Virginia in the American Revolution

Revolutionary sentiments first began appearing in Virginia shortly after the French and Indian War ended in 1763. The same year, the British and Virginian governments clashed in the Parson's Cause. The Virginia legislature had passed the Two-Penny Act to stop clerical salaries from inflating. King George III vetoed the measure, and clergy sued for back salaries. Patrick Henry first came to prominence by arguing in the case against the veto, which he declared tyrannical.

The British government had accumulated a great deal of debt through spending on its wars. To help pay off this debt, Parliament passed the Sugar Act in 1764 and the Stamp Act in 1765. The General Assembly opposed the passage of the Sugar Act on the grounds of no taxation without representation. Patrick Henry opposed the Stamp Act in the Burgesses with a famous speech advising George III that "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell..." and the king "may profit by their example." The legislature passed the Virginia Resolves opposing the tax. Governor Francis Fauquier responded by dismissing the Assembly.

Opposition continued after the resolves. The Northampton County court overturned the Stamp Act February 8, 1766. Various political groups including the Sons of Liberty met and issued protests against the act. Most notably, Richard Bland published a pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies. This document would set one of the basic political principles of the Revolution by stating that Virginia was a part of the British Empire, not the Kingdom of Great Britain, so it only owed allegiance to the Crown, not Parliament.

The Stamp Act was repealed, but additional taxation from the Revenue Act and the 1769 attempt to transport Bostonian rioters to London for trial incited more protest from Virginia. The Assembly met to consider resolutions condemning on the transport of the rioters, but Governor Botetourt, while sympathetic, dissolved the legislature. The Burgesses reconvened in Raleigh Tavern and made an agreement to ban British imports. Britain gave up the attempt to extradite the prisoners and lifted all taxes except the tax on tea in 1770.

In 1773, because of a renewed attempt to extradite Americans to Britain, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason, and others created Committees of Correspondence that helped build support for what ultimately became the American Revolution. Unlike other such committees of correspondence, this one was an official part of the legislature.

Following the closure of the port in Boston and several other offenses, the Burgesses approved June 1, 1774 as a day of "Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer" in a show of solidarity with Massachusetts. The Governor, Lord Dunmore, dismissed the legislature. The first Virginia Convention was held at Raleigh Tavern August 1–6 to respond to the growing crisis. The convention approved a boycott of British goods, expressed solidarity with Massachusetts, and elected delegates to the Continental Congress where Virginian Peyton Randolph was selected as president of the Congress.

On April 20, 1775, a day after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Dunmore ordered royal marines to remove the gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine to a British ship. Patrick Henry led a group of Virginia militia from Hanover in opposition to Dunmore's order. Carter Braxton negotiated a resolution to the Gunpowder Incident by transferring royal funds as payment for the powder. The incident exacerbated Dunmore's declining popularity. He fled the Governor's Palace to the British ship HMS Fowey at Yorktown. On November 7, Dunmore issued a proclamation declaring Virginia was in a state of rebellion and that any slave fighting for the British would be freed. By this time, George Washington had been appointed head of the American forces by the Continental Congress and Virginia was under the political leadership of a Committee of Safety formed by the Third Virginia Convention in the governor's absence.

On December 9, 1775, Virginia militia moved on the governor's forces at the Battle of Great Bridge. The British had held Fort Murray,^[1] which guarded the land route to Norfolk. The British feared the militia, who had no cannon for a siege, would receive reinforcements, so they abandoned the fort and attacked. The militia won the 30-minute battle. Dunmore responded by bombarding Norfolk with his ships on January 1, 1776.

After the Battle of Great Bridge, little military conflict took place on Virginia soil for the first part of the American Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, Virginia sent forces to help in the fighting to the North and South, including Daniel Morgan and his company of marksmen who fought in early battles in the north. Charlottesville served as a prison camp for the Convention Army, Hessian and British soldiers captured at Saratoga. Virginia also sent forces to its frontier in the northwest, which then included much of the Ohio Country. George Rogers Clark led forces in this area and captured the fort at Kaskaskia and won the Battle of Vincennes, capturing the royal governor, Henry Hamilton. Clark maintained control of areas south of the Ohio River for most of the war, but was unable to make gains in the Indian-dominated territories north of the river.

