Land rights was another issue he addressed, one of the major grievances of the "rabble" was that they would go into the wilderness clear fields, dig wells, build homes, raise crops, then be told by some land speculator from the coastal cities that it wasn't their land, they had to move or pay rent. Locke maintained that the settler earned title to the land by paying for it with his sweat and labor. In the decade prior to the Revolution there were outbreaks of violence over this in most of the Colonies. Oddly enough, those several of those remembered fondly as "Founding Fathers", such as Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin, were members of the guilty establishment rather than the aggrieved masses.