Background
The tenant revolts that threatened the success of the American Revolution in Virginia grew out of issues of land and tenancy that emerged before 1776. In 1748, sixteen-year-old George Washington traveled with George William Fairfax, who was Virginia’s largest landlord, to the Shenandoah Valley to plot out new leaseholds. The trip in cold, wet weather along poor-to-nonexistent roads over steep terrain was brutal. But Washington saw the promise in owning land west of the Appalachian Mountains and made his first land purchase in 1752. In 1772, he obtained a 10,990-acre plot along the Kanawha River. Because under Virginia law Washington needed to make improvements to his land within three years of buying it, in January 1775 he hired James Cleveland, who rented a farm from him and had worked for him as an overseer, to manage the improvement of his plot. Washington instructed Cleveland to hire indentured servants or lease enslaved workers to clear land, mark out plots for tenants, and build a grist mill and an iron works.
In November 1775, Cleveland reported that he and his crew had cleared forests, planted peach trees, sown corn and potatoes, and started building the grist mill. By year’s end, Cleveland believed he had done everything asked of him and sought payment. Washington, however, worried that Cleveland had exaggerated the amount of work he had done and instructed his cousin, Lund Washington, to pay Cleveland in the paper money the Revolutionary government had printed instead of the sterling they had agreed to. Cleveland was counting on paying rent with the money he earned, but the paper money he received had significantly less value than the sterling he was promised. Facing these dire circumstances and angry with his landlord Washington, in late 1775, Cleveland refused to pay rent. He would not be alone, as the issue of rent became embroiled with Revolutionary politics and economics, pitting tenants against landlords.
The Tenant Strike
By fall 1775, tenants in other parts of Virginia were also refusing to pay rent, illustrating broad discontent among Virginia’s yeoman farmers and tenants. Some did not pay because they hoped to escape tenancy and recognized that some of the same men leading the revolution in Virginia were large landlords. Tenancy was widespread when these men ruled colonial Virginia—one-third of the population of Loudoun County rented their property—and nothing they did in the first few months of the war made tenants think that they intended to redistribute land to the people who worked and lived on it. These insurgent tenants wanted a more equal society based on a widespread distribution of property, which would also give them access to political power at a time when only landholders could vote. Early in the war, Thomas Jefferson suggested giving every white male in Virginia fifty to seventy-five acres in the western part of the state to guarantee their political independence, but his proposal did not come to fruition.
Other tenants refused to pay rent because they lacked the money to do so. Most relied on local markets to sell their agricultural products, paying rent with the cash they earned. But the nonexportation movement had disrupted these markets, and once the fighting started, the realities of war—the British embargo of American exports, battles, shipping difficulties, and British soldiers in towns—further restricted Virginians’ access to markets. By the time Cleveland informed Washington he would not pay rent, tenants in Loudoun County told the Revolutionary Convention that the nearly 300 tenants in the region had shipped their grain and flour to Alexandria for sale, but, as Lund Washington summed up a few days after Christmas 1775, there was “no market for the produce of the Land.” He wrote that only “cruel” landlords could expect tenants to pay rent in such circumstances.
By Christmas 1775, when annual rent payments were due, Cleveland was advocating for his fellow Loudoun County tenants to refuse to pay rent. Soon after, the strike spread to other counties; some discontented renters and farmers refused to pay debts of almost any kind. George Rae of Norfolk said that some 1,300 yeomen and tenant farmers were refusing to pay their debts. They particularly opposed the tax levied by the state’s Revolutionary Convention in the spring of 1775 to help pay for the war. While the tax made sense to elite Patriots, who were struggling to finance a costly war with Britain, tenants who had no money to pay rent or their other debts found the tax reprehensible. Loudoun County petitioners, for instance, insisted that “Landlords have bound the Tenants to pay all Land Taxe’s that Might Happen,” but “as these Unhappy times was Unforeseen, this adds to our Embarassments.” By April 1776, nearly two-thirds of the counties in Virginia had failed to collect any of the taxes due. So many people rejected the tax that Patriot leaders had to devise other ways to generate money to pay for the war.
