The Stamp Act and the Virginia Resolves
Without even realizing it, white Virginians took their first steps toward separation about a decade before the Declaration of Independence. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Virginia was the largest of Great Britain’s North American colonies, and its borders stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. However, the westward movement of white colonists and competing imperial claims to the Ohio Country led to the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763). Fighting was fierce in western Virginia early in the war as colonists and Indigenous tribes raided each other’s villages. Peace returned to the colony after the fall of Quebec in 1759, and the Treaty of Paris (1763) secured Britain’s claim to all lands east of the Mississippi. However, the hopes of Virginia speculators for western lands were dashed when Britain forbade colonial settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains in the Proclamation of 1763, although white settlers continued to move westward.
Virginia Borders
The end of the Seven Years’ War brought new fiscal obligations to Virginians. Britain borrowed heavily to win the war, such that the national debt nearly doubled from £74 million in 1756 to £133 million in 1763. To ameliorate the situation by covering future military expenditures in the colony, Parliament passed the Sugar Act (1764), which laid duties on certain items imported to America, and the Stamp Act (1765), which taxed nearly all paper in the colonies. Britain expected to collect nearly £10,000 from Virginia alone under the Stamp Act.
Reaction to the new taxes was quick and negative. Richard Henry Lee of Westmoreland County decried “the illegality of taxation without consent” while the laws were still being drafted. In Boston, protests against the laws began in the streets, but in Virginia, they began in the assembly house. In December 1764, the House of Burgesses dispatched petitions to the king, lords, and commons that denounced both laws as violating Virginians’ “civil Rights as men and as Descendants of Britons.”
The House of Burgesses was hardly a bastion of democracy, as Virginia’s voters were exclusively landowning white men and its assemblymen overwhelmingly slaveholding tobacco planters. But a more radical generation, also made up primarily of enslavers, was coming of age. Twenty-nine-year-old Patrick Henry of Hanover County had recently gained notoriety for his vigorous defense of colonial rights in the Parson’s Cause; he had been accused of treason for his insistence that by disallowing a Virginia statute, George III, king of Great Britain, had “degenerated into a Tyrant.” Henry joined the House of Burgesses in May 1765 and nine days later introduced the Virginia Stamp Act Resolves that insisted that the colonial assembly had “the only and sole exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes” on Virginians.
Henry’s resolutions rankled the Virginia gentry. Richmond County planter Landon Carter fretted about the young man’s lack of deference to patriarchal authority, and others agreed. One day after passing the Stamp Act Resolves, the House of Burgesses rescinded the most radical parts. However, Henry’s legislation was reprinted in its entirety in New England newspapers a month later, and this promoted resistance to the tax in the northern colonies. When stamped paper arrived in Virginia on October 30, a mob gathered in Williamsburg and demanded that the designated distributor, George Mercer, resign his post. He did so promptly, and the tax remained uncollected.
The gentry’s support of the Stamp Act soon evaporated. When Parliament repealed the hated law in March 1766, Virginians greeted the news with bell ringing and bonfires. Subsequently, Richard Bland laid out the colony’s constitutional objections to the law in An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies (1766), in which he argued that Parliament could only impose external taxes like import duties on the colonies, not internal taxes like the Stamp Act.
Townshend Acts and Nonimportation
A year later, Parliament tacitly accepted Bland’s argument and passed the Townshend Acts (1767) that laid duties on tea, glass, paper, painters’ colors, and lead imported into the American colonies. Arthur Lee of Westmoreland County offered a biting critique of the new taxes in a series of essays that appeared in Rind’s Virginia Gazette under the pen name “Monitor.” In early 1768, four Piedmont counties demanded a collective response, and by the end of the year, all colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia endorsed Virginia’s invitation for a continental reply. King George III found the colony’s actions improper, and colonial secretary Lord Hillsborough suggested sending four or five ships to discipline Williamsburg. Virginia, observed British gadabout Horace Walpole, had both “the best heads and the principal boutesfeux,” or firebrands, in America.
