The American Revolution evokes many images—tricorne hats and fife-and-drum corps, famous battles like Saratoga and Yorktown, the Declaration of Independence and its contradictions. One thing that doesn’t spring to mind so readily is simmering class conflict. However, as our new entry on Tenant Revolts in Virginia during the American Revolution makes clear, critical battles were being fought off the battlefield, forcing us to rethink the parameters of the Revolution.
As Thomas Humphrey notes in our new entry, the possibilities of the Revolution looked very different depending on which side of the class line one stood. For the landed elites who already ran the Virginia colony, the Revolution offered the possibility of freedom from their British overlords—some of whom they were heavily indebted to—and a chance to control the new state of Virginia.
But the tenants of these elite landholders—men like James Cleveland, who rented land from George Washington—were hoping for a different kind of independence. They wanted freedom from tenancy and a more widespread distribution of the land owned by a relatively small number of elite families. Tenancy was widespread at the time: one-third of the population of Loudoun County rented their property, and most renters couldn’t vote.
When Washington tried to pay Cleveland for work he had done on one of his properties with depreciated Continental currency, Cleveland refused to pay his rent. The rent strike quickly spread across Virginia. Tenant farmers, strapped for cash with the decline of export markets and doubting that Patriot leaders intended to redistribute land if the war succeeded, refused to pay rent, the tax levied by the Revolutionary Convention to pay for the war, and other debts.
The strike was closely tied to the issue of militia service, as Patriot leadership sought greater control over independent militia companies that had been democratically organized by local men. Increasingly, small-holding farmers refused to turn out for the militia musters that took them away from their farms and jeopardized their ability to make a living, all for meager pay.
For a time, as Humphrey notes, the uprising threatened to undermine the Revolution in Virginia. Patriot leaders feared it would bolster Loyalist sentiment as evictions incited further unrest. The “first Battle we have in this part of the Country will be in Loudon, against General Cleveland,” Lund Washington warned George Washington in the winter of 1776.
Read our new entry, Tenant Revolts in Virginia During the American Revolution, to find out how the rent strike concluded. It’s a reminder, as Humphrey notes, that “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.”
Highly appreciate this research post. Examining these localized rent strikes beautifully enriches our broader historical understanding.
This additional tension and debate belongs to the founding of our country so that all Americans understand what was happening then, not just the battles.