Read my Post 292 again and quit trying to sell me the liberal view of the Founders. Soap makers weren’t the upper tier of society.
It depended on where you were. Anyone involved in politics had to have means to participate in political life. John Adams was a lawyer-farmer who did not have the wealth of a John Hancock, but he did all right. On the same social level as a small planter in Virginia (who also did a heck of his own work.) Preachers were prominent in the Cause.more so than lawyers. They didn’t have a lot of money but they had prestige. BY and large, the Revolutionary leaders was one social level lower than the English Revolutionaries of the 1640s.