Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making off the American Revolution in Virginia. (Book Reviews).

Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making off the American Revolution in Virginia. By Woody Holton. (Chapel Hill and London: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxii, 231. Paper, $15.95, ISBN 0-8078-4784-4; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2501-8.)

This study challenges a long-held but much contested assumption about Revolutionary Virginia: that the Old Dominion's planter elite confidently supported the struggle for American independence because they exerted unchallenged control over the province. According to Holton, one problem faced by the gentry came from Native Americans' success in persuading imperial authorities to block the westward expansion upon which land-speculating planters economically depended. The indebtedness into which the tobacco trade thrust planters posed an even greater threat. Although other scholars have noted Virginian leaders' concerns about debt and their belief that it resulted from their own extravagance, Holton suggests that the gentry also blamed their difficulties upon the trade restrictions imposed by the Navigation Acts and sustained by the political clout of their British merchant creditors.

The nonimportation association promoted in 1769 as a response to the Townshend duties appealed to Virginia planters for several reasons. It allowed them to protest the new taxation while also enabling them to reduce consumption of prestigious imported goods without loss of social status. Furthermore, it encouraged economic diversification away from the disadvantageous tobacco trade. Finally, by restricting the financial obligations that smaller farmers incurred for imported goods, it promised to facilitate the gentry's collection of debts from their humbler neighbors. Although Britain repealed all of the duties except the one on tea, the boycott failed within Virginia, in large part because high tobacco prices gave smaller planters little incentive to stop purchasing proscribed commodities.

The drastically lower tobacco prices of the mid-1770s made the boycott mounted against the Coercive Acts more successful. Large and small planters had long realized that reducing tobacco exports could improve prices, but the difficulty of enforcing nonexportation agreements and the threat of being sued for existing debts had limited earlier collective efforts. Consequently, patriot leaders called not only for nonimportation of British commodities but also for nonexportation of tobacco and for the closure of Virginia's courts to prevent debt litigation. This enabled them to win the support of small as well as large planters, and the delay in implementing nonexportation until 1775 assured much higher tobacco prices for all sellers in the intervening year.

Despite their apparent triumph, however, the Revolution brought new problems for the gentry. The royal governor repeatedly threatened to liberate the slaves and eventually offered freedom to those joining his forces. While this actually unified white Virginians behind the patriots, popular resentment of wartime economic hardships and inequities in the military service system posed greater difficulties. Eventually the need for a more stable government to confront the growing unrest drove the beleaguered gentry toward independence. Moreover, evangelicals and other humbler Virginians who expected independence to enhance their political power pushed their leaders in this direction.

Skeptical readers will be troubled by the sparcity of evidence at several points. To his credit, Holton describes this evidence and explains his conclusions from it in detailed notes. More serious shortcomings flow from his focus on the confrontation with Britain. Local conflicts between the gentry and poorer whites over such issues as livestock, property lines, and exploitation of natural resources receive little attention because they ostensibly lack direct implications for imperial politics. The daily struggles and accommodations implicit in slavery arguably get short shrift, as do conflicts between different non-elite groups. Recent scholarship also depicts the evangelical challenge to gentry hegemony as more complex than Holton suggests. Finally, if the gentry were so profoundly challenged, we get little sense of how they avoided more substantial change, even though the proclamation of independence did not end the hardships of wartime.

None of this detracts from Holton's achievement. This may be the most important book on the political culture of Revolutionary Virginia since Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982). It is certainly the most provocative.

ALBERT H. TILLSON JR.
University of Tampa