In May 1769, the Virginia assembly passed four resolutions reiterating that the right to levy taxes on Virginians “is now, and ever hath been, legally and constitutionally vested in the House of Burgesses.” Immediately, Virginia governor Norborne Berkeley, baron de Botetourt, dissolved the house. The delegates reassembled in Raleigh Tavern and continued their deliberations. The attendees agreed not to consume anything taxed under the Townshend Acts, and beginning September 1, 1770, not to import British spirits, foodstuffs, certain manufactures, oils, and paints. To enforce the boycott, the Virginia Association (1769) was formed.
The nonimportation movement had a profound effect on Virginia’s tobacco planters. Since John Rolfe had first planted the Orinoco variety in 1611, Nicotiana tabacum had been the mainstay of Virginia’s economy. Tobacco planters achieved the greatest prominence in the colony, and its labor demands led to the mass immigration of unfree laborers, first indentured servants and then enslaved Africans. Virginians’ overinvestment in monoculture subjected the colony to a regular boom-and-bust cycle, while efforts to sell tobacco in England on consignment left the planters dangerously overextended.
This tobacco mentality colored Virginians’ opinions of British taxes. Beginning in the 1740s, planters engaged in a transatlantic consumer revolution that brought a flood of clocks, looking glasses, carriages, jewelry, and silverwork from England to the colony. However, much of this extravagance was funded by speculation on future tobacco sales, such that between 1766 and 1776, the debts of Chesapeake planters doubled. The situation became dire in 1772 when a global panic depressed tobacco prices. The planters blamed greedy merchants and aspirational lower classes for the situation, but some also looked inward at their own luxurious lives. Many saw a reduction of British imports as salutary for the morals of the colony and their own pocketbooks, so they supported the Virginia Association. However, the great planters remained skeptical of rabble-rousers who envisioned a more radical change for Virginia.
Race, Region, and Religion
The coming of the American Revolution in Virginia was felt differently by the diverse elements of the colony. In 1770, there were approximately 500,000 people in the colony, but only about 10 percent were gentry. The rest of the white population consisted of small farmers, artisans, traders, and overseers; 40 percent of colonists were enslaved African Americans. Most colonists lived in the Tidewater region where tobacco dominated, but a growing number moved into the Piedmont and established farms there. Some pushed beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains into what is now West Virginia and Kentucky, where they encountered Indigenous hunters.
African Americans lived under an oppressive regime that denied them freedom and civil liberties. Nearly all of the Black people in Virginia were enslaved. Nevertheless, people of African descent built a distinctive culture, especially as the native-born reached four-fifths of Virginia’s Black population in the middle of the eighteenth century. Many African Americans participated in the religious revivals that heralded the Great Awakening, and they built a distinctive version of Christianity. On the eve of independence, enslaved Virginians pressed their enslavers for a free Sunday and greater protections for their families. Yet the economic turmoil caused by the colony’s overreliance on tobacco also destabilized Black lives. As the profitability of tobacco declined, many African Americans were transferred to wheat farms or urban trades.
Whites calling for the abolition of slavery were a distinct minority in late colonial Virginia and were mostly confined to the Society of Friends (Quakers). However, the nonimportation movement prompted the House of Burgesses to pass Virginia’s first laws interfering with slavery. In 1767 and 1769, the assembly doubled the duty on enslaved people, in part to reduce planters’ debts and drive up the price of tobacco. However, the Privy Council disallowed these duties, further angering Virginians over Britain’s control of their laws.
The imperial crisis worried the large planters who feared that a breakdown of patriarchal authority would undermine the institution of slavery. When the carelessness of an enslaved gardener named Johnny led to the destruction of a field on Landon Carter’s plantation, Carter berated the enslaved man, but Johnny replied, “He did not care.” Similarly, when a thrashing left Tony the carpenter unable to work, Carter grew exasperated, writing in his diary, “I might as well give up every Negroe if I submit to this impudence.” Nor were the planters’ fears unfounded, as several enslaved people took to heart the claims of freedom and used the opportunity to liberate themselves. In 1774, Isaac Bee, who was enslaved at Kingsmill, forged a pass, and escaped because he “thinks he has a Right to his Freedom.”
