Bacon's Rebellion

Bacon's Rebellion was the largest popular uprising prior to the American Revolution. The rebellion began as a dispute among English settlers in Virginia over American Indian policy. At its height, however, it erupted into a civil war pitting anti–American-Indian western settlers (including many servants and slaves) against Governor William Berkeley and his allies who encouraged more conciliatory policies toward indigenous peoples. Although the rebellion took the name of Nathaniel Bacon, who arrived as young man in Virginia in 1674 and was immediately welcomed into elite society, the causes and consequences of the rebellion, like all wars, were more profound than the ideas and leadership of a single man.

When Bacon migrated to Virginia in search of personal gain he entered a precarious world wherein American Indians, free and enslaved blacks, and English colonists (including many indentured servants) struggled to coexist. By the 1670s there were only four thousand American Indians, divided into twenty different tribes, who continued to live in close proximity to the European settlers. Many of these had long since accepted a dependent status as subjects of the English crown, but tensions between the natives and newcomers continued.

Governor Berkeley strove to treat American Indians equitably and to distinguish carefully between American Indian allies and foes. Regardless, many colonists, particularly those located on the western frontier, were deeply suspicious of all American Indians. The frontier situation was particularly complicated by the presence of more powerful native peoples, like the Susquehannocks, who resisted English encroachments on their lands. Anglo–American-Indian relations were further exacerbated by a depressed tobacco economy, anger over what were perceived to be excessive taxes, and displeasure with the restrictions on trade as a result of England's Navigation Acts. The larger economic and political issues, then, contributed to the volatile nature of colonial society and made American Indians convenient scapegoats for all manner of grievances.

The details of the rebellion are fairly straightforward. In July 1675 a violent dispute erupted over a misunderstanding between a band of Doegs and English settlers in the Potomac River Valley. In late August, Governor Berkeley's efforts to facilitate a peaceful resolution were hampered by angry colonists who chose to take matter

into their own hands. By early 1676 (at precisely the same moment that word began to arrive in the colony about King Philip's War in New England), a full-scale war threatened to tear apart the colony.

Berkeley sought to contain the situation, but his attempt to balance the interests of both American Indians and Englishmen proved untenable. When frontiersmen began looking for a leader more willing to condone their virulent anti–American-Indian measures, Nathaniel Bacon embraced the opportunity to elevate his local standing and agreed to lead volunteer militia units. The governor, however, was suspicious of the young man's real intentions and refused to authorize his command.

Western settlers were undeterred and in June 1676 Bacon secured (by threat of force) a commission from Governor Berkeley to lead his volunteers in military action against the American Indians. Berkeley soon insisted that he had granted the commission under duress, leading Bacon to attack the governor and his small band of allies, forcing a retreat across the Chesapeake from Jamestown to the Eastern Shore. By July the Old Dominion was firmly in Bacon's hands. His forces crushed a group of friendly Occaneechees and scattered a bedraggled band of Pamunkeys hiding out in a swamp, but they were never able to do anything about the Susquehannocks beyond their frontier. Berkeley temporarily regained control of Jamestown in early September, only to see Bacon's forces return and burn the capitol to the ground. In subsequent weeks, rebels looted and burned the homes of numerous loyalists. When Bacon died in late October, however, the rebellion collapsed. By January Berkeley was back in Jamestown, where he proceeded to hang a number of the remaining rebel leaders, but he was soon recalled to England and replaced by a more conciliatory administration.

Bacon's Rebellion redefined the domestic landscape of seventeenth-century Chesapeake. What began as an external conflict with American Indians rapidly developed into a domestic insurrection among predominantly western settlers who rejected the accommodationist policies of the eastern establishment. As it developed, however, Bacon's Rebellion took on a tenor of class warfare as his forces, increasingly composed of runaway servants and slaves, plundered the property of Berkeley's allies in the Tidewater. Some historians have argued that class conflict and racial egalitarianism among Bacon's rebels prompted tobacco planters to replace white indentured servants with African slaves, thus sowing the seeds of the racial divide that would define the South and much of America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The rebellion also decimated the remaining tribes in Virginia and forced many of the survivors to flee the colony. Bacon's Rebellion therefore illustrates the racism that would spill so much American Indian blood in the future, ultimately leading to the subjection of native peoples in the expanding United States.

European Invasion of Indian North America, 1513–1765; Jamestown, Legacy of the Massacre of 1622; King Philip's War, Legacy Of; Slavery in America; Stono Rebellion.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton & Co., 1975.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676: The End of American Independence. New York: Knopf, 1984.

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