Well, if the goal of the American Revolutionaries was to collectively declare bankruptcy from their British creditors they didn't do a very good job of negotiating the Treaty of Paris in 1783. They got independence but they also agreed to honor all legally contracted debts.

But yeah, Virginia planters were often deeply in debt as English Merchants allowed them to buy on credit to be repaid in cotton after a harvest, but a bad harvest could really destroy a family. Thomas Jefferson's lifelong hobby was being cripplingly in debt, not the least of which because he often cosigned or guaranteed loans issued to people who died shortly after the ink on the contract dried. Most of the Founding Fathers who were involved in the plantation economy were in massive debt the whole time.

During the, rather effective, Non-Importation and Boycott movements that responded to the Stamp Act and Townshend Act many of the merchants in the Southern Colonies simply couldn't get involved until after the cotton was shipped and the loans repaid, to move before would economic suicide.

The revolutionaries who came from Philadelphia, New York, and Boston were part of a slightly different political economy that didn't involve the period equivalent of payday loans to get by. As a result, Benjamin Franklin (who left both Boston and Philadelphia large sums of money... to be paid in hundred year intervals) didn't have the personal debt that George Washington did.