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As the burgesses gained the ascendancy over the council, the house became, in the words of Carl Bridenbaugh, "the tobacco gentry club". There sat the new generation of Randolphs, Harrisons, Nelsons, Robinsons, and Lees. There developed around Robinson and his cousin, Attorney-General Peyton Randolph, a group of like-minded gentry known in Virginia politics as the "Robinson-Randolph Clique."
In the 1760's three new groups joined the prevailing Robinson-Randolph leadership. The first was the generation born in the 1730's and 1740's which would reach maturity in the 1760's and be waiting to enter the "tobacco club" as a matter of birth.
Both events shook the Robinson-Randolph leadership and the gentry everywhere. Robinson's death brought into the open the extent of his financial problems and persons to whom he had loaned money. In 1766 Virginians were treated to another new phenomenon an open and free press. From 1732 when William Parks set up the Virginia Gazette until 1766 there had been only one paper in the colony.
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