Conflicting Independence: Land Tenancy and the American Revolution

Two tenant revolts waged during the Revolutionary War reveal the fragility of the movement in Virginia and New York. In late 1775, James Cleveland tried to convince tenants in Loudoun County, Virginia, to join him in a rent strike designed to compel landlords to give tenants better terms. Shortly after initiating the strike, Cleveland began encouraging people to stop paying any bills they owed, including a tax that Virginia’s Revolutionary leaders had recently foisted on poorer rural Virginians. Within two years, in the spring of 1777, insurgent tenants in New York’s northern Hudson Valley designed an armed uprising to coincide with a rumored invasion of the region by the British army. The insurgencies indicate that Revolutionaries had to fight the war for home rule and the battle to rule at home simultaneously, a prospect that badly frightened men such as Lund Washington, who administered his cousin George Washington’s land, and Robert Livingston, Jr., who owned the estate, Livingston Manor, on which most of the New York insurgents lived. Under such stress, Washington and Livingston reached the same conclusions: They hoped somewhat desperately that all their opponents would be “hang’d.”¹

These tenant revolts expose ambiguities inherent in the move toward independence in two states critical to success in the war against Britain. Tobacco produced in Virginia fueled part of the economy of the British Empire, and grain grown and shipped from New York, and increasingly Virginia, fed people who produced cash crops throughout Britain’s Atlantic colonies. Warfare, however, inhibited production and trade because men left the fields to fight, or to avoid fighting, and both armies closed off trade routes. Ravaging soldiers also took what food and supplies they needed; sometimes they promised to pay and other times they simply took what they wanted. While both regions were plagued by these similar wartime ills, support for the Revolution differed dramatically. New Yorkers famously, or notoriously, divided over the Revolution, and Virginians have been portrayed as solidly in favor of independence. More recent analysis of each region suggests more complicated divisions, and a study of tenant revolts in both provides an opportunity to offer broader analysis of colonists as they calculated their chances of winning independence and preserving their property, power, and order.

When looked at together, tenant revolts in Virginia and New York raise important questions about how white rural inhabitants, especially land tenants, participated in and interpreted the American Revolution. What grievances, for example, did tenants in different parts of the country hope to redress during the Revolution? How did they intend to achieve their goals? How did Revolutionary landlords address those grievances and tactics? While historians have asked some of these questions about tenants in individual states or regions, few have examined them in broader perspective. This essay begins that process by investigating the actions of tenants in New York and Virginia during the Revolutionary War to uncover their grievances, analyze their relationship with the British army, explain how landlords and Revolutionaries reacted, and measure their levels of success.²

Historians of the American Revolution who focus on rural inhabitants have generally focused on freeholders, those farmers who owned land, often basing their analysis on late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers who linked a yeoman ideal with the republican political structure that emerged in the Revolutionary era. Thomas Jefferson famously extolled the virtues of farmers, while others championed yeomen farmers as the personification of the republican politics espoused by Revolutionaries. They began the Revolutionary period lauding farmers who owned the land they occupied and improved, and by the end were insisting that honest political participation depended on land ownership. The author of the 1775 tract American Husbandry, for example, admired how farmers from New England to the Carolinas took up “land whenever they are able to settle it” to become so self-sufficient that market “consumption is scarce worth mentioning.” J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur asserted that during the Revolution these farmers had thrown off the “involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor” that had plagued their European ancestors, and now ruled themselves...