Non-elite whites also struggled with debt, especially those who planted tobacco in the Tidewater. Landless whites and the poor suffered hunger and homelessness, yet racism kept them from making common cause with Blacks. For those without great estates, the promise of Virginia lay in the Piedmont and beyond. Non-elite whites headed west beginning in the 1720s, often relocating without enslaved laborers. By 1763, more than 20,000 colonists lived west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they planted hemp, flax, and wheat instead of tobacco.
Ethnically and religiously, western Virginia stood apart from the Tidewater. The Shenandoah Valley was settled by Palatinate Germans from the Rhine Valley region and Ulster Scots, who brought their own distinctive versions of Protestantism with them. In 1776, the Shenandoah Valley hosted twice as many Presbyterian churches as Anglican ones, even though the latter were tax-supported; there were many Lutheran and German Reformed congregations as well. In the 1740s, the Great Awakening began in western Virginia with the evangelical preaching of itinerants like Samuel Davies. By 1774, there were fifty-four separate Baptist churches with 4,000 members in Virginia.
Politically, small planters adhered to the Tidewater elites, although the imperial crisis exposed friction among the colony’s white population. During the boycotts, small planters ignored the elites’ efforts to ban the importation of enslaved laborers. Class divisions mapped onto religious differences as the elites promoted an Anglican bishopric for America as a means of countering evangelicalism. Conversely, Baptists criticized Virginia’s noncompliance with Britain’s Act of Toleration and the jailing of several Baptist preachers.
The westward movement of colonists led to new conflicts with Virginia’s Indigenous peoples, especially the Shawnee, Mingo, and Lenape (Delaware). Many of these people had fought against Britain in the Seven Years’ War, although peace was secured through the Proclamation of 1763 and treaties negotiated at Fort Pitt in 1765. However, official prohibitions did not prevent hunters, squatters, and land speculators from heading west of the Appalachian Mountains. Violence followed as natives and newcomers raided each other’s towns, making the region “bloody Ground” according to Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe.
In an attempt to broker a new peace, British Indian superintendent William Johnson negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) that opened up most of present-day Kentucky to colonial settlement. However, the treaty was signed by the Six Nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), not the peoples hunting in the region. The treaty consequently sent the Shawnee “in a rage” as their young men were “dissapointed in their hunting and find the Woods cover’d with white people.” Further violence ensued, and the Shawnee began trying to establish a confederacy with Creek, Wyandot (Hurons), Cherokee, and other nations “to Defend themselves against any Enemy.”
In September 1771, a new governor arrived in Williamsburg: John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore. Dunmore aggressively promoted western expansion, which three years later resulted in a brutal conflict that bore his name: Dunmore’s War. On April 30, 1774, colonists led by Jacob and Daniel Greathouse killed a dozen Mingo people, including John Logan (Tah-gah-jute), on the Ohio River in the Yellow Creek Massacre. When Logan retaliated, Dunmore raised an army and headed west. The Shawnee were defeated at the Battle of Point Pleasant on October 10, and nine days later, they agreed to cease hunting south of the Ohio River in the Treaty of Camp Charlotte.
Dunmore’s War exposed growing tensions between Virginia and Great Britain. Dunmore granted western lands to Seven Years’ War veterans, but colonial secretary William Legge, earl of Dartmouth, canceled these bounties, seeking instead to sell the land to the highest bidder. Virginia’s loss of the backcountry was confirmed by the Quebec Act (1774), which transferred control of the land west of the Ohio River to Canada. Colonists saw such actions as meddlesome and illegal. On November 5, 1774, Virginia officers returning from Dunmore’s War issued the Fort Gower Resolves (1774) in which they announced “that we are ready, at all Times, to the utmost of our Power, to maintain and defend” the “just Rights and Privileges” of Virginia. This marked the first time that Americans announced their willingness to bear arms against the King.
