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Class War? Class Struggles during the American Revolution in Virginia
Michael A. McDonnell
| AFTER an extraordinary debate, even for an extraordinary time, legislators in the Virginia General Assembly in the fall of 1780 came up with a startling offer to needy whites in the state. For joining the Continental army, new recruits were promised not only a parcel of land large enough to enfranchise them but also an enslaved Virginian as an extra bounty. Yet this controversial offer was merely a compromise solution to conceal a more profound debate in the legislature that fall. Desperate for soldiers amid a series of British invasions, the Virginia legislature initially debated even more radical plans to redistribute property from the most wealthy in the state to the poorest in return for military service. Many legislators argued that the wealthiest slaveholders in particular, who generally had not fought in the war, ought to give up a larger share of their slaves to those who had. |
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Though many commentators, starting with James Madison, have remarked on the perverse logic of rewarding soldiers fighting for so-called liberty with enslaved Virginians, few have taken note of the full contours of the revealing debate that fall. In discussing this legislation, most delegates to the assembly seemed more concerned about class and labor issues and not quite so much about race and slavery as modern historians might expect. Legislators seemed to think that the only way to make military service attractive to potential recruits was to offer enslaved Virginians to nonslaveholding lower-class whites. Joseph Jones told Madison that the "Negro bounty cannot fail to procure Men for the War." On the other end of the social spectrum, Jones thought that, though the "scheme bears hard upon those wealthy in Negros," in the present political climate any opposition from wealthy slaveholders would come to naught. Jones told Madison: "You know a great part of our House are not of that Class or own so few of them as not to come within the Law shod. it pass." Indeed one representative from the western county of Botetourt, Thomas Madison, believed that the legislature introduced this scheme precisely because they wanted to make the wealthy pay their share of the war. Finally, the one major reason legislators did not do as James Madison and several others suggested and arm enslaved Virginians, Jones asserted, was because such a move would "draw off immediately such a number of the best labourers for the Culture of the Earth as to ruin individuals." What enslaved Virginians produced by their labor, Jones claimed, was "but barely sufficient to keep us joging along with the great expence of the war." Jones, though a supporter of eventual freedom for blacks, argued that it had to be done gradually so planters could find replacement laborers, "or we shall suffer exceedingly under the sudden revolution which perhaps arming them wod. produce."1 |
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But if Jones worried about a revolution in labor practices, another wealthy Virginian, Theodorick Bland, was angry about a different kind of revolution he felt was brewing from below. Increasingly frustrated by Virginia's inability to defend itself in the face of repeated British invasions, Bland watched helplessly as his neighbors refused to turn out for military service and rioted against attempts to draft them into the army as his own enslaved population grew more restive. In addition to these challenges from below, Bland was also feeling the pinch of high progressive taxes laid by the legislature to pay for increasing bounties for soldiers. Bland worried that the elected legislators who supported middle-class demands for redistributive taxes—whether in slaves or any other kind of property—to pay higher bounties to lower-class soldiers were "enemies to America, or fools or knaves, or all three." He feared their actions might "bring on a revolution in this state," a consequence that he thought was actually the "wish of a majority of the assembly."2
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