The fate of the urbanled Patriot movement would depend on the colonies’ large rural population. Most farmers had little interest in imperial affairs. Their lives were deeply rooted in the soil, and their prime allegiance was to family and community. But imperial policies had increasingly intruded into the lives of farm families by sending their sons to war and raising their taxes. In 1754, farmers on Long Island, New York, had paid an average tax of 10 shillings; by 1756, thanks to the Great War for Empire, their taxes had jumped to 30 shillings.

The Continental Association The boycotts of 1765 and 1768 raised the political consciousness of rural Americans. When the First Continental Congress established the Continental Association in 1774 to enforce a third boycott of British goods, it quickly set up a rural network of committees to do its work. In Concord, Massachusetts, 80 percent of the male heads of families and a number of single women signed a “Solemn League and Covenant” supporting nonimportation. In other farm towns, men blacked their faces, disguised themselves in blankets “like Indians,” and threatened violence against shopkeepers who traded “in rum, molasses, & Sugar, &c.” in violation of the boycott.

Patriots likewise warned that British measures threatened the yeoman tradition of landownership. In Petersham, Massachusetts, the town meeting worried that new British taxes would drain “this People of the Fruits of their Toil.” Arable land was now scarce and expensive in older communities, and in new settlements merchants were seizing farmsteads for delinquent debts. By the 1770s, many northern yeomen felt personally threatened by British policies, which, a Patriot pamphlet warned, were “paving the way for reducing the country to lordships” (Table 5.3).

Southern Planters Fear Dependency Despite their higher standard of living, southern slave owners had similar fears. Many Chesapeake planters were deeply in debt to British merchants. Accustomed to being absolute masters on their slave-labor plantations and seeing themselves as guardians of English liberties, planters resented their financial dependence on British creditors and dreaded the prospect of political subservience to British officials.

That danger now seemed real. If Parliament used the Coercive Acts to subdue Massachusetts, then it might turn next to Virginia, dissolving its representative assembly and assisting British merchants to seize debt-burdened properties. Consequently, the Virginia gentry supported demands by indebted yeomen farmers to close the law courts so that they could bargain with merchants over debts without the threat of legal action. “The spark of liberty is not yet extinct among our people,” declared one planter, “and if properly fanned by the Gentlemen of influence will, I make no doubt, burst out again into a flame.”