Collecting Debts: Virginia Merchants, the Association, and the Meetings of November 1774

Abstract

<p>"Collecting Debts" considers two Meetings in November 1774 and Virginia merchants’ adherence to the Continental Association in the year ahead. In Williamsburg Virginia legislators gathered for a Meeting of Delegates, debated and voted on revolutionary politics. At the Meeting of Merchants, scores, perhaps hundreds, of Virginia merchants simultaneously gathered in the colonial capital. Men from the two bodies conversed, with legislators getting merchants to sign the Continental Association. Merchants signed the Association to recover debts. The Association’s immediate non-import and delayed non-export provisions helped merchants cease issuing new loans (non-import) and collect outstanding loans (delayed non-export). In contrast to interpretations which see the Association as primarily benefiting planters, this article argues that in 1775 Virginia <em>merchants</em> were the main beneficiaries of rising tobacco prices and delayed non-export. Being paid in pricy tobacco meant they could write off more debt. This points to merchant self-interest in supporting the Revolutionary cause. 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, which was more broadly supported among the colony’s economic elite. </p>