John Robinson Speaker and Treasurer 1766
1768 April 21st
Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg Virginia.
Larry Allen Clowser Webb posted on Facebook this news article dated 21 April 1768.
This news article is so packed with detail.
This act to cancel the tax revenue to be collected was kind of crazy.
The leaders in the House of Burgesses figured they could collect £294 2s 8p from the deceased John Robinson's Estate. John Robinson was the colony's Treasurer and Speaker of the House, two roles that probably should have never resided with one person.
But picking apart his estate so they could cancel the taxes wasn't so easy a solution.
It took multiple lawsuits extending all the way to 1781 to figure out really how much Robinson had before he died.
Robinson had made loans with treasury notes to his friends. If he got paid by them, which was rare, he was required to burn and destroy the money he received. This was an effort to control inflation. Stop the growth of money supply. Too much money chasing too few goods is the definition of inflation. It is the definition of money losing its value if you have too much of it chasing goods and services.
But John Robinson didn't burn that money. He used it to keep making loans to his friends.
The story of John Robinson being both Speaker of the House of Burgesses AND head treasurer was too much power in one person's hands.
This repeal law of the taxes is because the House thought they could recover that income from John Robinson's estate.
It is just the beginning of a huge scandal that lasted decades and exposed many to ruin.
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Virginia Encyclopedia explanation
Debt
After the war ended in 1763, Virginia’s government was heavily in debt. The colony’s planters faced a serious shortage of cash as well as high taxes to pay that public debt.
The shortage of cash made it impossible for county sheriffs to collect all the tax revenue that residents owed and pay it into the treasury, which in turn made it difficult for the treasurer to pay the colony’s bills and debts.
Fluctuating rates of exchange between paper money and the pound sterling strangled credit in the mid-1760s and led to an increase in debt collection suits.
There was not much increase in the actual collection of debts, however, because few planters had any money with which to pay, and they could find few purchasers if they tried to sell land or slaves to raise the money.
The interconnected webs of debt and credit that enabled the tobacco economy to operate began to fail, and the financial condition of the colony and of the colonists rapidly worsened, even without the prospect of paying a new stamp tax on legal documents, newspapers, and other printed materials.
The difficulties that sheriffs had in collecting taxes and remitting revenue to the treasury left a major deficit in Robinson’s treasury accounts.
the mid-1760s some influential (and indebted) planter-burgesses proposed to create a public loan office to borrow a large sum of money from British investors.
The loan could be paid back from future tax revenue over a period of years, but in the meantime the borrowed money could pay the immediate expenses of the colonial government.
Robinson supported the bill, which the burgesses passed, but some members of the Governor’s Council opposed it and killed the proposal.
Even though committees of burgesses routinely made glowing perfunctory reports about the soundness of the treasury accounts, the treasury was very short of cash and not only because collections from sheriffs were seriously in arrears.
The paper money that the colony had issued during the war was part of the problem because it was part of the colony’s debt.
The money acted like a short-term loan.
When the assembly authorized each of several issues of paper money, it set an expiration date for the bills to encourage people to pay taxes with them before the money ceased to have any value.
The treasurer paid salaries and purchased supplies with the paper money, which circulated for a limited period of time as much-needed cash, although at a discount. The legislators expected people to pay their taxes with the money to draw the currency back into the treasury, extinguish that portion of the debt, and prevent dangerous inflation.
Some of the laws that created paper money required the treasurer to burn the bills when he received them into the treasury or to hold them for burning later. He did not do that, however.
When other men were struggling, Robinson was one of the few men in Virginia with access to ready cash. He was very wealthy and owned several thousand acres of land in half a dozen counties, several houses and lots in Williamsburg, and about 400 slaves. He was also very generous and began lending money to his hard-pressed friends and no doubt anticipated making a profit when the planters repaid him with interest. Their financial obligations to him may also have temporarily increased his political power in the House of Burgesses. To oblige the many desperate friends and political allies who appealed to Robinson for personal loans, he began lending out money from the treasury in addition to his own funds, improperly recirculating paper money that the law required be withdrawn from circulation.
It is likely that most or all of the men who borrowed from Robinson were unaware that many other men borrowed from him, too, or that he should not have lent them that paper money. That he lent so much money to so many men indicates how cash-starved the colony’s economy was and also how fragile were the interconnected financial webs of debt and credit. Robinson’s accounts, which were not then public, disclosed that many of the most influential and apparently wealthy Virginia families were actually insolvent. Until required to pay their debts, they did not appear to be insolvent but merely short of ready cash. In 1765 and early in 1766, however, many were in danger of financial failure. Had any significant number of them defaulted on their debts, the whole plantation economy could have collapsed and ruined many of the colony’s leading families.
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30th year of King George II
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