lord-Bishop of London (1760)
  • Colonel Dismounted: or the Rector Vindicated, in a Letter addressed to His Reverence: Containing A Dissertation upon the Constitution of the Colony (1764)
  • An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766)
MAP
TIMELINE
May 6, 1710
Richard Bland is born to Richard Bland and Elizabeth Randolph Bland at Jordan's Point in Prince George County, his father's plantation.
1720
Richard Bland is orphaned and taken in by his mother's family, the Randolphs of Turkey Island.
March 21, 1730
Richard Bland marries Anne Poythress. They will have six sons and six daughters.
Spring 1742
Richard Bland wins a seat in the House of Burgesses representing Prince George County. Bland will remain in the Virginia legislature until his death thirty-four years later.
1746
Richard Bland is admitted to practice law under the Virginia bar.
1753
Richard Bland writes a short essay arguing against implementation of the pistole fee. Entitled "A Modest and True State of the Case," it will be better known as A Fragment on the Pistole Fee, the title under which it is published in 1891.
December 4, 1753
The House of Burgesses passes a set of resolutions, drafted in part by Richard Bland, declaring that the pistole fee is unconstitutional and that an appeal for its discontinuation should be made to the Crown.
October 28, 1755
Burgesses Richard Bland and Lemuel Riddick are directed to prepare "a Bill to enable the Inhabitants of this Colony to discharge the Officers Fees in Money, for this present Year." This bill will become the Two Penny Act of 1755.
April 9, 1758
Anne Poythress, wife of Richard Bland, dies.
September 15, 1758
A petition to the House of Burgesses in which residents of Prince George County request a second Two Penny Act "[b]y Reason of the short Crops of Tobacco made this Year" is read at the Capitol on the second day of the General Assembly session. Richard Bland, a burgess of Prince George County, is asked to draft the bill.
October 12, 1758
Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier signs the Two Penny Act, which fixes the rate of Anglican ministers' salaries at two pence per pound of tobacco. This effectively reduces their pay and earns Fauquier a rebuke from authorities in London.
January 1, 1759
Richard Bland marries Martha Macon Massie, his second wife; she will die eight months later.
ca. 1760
Richard Bland marries his third wife, Elizabeth Blair Bolling, the widowed half sister of councillor John Blair.
1760
Richard Bland attacks the Virginia clergy and the bishop of London in the pamphlet A Letter to the Clergy of Virginia, arguing that in an emergency the General Assembly has the right to do what is necessary for the good of the colony.
1764
Richard Bland publishes Colonel Dismounted: or the Rector Vindicated, an extended satiric dialogue blasting commissary John Camm, who opposed the Two Penny Acts. In it Bland asserts that the General Assembly of Virginia is the only representative body that can tax or legislate for the colony.
1766
Richard Bland publishes An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies, in which he argues that Parliament does not have the authority to lay a tax on a colony or pass legislation respecting its internal affairs.
March 12, 1773
Richard Bland is appointed to the Virginia Committee of Correspondence, created to establish communication among the colonies.
September 5, 1774
The First Continental Congress convenes in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Seven Virginia delegates are in attendance, including Richard Bland, Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Edmund Pendleton, and George Washington.
April 1775
Elizabeth Blair Bolling, Richard Bland's third wife, dies.
May 10, 1775
Richard Bland attends the opening of the Second Continental Congress as a Virginia delegate, but returns to Virginia later that month due to ill health.
July 7, 1775
Samuel Sheild, a Virginia clergyman, publicly accuses Richard Bland of disloyalty to the colonial cause. Bland retaliates by writing a public letter to the Virginia Gazette; he also demands and receives a public endorsement of his patriotism from the Virginia Convention of July—August 1775.
September 1775—July 1776
Richard Bland serves on Virginia's eleven-man Committee of Safety, created to manage the colony's affairs in the absence of a royal governor.
December 1775
Richard Bland represents Prince George County at the Virginia Convention.
May 1776
Richard Bland joins the other members of the Virginia Convention in instructing the colony's congressional delegation to move a resolution of independence from Britain. Despite his failing health, he serves on the committee that writes the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the colony's first constitution.
October 26, 1776
Richard Bland, after returning to Williamsburg from the Virginia Convention, collapses in the street. He dies later that evening in the house of John Tazewell.
FURTHER READING
  • Tarter, Brent. “Bland, Richard.” In The Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Vol. 2, edited by Sara B. Bearss et al., 10–13. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2001.
CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
Tarter, Brent & Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Richard Bland (1710–1776). (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bland-richard-1710-1776.
MLA Citation:
Tarter, Brent, and Dictionary of Virginia Biography. "Richard Bland (1710–1776)" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 24 Nov. 2023
Last updated: 2021, December 22
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