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The Revolutionary history that many of us learned as children pictured brave Colonists united against British tyranny.
The reality was far more complex. The stress of war revealed deep cracks among elements of society — wealthy planters owning hundreds of enslaved persons and thousands of acres, small landowners with few or no slaves, landless white laborers and enslaved African-Virginians taking advantage of the upheaval in the white world to free themselves.
The simmering conflict among groups with differing agendas never boiled over into civil war, but at times it came close — as shown by violent resistance to the draft in Virginia’s Northern Neck.
The Northern Neck is the peninsula between the Potomac and the Rappahannock rivers. The lower (southeasternmost) counties are Westmoreland (birthplace of George Washington), Richmond, Northumberland and Lancaster. Today, these counties are still mostly rural, as they were in Revolutionary times.
The Northern Neck’s leading families — Virginia blue bloods such as the Carters, Lees and Washingtons — were among the Patriot ringleaders. But the lesser sorts had mixed sentiments from the beginning.
In 1776, Landon Carter of Richmond County heard a report of a small farmer who refused to lend a musket to help defend the riverside houses of the local gentry against enemy raiders, saying he thought it would be better to let the mansions be destroyed.
Nineteen Westmoreland County men refused to perform militia duty in 1777, and the next year a larger group was charged with opposing any attempt to march them out of the state on military duty.
John Augustine Washington of Westmoreland County, younger brother of George, reported in 1778 that some individuals were discouraging military recruiting by blaming the war on gentlemen, saying that poor people had little stake in the conflict.
Even the tax on tea, which sparked the Boston Tea Party, divided the rich and poor. Many “vulgar” people at a meeting in Richmond County, according to one sniffy observer, didn’t care about the tax because they didn’t drink tea.
The problem of filling the ranks of the Continental Army got worse as the war dragged on.
In 1775, Virginia required all white males from 16 to 50 to serve in their local militias, relying on volunteers for the full-time Continental Army and local companies of minutemen, according to Albert Tillson, author of “Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia’s Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760-1810.” (Minutemen trained more extensively than the militia and performed several short tours of duty each year.)
With volunteers failing to step forward, the state in 1777 resorted to a draft for the Continental Army. But recruiters were only able to meet 40% to 45% of the quota.
People had varying reasons for disaffection. Some saw the conflict as a rich man’s war but poor man’s fight and resented the wealth and power of the slave-owning aristocracy. Some had economic ties to Great Britain. Some were simply loyal to the king. Many men did not want to be pulled away from their farms, wives and children. Lacking slaves, their labor was essential to keeping the farms going. In addition, said Tillson, potential recruits were increasingly wary of the hard life in the army, and fearful of deadly contagions like smallpox.
In 1780, the worsening manpower shortage led to a new draft law. “The recruitment act that was delivered to Gov. Jefferson on July 18th required that each county form divisions (pools) of fifteen militiamen, from which one man would be drawn to serve until the end of 1781 (‘eighteen-month men’),” according to “Pillar of Liberty’s Temple,” an online book by Richard Bush, a genealogist and historian. “Voluntary recruitment was preferred and the division would be responsible for the bounty, with each remaining member paying a share proportionate to his annual tax bill.” The average price to induce a man to enlist was reportedly about £3,000 pounds, and sometimes much more.
“If volunteerism did not work recruits would be drawn by lot,” Bush wrote. “The person so selected did have the option of paying a substitute, or the slot could also be filled with an apprehended deserter. Anyone openly resisting the draft and convicted by his county court-martial could be drafted to serve in the continental army until the end of the war.”
The issue of slavery pitted white against white and Black against white. Large, slave-owning planters often refused to serve, for fear of leaving their families and plantations vulnerable to slave rebellion. On the other hand, many nonslaveholding farmers “complained that slaveholders were not bearing their fair share of the burden of war,” according to Michael McDonnell, author of “The Politics of War: Race, Class, & Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia.” Nonslaveholders “were quick to point out that military service was actually much more onerous for those without slaves, for they had no one to labor for them in their absence. Slaveholding was so divisive that Virginia legislators finally debated one revolutionary proposal … they considered taking slaves from the very wealthiest (who were seen to be shirking military service) to give to the very poor to entice them to enlist.” Meanwhile, many Northern Neck slaves voted with their feet, escaping to the British.
Nowhere was the social gulf among whites keener than in the lower Northern Neck, which had the greatest inequalities in wealth in Virginia. “Many divisions might have been simply unable to raise enough money for new recruits without bankrupting themselves,” McDonnell wrote. “By the fall of 1780, there were fewer potential recruits, and they usually came at a tremendous price. A division with little money would have been hard pressed to find enough to raise a soldier.”