Coercive Acts and Virginia Conventions
Less than a year after the formation of the Virginia Association, events in New England deepened the crisis between the American colonies and Great Britain. In late 1768, the British government stationed four regiments of soldiers in Boston to suppress resistance to the new taxes and trade regulations. On March 5, 1770, a detachment of these redcoats fired into a crowd of civilians, killing five, in the Boston Massacre. Two years later, colonists in Rhode Island burned the HMS Gaspee, a customs schooner that had been arresting smugglers. In response, the British government demanded a thorough investigation and sent a special commission to prosecute the perpetrators without the privilege of trial by jury.
These developments rankled white Virginians. When the House of Burgesses convened in spring 1773, a majority agreed that Virginia should better coordinate with the other colonies. On March 12, Dabney Carr of Louisa County proposed that a Standing Committee of Correspondence and Inquiry be established. The measure passed easily. Thus began an enduring union of the thirteen colonies. The “Measure proposed by the Virginia Assembly,” predicted future Yale President Ezra Stiles, “will finally terminate in a General Congress.”
In May 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, and America lurched closer to revolution. The Townshend Acts had been repealed three years earlier, except for the duty on tea, and the Tea Act encouraged colonists to pay the tax by reducing the cost of the tea itself. On December 16, the Sons of Liberty destroyed £10,000 worth of tea in what would become known as the Boston Tea Party. (Virginia had its own tea party the following year. On November 7, 1774, colonists at Yorktown boarded the brig Virginia, seized “two Half Chests of Tea,” and “threw it into the River.”)
In response, Britain passed the Coercive Acts in spring 1774, which closed the Port of Boston, revoked the Massachusetts charter, and gave royal officials accused of capital crimes in America the option of being tried by sympathetic courts back in England. Although the Coercive Acts had little effect outside of New England, the House of Burgesses ordered fasting and prayers for the day that Boston Harbor was to be closed. “This Colony is in a great tumult and confusion,” observed Philip Vickers Fithian; something had to be done. Worried about rebelliousness in the house, Governor Dunmore dissolved the assembly. However, the fast continued as planned on June 1, and Dunmore soon departed to fight the Shawnee.
To Virginians, the cause of Massachusetts was the cause of all America. As the members of the dissolved House of Burgesses reassembled at Raleigh Tavern, they declared that “an attack made on one of our sister colonies, to compel submission to arbitrary taxes, is an attack made on all British American, and threatens to ruin the rights of all.” As before, the preferred response was a boycott. While the previous nonimportation association had allowed the purchase of certain goods, the 1774 boycott banned almost every item imported from Britain. As part of this movement, the ban on importing enslaved people resurfaced and virtually ended the trafficking of Africans to the colony. Tobacco planters in the Northern Neck of Virginia also proposed non-exportation associations, although concerns over debt hampered such schemes.
In lieu of an assembly, towns across Virginia elected representatives to an extralegal convention. In July, freeholders in Fairfax County gathered to elect delegates, and they issued a radical statement of defiance. Authored by George Mason, the Fairfax Resolves (1774) decried Parliament’s efforts to “extort from us our Money without our Consent” as a violation of the English constitution, the charter of Virginia, and “the natural Rights of Mankind.”
The first of the Virginia Revolutionary Conventions assembled on August 1, 1774, in Williamsburg. All sixty-one of Virginia’s counties advocated a vigorous and united resistance to the Coercive Acts. The first convention also selected Patrick Henry, George Washington, and five other leading Virginians to represent the colony at the First Continental Congress, which convened in Philadelphia in September. Virginians played a leading role in Congress and convinced the other delegates to endorse a continental nonimportation and non-exportation plan. The colonists kept a close watch on the conventions, and, in the Fincastle Resolutions (1775), one Virginia county pressed the delegates for a more muscular response.