The Fifth Virginia Convention met on May 6, 1776 and declared Virginia a free and independent state on May 15, 1776. The convention instructed its delegates to introduce a resolution for independence at the Continental Congress. Richard Henry Lee introduced the measure on June 7. While the Congress debated, the Virginia Convention adopted George Mason's Bill of Rights (June 12) and a constitution (June 29) which established an independent commonwealth. Congress approved Lee's proposal on July 2 and approved Jefferson's Declaration of Independence on July 4.

The constitution of the Fifth Virginia Convention created a system of government for the state that would last for 54 years. The constitution provided for a chief magistrate, a bicameral legislature with both the House of Delegates and the Senate. The legislature elected a governor each year (picking Patrick Henry to be the first) and a council of eight for executive functions. In October, the legislature appointed Jefferson, Edmund Pendleton, and George Wythe to adopt the existing body of Virginia law to the new constitution.

During the American Revolution, Virginia was not a united colony. The war challenged the power of the gentry because ordinary Virginians wanted a larger role in deciding how the war was run, often using the Revolution’s republican ideas to support their demands. Many poor white men expected to elect their officers and to have a voice in how the militia was used, rather than simply following elite commands.^[2]

At the beginning of mobilization, some local militias allowed ordinary men to elect their officers, and some of them pushed to elect leaders from their own communities to have a fairer system. These men spoke about liberty and rights to argue that they should take part in militia decisions, which worried many elites who were used to controlling politics and military roles. As militias became more active, some companies pushed for stronger actions against British authority and suspected loyalists. Elites worried that if armed commoners acted this boldly, they might also challenge the colony’s social hierarchy and elite power. In response to this, many leaders reorganized the military to reduce local control and stop open elections of officers to restore power to the elites.

Creating the minutemen regiments was a major part of this reorganization. Originally, the minutemen were meant to be a people’s force who could respond quickly to threats across Virginia. However, the system became quite hierarchical. Officers were appointed by elites instead of elected which meant they were no longer unbiased citizens from the community. Officers earned much higher pay and had increased power to command and discipline their men. Junior officers made several times a private’s daily pay, while captains and field officers earned even more. This further increased the gap between them and the ordinary men, slowly taking more power from the poorer folks. McDonnell notes that replacing elected militia officers with appointed minutemen leaders and paying people unequally showed a clear move away from popular control and toward stronger elite authority.

These changes directly affected class divisions. Minutemen recruitment fell mostly on poorer farmers and laborers, who had to leave their fields and families for long periods while receiving less pay than officers. Not only this but spending time away meant losing money and small farmers had no way to “buy their way out” as the elites could. Farming was their primary source of income, and since there was often no help at home, their absence threatened their families’ basic survival. McDonnell explains that this unequal burden made poorer men view service as dangerous to their basic survival needs and further enforced the belief that “gentlemen or men of fortune ought to bear the expense and difficulties of defending the colony” instead of transferring the costs onto those with the least to spare.

As poor Virginians saw that they took on most of the risks while officers and wealthy men celebrated the benefits, the recruitment levels for the minutemen rapidly declined. There were reports across Virginia describing how recruiting was slow, and there were incomplete units. Training attendance went down and recruitment quotas became harder to meet, causing many leaders to struggle to maintain the small units they had. McDonnell suggests that this decline was linked to a growing belief that the Revolution’s promises of shared sacrifice and political voice were not being met, arguing that the minutemen system revealed deep divisions between elites and poorer whites. It becomes apparent that the dwindling enlistment and resistance to the minutemen system explains why Virginia’s war contribution weakened and why class and racial conflict remained key to the colony’s Revolution.