Forced Founders by Woody Holton

Author:Woody Holton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1999-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

III

It was in that context of ruinously low tobacco prices, an expanding but flawed crop-withholding movement, and growing demands for gentry intervention in the economy that Chesapeake gentlemen finally decided, during the spring of 1774, to do something about the recession. The impetus came from Parliament, which, in March 1774, punished Boston for its famous tea party by adopting the Boston Port Act, which closed Boston Harbor. Leading men in both Maryland and Virginia found a strategy that, they hoped, would strike a blow against the Boston Port Act and at the same time pull the Chesapeake out of the recession. Two Virginia brothers living in London, William and Arthur Lee, wrote their friends in Virginia and Maryland and proposed that all tobacco growers do what many smallholders had already done: refuse to ship any tobacco to England or Scotland. The Lees apparently realized that a tobacco boycott would accomplish three goals. It would protest the Boston Port Act, clear out European tobacco markets, and furnish tobacco farmers with a patriotic justification—the “Excuse” that William Carr noticed them desperately seeking in April 1774—for withholding their crops while they waited for the tobacco glut to end.21

In addition to nonexportation, the Lee brothers proposed that Virginia and Maryland halt their importation of British manufactured goods. If the American colonies stopped their trade with Britain, William Lee wrote his Virginia brother Francis Lightfoot Lee, the trade boycott would both force Parliament to repeal the Boston Port Act and also “tend to the particular pecuniary advantage of each Colony.” Although William Lee did not identify in this letter what the “pecuniary” benefits of nonexportation would be, he later predicted that the plan would double the price of tobacco.22

It is not clear when Arthur and William Lee’s letters touting the political and pecuniary benefits of a trade cutoff reached their two brothers in the Virginia House of Burgesses. But on May 10, 1774, burgess Richard Henry Lee launched his own bold effort to remove the greatest obstacle keeping indebted farmers out of the crop-withholding movement: their fear of beingsued. Lee proposed that the House of Burgesses refuse to renew the law establishing the fees charged by Virginia’s court officers. The effect of Lee’s motion would be to close Virginia’s courts, thus preventing creditors from suing debtors. That legal immunity would make it possible for indebted tobacco farmers to keep their crops out of their creditors’ hands. Crop withholding would expand throughout the province and succeed both in pressuring Parliament and in raising the price of tobacco. Lee’s fellow burgesses did not want to go on record in support of closing Virginia’s courts, so they rejected his proposal and voted to continue the fee act renewal on its passage through the legislative mill.23

But the idea of closing the courts did not die. Some loyalists, like Norfolk trader James Parker, believed that the reason many Virginians wanted to halt judicial proceedings was that they wished to repudiate their debts to British merchants (like him). The “more a

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