The Coercive Acts also shrank the divisions among white colonists. Although the large planters of the Tidewater had been reluctant to support anything that critiqued patriarchal privilege, they ultimately led the conventions and boycotts. As the rhetoric became increasingly strident, the gentry no longer demanded deference from small planters and western farmers but sought their political support. Whites across Virginia were also brought together by rumors of slave revolts and calls to reinvigorate the county militias.
War and Independence
On March 20, 1775, representatives gathered at St. John’s Anglican Church in Richmond for a second revolutionary convention. Future presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson listened intently as the delegates debated whether or not to put Virginia “into a posture of Defence.” Some thought that reconciliation was still possible, and they sought to delay raising an army. Then, Patrick Henry rose and condemned those who cautioned patience. “The war is actually begun!” he thundered, such that all America could do now was defend itself and its principles. As his oratory built to a crescendo, Henry proclaimed: “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
Some Virginians pressed for peace, but events soon made this impossible. On April 19, British soldiers exchanged fire with Massachusetts minutemen at the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775), beginning the American Revolution (1775–1783). Before news of this reached the southern colonies, however, free Virginians had their own confrontation with the Redcoats. Early on April 21, twenty-one marines snuck into Williamsburg and carried off fifteen half barrels of gunpowder from the provincial magazine in what became known as the Gunpowder Incident. The capital was immediately in an uproar, and hundreds of colonists from northern and western Virginia assembled in arms at Fredericksburg. Rumors of slave revolts spread from Norfolk to Prince Edward County, fueled by gossip that Britain was preparing an abolition bill. Philip Fithian reported that the enslaved were “running off daily” in June, and this continued through the fall.
When it was revealed that Dunmore had ordered the powder’s removal, the governor immediately became a villain to many Virginians. Dunmore called the House of Burgesses back into session on June 1, 1775, but this did little to pacify the increasingly belligerent colonists. The governor fled Williamsburg on June 8, and he took refuge aboard the HMS Fowey at the mouth of the James River. A third convention met in Richmond in July and ordered the raising of two regiments of provincial soldiers. It also created the Committee of Safety to take over the executive function of Virginia now that royal authority had collapsed.
Dunmore lacked British soldiers to command, so in addition to Loyalist militia, he raised an army of the unfree. On November 7, the governor signed Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775), which offered freedom to all enslaved people and indentured servants belonging to Patriots who were willing and able to fight for the king. As many as 2,000 enslaved Black people answered the call, including Yellow Peter, who abandoned his master, changed his name to Captain Peter, and joined “Governor Dunmore’s regiment with a musquet on his back and a sword by his side.”
Dunmore’s army of Black and white Loyalists defeated a Patriot militia at the Battle of Kemp’s Landing on November 15, and this encouraged more African Americans to join what Dunmore labelled the Ethiopian Regiment. However, the 2nd Virginia Regiment led by Colonel William Woodford defeated Dunmore’s army at the Battle of Great Bridge (1775) on December 9. Afterward, the governor withdrew his soldiers to his ships in Norfolk Harbor. After the burning of Norfolk on January 1, 1776, Dunmore repositioned his flotilla near Gwynn’s Island in the Chesapeake Bay, where much of the Ethiopian Regiment perished of smallpox and other diseases. Shortly after Dunmore’s defeat at the Battle of Gwynn’s Island (1776) in July, his ships finally abandoned Virginia. By then, however, royal rule in Virginia had collapsed.
On May 6, 1776, a fifth convention assembled in Williamsburg, and after a short debate the delegates voted to declare Virginia a free and independent commonwealth. Richard Henry Lee departed shortly thereafter to inform the Second Continental Congress of Virginia’s decision and to advocate for an American Declaration of Independence. The convention also devised a frame of government. George Mason drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which the convention approved on June 12. Two weeks later, the representatives approved the Virginia Constitution of 1776, and on June 29, Patrick Henry was inaugurated as the state’s first governor.
The American Revolution had come to Virginia. A bloody war would soon follow. Today, the Revolution lives on in the Virginia seal, which depicts a king uncrowned by virtue and the words: “Sic semper tyrannis” or “thus always to tyrants.”
