Prince George County Virginia USGenWeb Archives Biographies.....Bland, Richard ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/va/vafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Alice Warner http://www.rootsweb.com/~archreg/vols/00015.html#0003503 April 1, 2008, 12:17 am Author: Henry Howe Richard Bland was another of the many prominent Virginians who acted on the theatre of the revolution. Wirt, in speaking of him before the war, says he "was one of the most enlightened men of the colony. He was a man of finished education, and of the most unbending habits of application. His perfect mastery of every fact connected with the settlement and progress of the colony, had given him the name of the Virginian antiquary. He was also a politician of the first class; a profound logician, and was also considered as the first writer in the colony;" but he was a most ungraceful speaker in debate. "He wrote the first pamphlet on the nature of the connection with Great Britain, which had and pretension to accuracy of view on that subject; but it was a singluar one: he would set out on sound principles, pursue them logically, till he found them leading to the precipice which we had to leap; start back, alarmed; then resume his ground, go over it in another direction, be led again by the correctness of his reasoning to the same place, and again tack about and try other processes to reconcile right and wrong; but left his reader and himself bewildered between the steady index of the compass in their hand, and the phantasm to which it seemed to point. Still there was more sound matter in this pamphlet, than in the celebrated Farmer's Letters, which were really but an ignus fatuus, misleading us from true princple." Mr. Bland was a member of Congress from 1774 to 1776; he died in 1778. Additional Comments: From Prince George County history in Historical Collections of Virginia by Henry Howe, 1845. File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/va/princegeorge/bios/bland99gbs.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/vafiles/ File size: 2.2 Kb