Landlords and local officials tried a variety of tactics to settle growing debts and collect taxes. Lund Washington preferred not to squeeze tenants too hard. While hardly sympathetic to the plight of delinquent tenants—he told his cousin George Washington that he hoped Cleveland and other insurgent tenants would hang for their actions—he knew he could not get rent from tenants who had no money. He also feared that pushing tenants too hard might incite even greater upheaval. Other landlords, however, took a harder line. Richard Henry Lee’s agent, for instance, told one tenant that he would evict him “very shortly” if he did not settle his debt. Other landlords had the local sheriff confiscate delinquent tenants’ personal property—including crops, livestock, and in rare cases, enslaved people—and auction it off to settle debts. Confiscation and eviction were legal proceedings that originated in local courts and, therefore, carried the authority of local Revolutionary governing bodies. Attempts to oppose these measures challenged the authority of these rulers and undermined the chance of success of the war against Britain.
Even though some insurgents such as Cleveland said they supported the war against Britain, Revolutionaries in Virginia worried that growing grassroots discontent could bolster Loyalism. Revolutionaries’ fear that the insurgents may have been Loyalists, however, was misplaced. Cleveland, for instance, grew angry when the Committee of Safety questioned his allegiance to the Revolution. On at least two occasions, he urged leading Patriots in Loudoun County to investigate his allegiances, telling them that he happily awaited their conclusions. Like many disgruntled tenants, Cleveland generally supported independence from Britain, but that independence included the ability to own the land on which he lived and worked. Cleveland viewed the tenant insurgency as more of a social conflict than a political one. He charged that the “Poor People” of the region had more to fear from their oppressive landlords than from the British army. It was landlords, after all, not the British, who were evicting indebted tenants from their farms, ordering people to pay bills even though they had no cash, and hauling them in front of local committees of safety. But Cleveland went further. After suggesting that tenants should stop paying rent and taxes, he announced that enlisted men and officers in the militia should receive the same pay for the same service.
Cleveland’s suggestion stemmed from a bitter debate about the way the Revolutionary militia was organized. Originally, the militia units were “Independent Companies of Volunteers” in which officers were elected from the ranks, which included both elites and less wealthy men. But fearing that these companies were too democratic and difficult to control, the Third Virginia Convention abolished them and created a new, more hierarchical militia in which officers were appointed by the Patriot leadership. They were also paid significantly more than regular soldiers. As a result of this pay disparity and greatly increased time demands for militia musters under the new system, which further eroded their ability to make a living, many small-holding farmers and tenants refused militia muster. As Cleveland noted, there was “no inducement for a poor man to Fight, for he has nothing to defend.”
So when the Revolutionary Committee of Correspondence ordered the leaders of the rent strike to appear before it in December 1775, the insurgents announced that they were “not at all Intimidated.” Instead, they threatened to “turn out Committee” members of their actual and political houses if they continued to treat tenants so harshly. Tensions continued to mount. In February 1776, Cleveland forced the closure of the courts in Botetourt and Fincastle counties to prevent them from issuing writs of eviction or confiscation. As the conflict escalated, Lund Washington warned George Washington that the “first Battle we have in this part of the Country will be in Loudon, against General Cleveland.”
Alexandria merchant James Hendricks highlighted the fear of social and political rebellion when he asked Loudoun County planter Leven Powell: “How goes on the spirit of Levelling?” Powell, who recognized the historical reference to English Revolutionaries and regicides of the 1640s and 1660s, might well have answered “too well.”
Revolutionaries outside Loudoun County likewise worried about the “spirit of Levelling” bubbling up among tenants. In Williamsburg, Patriots openly talked about calling out troops to quash the growing insurgency. Secretly, however, they had already moved the Third Regiment from Pittsylvania County into position to strike against insurgents in Loudoun County if discontent escalated into violence because they feared that the local militia might refuse to attack their neighbors. While they worried that calling out troops might antagonize otherwise peaceful protesters, they also feared that the Loudoun County insurgency would spread and undermine the Revolution. Edmund Pendleton helped organize a system of alarms along the Potomac River if the widespread discontent erupted into violence. This show of power intimidated unruly tenants and, by May 1776, the movement began to fade.
The tenant insurgency in Virginia in 1775 and 1776 highlights the duality of the American Revolution. As much as the struggle for independence from Britain was a struggle for home rule, it was also a fight over who was going to rule at home. Elite Revolutionaries wanted independence from Britain but also wanted to protect their property and political power, which meant quashing the insurgency led by James Cleveland without provoking an upheaval that would threaten the success of their war against Britain. Questions about land and power would continue to reverberate throughout the new Commonwealth of Virginia.