Washington needed soldiers for the far-flung Continental ranks — but Northern Neck men were worried about defending their own homes and farms from British raiders.
In Northumberland County, Thomas Gaskins, the county lieutenant, was responsible for the enforcing the draft. On September 15, 1780, Gaskins, Edwin Hull and other militia officers went to the courthouse in Heathsville, the county seat. “A surly crowd of planters gathered in front of them, some of whom were clearly determined not to be conscripted,” according to Bush, a descendent of Gaskins. “They carried arms and seemed prepared to use them.”
Officers stepped forward under a flag of truce, in an account by McDonnell. The officers persuaded most of the unruly militia members to lay down their arms. “But, as the militia marched back to the muster ground, one of them, Joseph Pitman, ‘passed with his firelock on his shoulder.’ Captain Edwin Hull took offence at Pitman’s act of silent defiance and ordered him to ‘ground his fire arms.’ Pitman replied, ‘You ground your fire arms.’
“Neither could turn back from the brink. As a witness reported, ‘Both of them levelled their pieces … at each other, at the same instant and fired.'” Hull was killed instantly; others, including Pitman, were wounded.
Gaskins later reported to Gov. Jefferson that “almost the whole county was inflam’d … a most criminal & unlawful combination” had used “Force & Threats” to “disturbe the Peace of this Commonwealth, and murder, wound or annoy many of the good People thereof.”
On Sept. 16, Gaskins moved quickly to assert Patriot authority. A court-martial sentenced 41 men to Continental service for the duration of the war, as the law mandated for draft resisters.
“Militia officers and all Northumberland citizens were ordered to search for and apprehend these men, as well as ‘all others’ whom they believed had participated in or supported the riot,” Tillson wrote.
But when the court-martial resumed on September 25 and 26, it decreed that any who surrendered within the next eight days would be required to serve only 18 months with the Continental Army rather than the full duration of the war.
“Northumberland authorities clearly recognized the limits of their power in the period following the riot … Evidently Northumberland leaders sought some renewed assertion of loyalty but also recognized that more vigorous repression would likely result in renewed resistance rather than acquiescence,” Tillson wrote. But some rioters wouldn’t be reconciled to the Patriot cause; they went over to the enemy and boarded British ships.
As for Joseph Pitman, the county court examined him for the murder of Edwin Hull and ordered that he be tried at the state’s next General Court.
The mood was no calmer in neighboring Lancaster County. “On the day appointed to carry out the draft, a mob assembled, disarmed the militia officers present, and seized from county lieutenant John Taylor the papers needed for implementing the process,” Tillson wrote. “Although Taylor held a court martial that condemned many of the rioters, only a few were apprehended, and they quickly escaped from custody.”
By 1781, tensions were easing, and the Northern Neck had fewer draft incidents than some other parts of the state. Still, officials had trouble collecting the enlistment bonus money, and even with a cavalry detachment to enforce obedience, the draft produced only 66 of the 119 men required from the lower four counties.
“With the violence of the previous fall fresh in their minds and new reports of uprisings around the state reaching their ears, local officials in the lower Northern Neck were reluctant to push their neighbors too far,” McDonnell wrote.
History abounds with examples of societies that exploded when imperial authority was removed, like a cork from a pressurized bottle. There are several reasons why that didn’t happen in Virginia, according to Tillson.
One, dissidents had no alternative social vision with which to challenge the elite planters. Two, poor as well as rich white people feared slave violence and sensed the potential for revolutionary ideology to inflame it. And three, many poor white people bought into slavery-based society, hoping to climb socially and economically by enslaving Black people.
In addition, said Tillson, many planters were effective at maintaining “soft control” of their society. They “overawe their neighbors with their wealth, which is supposed to impress them — although sometimes it generates resentment — but they also don’t push them too hard. That’s evident in the way that the people who are involved in the draft resistance get treated. Once they’ve submitted, they’re treated with relative leniency, in part because the county authorities realize that if they push hard, they’re going to have a bigger problem on their hands.”
SOURCES:
Bush, Richard, “Pillar of Liberty’s Temple,” https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~bush22031/genealogy/
Encyclopedia Virginia, “Gentry in Colonial Virginia.”
McDonnell, Michael, “The Politics of War: Race, Class, & Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia.”
National Park Service, Northern Neck National Heritage Area Feasibility Study, June 2020.
Tillson, Albert, “Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia’s Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760-1810.”