s of land
withheld by Virginians in order to prevent collection of the annual
quit-rent on the land which every Virginia landowner paid the crown. In
the heated debates which followed, both parties built their cases
around the rights and privileges each claimed was its own. The ultimate
outcome, which resulted in a compromise by the crown, satisfactory to
both Dinwiddie and the burgesses, is not as important as the
constitutional argument put forth by the burgesses.

The house resolutions included ringing phrases which would become
familiar in the 1760's:

The Rights of the Subject are so secured by Law, that they cannot
be deprived of the least Part of their Property, but by their own
Consent; Upon this excellent Principle is our Constitution founded
... That the said Demand is illegal and arbitrary, contrary to the
Charters of this Colony, to his Majesty's and his Royal
Predecessor's Instructions to the several Governors, and the
Express Order of his Majesty King William of Glorious Memory ...
That whoever shall hereafter pay a Pistole ... shall be deemed a
betrayer of the Rights and Privileges of the People.[7]

[7] Journal of House of Burgesses, 1752-1758, 143, 154-155.

The author of these resolves was Richard Bland, a tough-minded burgess
from Prince George County, descendant of one of the colony's oldest
families. One of the earliest graduates of the College of William and
Mary to achieve a major position in the burgesses, he was one of the
most widely read. He held four beliefs common to the revolutionary
generations, beliefs he translated into major works during the Pistole
Fee Controversy, the Parsons' Cause, the Stamp Act, and the later
revenue crises:

the eternal validity of the natural-law doctrines most cogently
stated by John Locke;

the superiority over all other forms of government of the English
Constitution, of which an uncorrupted model or extension was the
peculiar property of the Virginians;

the like superiority of those unique rights and liberties which
were the heritage of the free-born Englishman; and

the conviction that the good state rests on the devotion of men of
virtue, wisdom, integrity, and justice.[8]

[8] Clinton Rossiter, Six Characters in Search of a Republic
(Harcourt, Brace: New York, 1964), chap. 5, "Richard Bland, the
Whig in America", 184.

In addition to the house reso