Return to Lender: Virginia Merchants, the Association, and the Meetings of November 1774

Abstract

The piece considers two Meetings in November 1774 in Williamsburg and Virginia merchants’ adherence to the Continental Association in the year ahead. At the Meeting of Delegates legislators met, debated and voted on revolutionary politics while scores, perhaps hundreds, of merchants simultaneously gathered for a Meeting of Merchants. Delegates and merchants conversed, with legislators getting merchants to sign the Association. Merchants signed in order to recover debts. The Association’s immediate non-import and delayed non-export provisions assisted merchants in ceasing to issue new loans (non-import) and collecting outstanding ones (delayed non-export). In contrast to other interpretations which see the Association as primarily benefiting planters, this articles argues that in 1775 Virginia merchants were the main beneficiaries of rising tobacco prices engineered by delayed non-export, as more-valuable tobacco allowed them to recover more loans. This in turn points to merchant self-interest in supporting the Revolutionary cause, a point of significant historiographic debate. The success of the 1774 meetings was facilitated by the absence of some of the more radical frontier burgesses, who served in the militia during Dunmore’s War, allowing a tidewater delegates to pursue a trade-based rather than militia-based solution, achieving a broad agreement among the colony’s economic elite.