Bland was born at Cawsons, his father’s plantation in Prince George County near the confluence of the James and Appomattox rivers. He was the son of Theodorick Bland (1719–1784) and Frances Bolling Bland. In about 1753, his father, an affluent tobacco planter, sent him to England for a classical education at Wakefield School in Yorkshire. In 1759 Bland began studying medicine at a Liverpool infirmary, and two years later he entered the University of Edinburgh as a medical student. He graduated in 1763 after writing a thesis on digestion, and in 1764 he sailed to Virginia.
Soon after returning to Prince George County, Bland opened a medical practice at Blandford, a village adjacent to Petersburg, and a few years later he became a partner in a Blandford “medicinal shop.” He eventually found that the long hours and almost constant travel required of a practicing Virginia physician were undermining his health, and much against his parents’ wishes he gave up his medical career. To mollify his family and patients, Bland announced in William Rind’s Williamsburg Virginia Gazette on March 28, 1771, that, although he would no longer make house calls or keep medical accounts, he would give “advice, and prescribe for any case that shall be properly stated and sent me for that purpose, accompanied with my fee, which is a pistole for prescribing, and a guinea for a consultation.”
Between 1771 and 1774, Bland acquired Kippax, a Bolling plantation near Cawsons that his mother apparently had inherited from her father. Renaming the place Farmingdell, Bland settled there with his wife, Martha Dangerfield Bland, whom he had married about 1768. Their one child died young. Bland raised tobacco, wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle there and at another plantation in Amelia County.
A vestryman by 1765 and a justice of the peace as early as 1771, Bland assumed a more prominent public role as an advocate of American rights in 1775. On May 8, 1775, he became a member of the Prince George County Committee, and on June 24 he was one of twenty-four men who removed a large quantity of arms from the governor’s palace in Williamsburg. In December, using the pseudonym Cassius, Bland wrote two open letters to the royal governor John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, upbraiding him for his unrelenting opposition to the American cause. By the end of 1775 Bland was seeking an army commission, and although he lacked military experience, on June 13, 1776, the Virginia convention appointed him captain of the first of six troops of light horse to be raised for defense of the colony. During the ensuing weeks Bland recruited men and purchased horses, and on September 5 he arrived in Williamsburg with his troop. On December 4, 1776, the General Assembly named him major commandant of all six troops of Virginia cavalry. About that same time, he received orders to join George Washington’s army with his new regiment.
Bland’s regiment reached Washington’s headquarters at Morristown, New Jersey, early in January 1777, and it was immediately dispersed in small detachments to forage, gather intelligence, and provide security for the army. On January 14, Congress took the regiment into Continental service, and on March 31, Washington promoted Bland to colonel. By June 1777 the Virginia contingent of light horse was so fatigued that Washington let Bland reassemble his regiment to rest and equip it properly. During the Philadelphia campaign later that year, Bland’s cavalry performed reconnaissance and acted as a screening force. At the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777, Bland was posted on the army’s right flank and belatedly sent Washington irrefutable reports of an impending British attack from that direction. Dissatisfied with his rank relative to other cavalry officers and needing to attend to his neglected private affairs, on November 8, 1777, Bland requested permission to resign his commission. Washington refused, but in March 1778 he sent Bland to Virginia to purchase horses. Bland did not rejoin the army until the following September.
On November 5, 1778, Washington ordered Bland to supervise the march from Massachusetts to Virginia of the so-called Convention Army, which consisted of the British and German soldiers who had surrendered after the Battle of Saratoga. Bland delivered the prisoners to their new camp near Charlottesville in January 1779 and proceeded to Farmingdell. Reports of disorder at the Charlottesville barracks prompted Washington on February 28 to direct Bland to return to the camp as its commandant. Arriving on April 15, Bland quickly restored order by appointing a new quartermaster and hospital director and reinforcing the ill-disciplined guards with troops from his own regiment. Bland also established cordial relations with the British and German officers. In October 1779, Washington allowed Bland to go home, and on December 10, Congress accepted his resignation from the army.
On June 21, 1780, the General Assembly elected Bland a member of the state’s delegation to the Continental Congress. He took his seat on August 30 and served until October 1783. Bland was a member of the medical committee and sat on various committees dealing with financial and military matters, including the one that in January 1781 helped to quell the mutiny of the Pennsylvania State Line. A strong nationalist, he supported increased taxing powers for the Congress and urged that Virginia’s demand for free navigation of the Mississippi River be moderated to encourage full Spanish participation in the war against England.
The plundering of Farmingdell by British troops in April 1781 did not prevent Bland from resuming his life as a planter there in 1783. In 1785 he became county lieutenant, and from 1786 to 1788 he represented Prince George in the House of Delegates. During his first year he served on the Committees on Commerce, Propositions and Grievances, and Religion, and during his second year he served on the Committees on Commerce, Privileges and Elections, and Propositions and Grievances. As a member of the Virginia Convention of 1788, Bland voted against ratification of the Constitution despite his nationalist views. The new federal government, he later wrote to Richard Henry Lee on October 28, 1788, would threaten “Tyranny and oppression” unless checked by amendments protecting individual rights.
In February 1789 Bland was elected to the House of Representatives as an Anti-Federalist. He was the only announced candidate in his large south-central Virginia district. Bland took his seat at New York on March 30, 1789, and served on the Committee on Joint Rules. In 1790 he supported Alexander Hamilton’s plan for the United States government to assume states’ wartime public debts. Bland died in New York City on June 1, 1790, and was buried in the churchyard of Trinity Episcopal Church. In 1828 his remains were moved to Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Having no surviving children, Bland bequeathed to his wife all of his property except for mementos to three nephews and a two-acre lot in Blandford set aside for a college that never was built.
